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| Hip Hop! |
Everybody dances to it, listen to it, speaks about it…but what’s hip hop? You mustn’t think about dancing only…Hip hop is much more!
Hip hop arises during the 1970s, as an expression of the road culture of the South Bronx, a poor suburb of NY characterized by a hard daily life made of violence, drug. criminality. In this urban and social degradation, gangs of kids full of imagination but short of money, start creating a new style which will distort completely the concept of art, by bringing it back, in some way, to its most original pureness. From music to dancing, from painting to life, art is conceived as spontaneousand bursting creation, anyway and anywhere, out of any commercial interest. The pioneers of this new culture define themselves as “bboys” (term which is currently in use for the hip hop’s supporters), that is the boys of the Bronx, but also the “black boys”, the “bad boys” and the “break- boys” or the “boogie-boys”- those who dance at the “block parties” (on-the-road event which involves the neighbour); girls are called “fly-girls” or “b-girls”.
This new cultural context develops four artistic expressions : rap, the deejay’s musical compositions, graffitism and break-dance.
Break-dance is a type of dancing performed on the road: rotations on the knees, on the back or even on the head, fragmented moves, acrobatic paces but above all, contact with the floor... WOW !!! Cool! Together with the break-dance develops the “electric boogee”, which includes mimes’ and robots’ movements. In the 1980s the break-dance enters the Black Power Movement, to solve the problem of violence among rival gangs: supremacy on a territory will no longer be determined through bloody fights, often ending in tragedies, but through break-dance challenges, during which the gang showing better acrobatic and techncal skills win. Thus dancing , as well as painting, music and rythmed discourse (rap) create a new space where to dfine the ierarchy of the ghetto.
The rapper, who sings or plays quickly a slang text, address to his community and act as its spokesman. Rythming songs about one’s community and reality in the road, in front of an audience, means to create that space of denounciation and freedom of expression which is often refused by the media.
As a musical style, rap consists in the rapper’s interaction on pieces manipulated by a dejay who blocks and loosen the disk by hand: deejay’s techniques’ revolution lies just in the hip-hop socio-cultural context. Kool Herc is the first who shows two identical disks on the turntables, thus extending the same rythm indefinitely and according to his will. Afrika Bambaataa is one of the first deejays using “scratching”, a technique invented by chance by DJ Grand Wizard Theodore, which consists in the typical sound produced by a scratched disk, present nowadays in many pieces, not only of hip hop music. |
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