Word: hipping
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...hip-hop the same thing now as 25 years ago, or has it transmuted into something quite different? How have the constitution and the borders of the "hip-hop nation" changed...
...Viewed in the context of Black music in America over the past century, there's nothing surprising about hip-hop "crossing over." Blues and jazz crossed over in the 1920s, when whites rushed to Harlem to hear the music. In the 1930s, jazz became - for whites - "swing." When Black musicians created something called bebop (a clear antecedent for hip-hop) in the 1940s, that too crossed over as whites gravitated toward the language, fashion, attitude and music of hip cats like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. And I think most people today are clear that it was artists like Louis...
...rebelliousness (anyone from Big Mama Thornton to Jimi Hendrix) and the fact that edginess and rebelliousness ultimately appeals to white young people as much as it does to Black young people. That and "white music" suffering slumps from time to time made the white embrace of hip-hop inevitable - has there really been anything interesting happening in rock music since the heyday of Nirvana? Not really...
...course, this crossover success and hip-hop's current dominance of youth culture has not come without a price. What was the effect on hip-hop of its success...
...Nothing stays the same. Remember, hip-hop was born on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, a serious fiscal crisis in New York City and other urban areas, gang activity, etc. Since then we have been through the horrific Reagan era, the invasion of crack, guns, AIDS and an alleged economic boom in the 1990s - "alleged" because not too many Black people I know, even the ones with college degrees, are anything more than a paycheck away from poverty. Hip-hop has documented all of this, and more. As Amiri Baraka (n? LeRoi Jones) stated in "Blues People" (perhaps...