What is Hip-Hop?
Hip-Hop is a cultural movement and genre of music which developed in the late 1960’s. Since first emerging in the Bronx and Harlem, the culture and lifestyle of Hip-Hop has spread around the world.
Early on Hip-Hop was credited with helping to reduce inner-city gang violence by replacing physical violence with dance and artwork battles. Hip hop culture became an outlet and a way of dealing with the hardships of life as minorities within America, and an outlet to deal with violence and gang culture.
Hip Hop was a celebration of life gradually developing each of it's elements to form a cultural movement. Due to it's energy, dynamics, and momentum, Hip Hop culture has become, ultimately, a key to upliftment and reformation.
Hip hop was not centered around violence, drugs, and weapons like most people thought in the early days. Many people used hip hop in positive ways.
Hip Hop culture is defined as a movement which is expressed through various artistic mediums which we call "elements". The main elements are known as MC'ing (Rapping), DJ'ing, WRITING (Aerosol Art), SEVERAL DANCE FORMS (which include Breaking, Up-Rocking, Popping, and Locking) and the element which holds the rest together: KNOWLEDGE. There are also other elements such as Vocal Percussion/Beat Boxing, Fashion, etc. Within the past 20 years, Hip-Hop culture has greatly influenced the entertainment world with its creative contributions in music, dance, art, poetry, and fashion.
From the 80's on, the Rap industry and media have helped to make the terms "Hip Hop" and "Rap" synonymous, leaving out the other elements included in the culture.
Hip-hop's social impacts on the country have not been all negative, it has positively affected many youth and encouraged them to voice their opinions on world and personal issues.
With the emergence of commercial and crime-related rap music during the early 1990s, however, an emphasis on violence was incorporated, with many rappers boasting about drugs, weapons, misogyny, and violence. While hip hop music now appeals to a broader demographic, media critics argue that socially and politically conscious hip hop has long been disregarded by mainstream America in favor of gangsta and commercialized rap.
mainstream America in favor of gangsta rap.
Though created in the United States by African Americans and Latinos, hip hop culture and music is now global in scope. Youth culture and opinion is meted out in both Israeli hip hop and Palestinian hip hop, while France, Germany, the U.K., Brazil, Japan, Africa, and the Caribbean have long-established hip hop followings. Hip-Hop is a cultural movement that crosses social barriers and cuts across racial lines.
Hip hop is attractive in its ability to give a voice to disenfranchised youth in any country, and as music with a message it is a form available to all societies worldwide. Even in the face of growing global popularity, real Hip-Hop has come under fire with the commercialized and commodified rap music being unleashed by the coporate-controlled music industry, still claiming the music is Hip-Hop, the negative portrayal with messages about money and bling-bling, The rap music has given Hip-Hop a bad image today, with messages of sexism, materialism, degradation, negativity, crime, violence, and American consumerism.
The commercialization of Hip Hop is a negative and pervasive phenomenon, in that what Hip Hop actually is has become inseparable from what we call the Rap industry or rap music, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer.
Due to their lack of knowledge about the whole of Hip Hop culture, many of our world's youth are mistaken in thinking that activities such as: smoking blunts, drinking 40's, wearing a designer label plastered across their chest, carrying a gun, or going to strip clubs, are "Hip Hop". Hip Hop is being portrayed negatively by many artists who work in the element of Rap (emceeing), and this negativity is usually instigated and promoted by the record industry and various other corporations who exploit the culture at the expense of the youth's state of mind and morality.


The Hip-Hop Movement:
From its early spread to Europe and Japan to an almost worldwide acceptance through Asia, Africa and South America, the musical influence has been global. Hip Hop sounds and styles differ from region to region, but there is also a lot of crossbreeding. In each separate Hip-Hop scene there is also constant struggle to get recognized by the masses based upon the message being represented.. Regardless of where it is found, the music often targets local disaffected youth.
Hip-Hop has given people a voice to express themselves, from the "Bronx to Beirut, Kazakhstan to Cali, Hokkaido to Havana, Hip Hop is the new sound of a disaffected global youth culture." Though on the global scale there is heavy influence from US culture, different cultures worldwide have transformed Hip-hop with their own traditions and beliefs. “Global Hip Hop succeeds best when it showcases...cultures that reside outside the main arteries of the African Diaspora.”
As Hip-Hop becomes more globally-available, it is not a one-sided process that eradicates local cultures. Instead, global Hip-Hop styles are often synthesized with local styles. Hartwig Vens argues that hip hop can also be viewed as a global learning experience. Hip-Hop from countries outside the United States is often labeled "world music" for the American consumer. Author Jeff Chang argues that "the essence of hip hop is the cipher, born in the Bronx, where competition and community feed each other."
Hip hop has impacted many different countries culturally and socially in positive ways. "Thousands of organizers from Cape Town to Paris use hip hop in their communities to address environmental justice, policing and prisons, media justice, and education." Also, "young people in places as disparate as Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Norway use hip hop to push their generation's views into the local conversation."
While hip hop music has been criticized as a music which creates a divide between western music and music from the rest of the world, a musical "cross pollination" has taken place, which strengthens the power of hip hop to influence different communities. Hip hop's impact as a "world music" is also due to its translatability among different cultures in the world. Hip hop's messages allow the under-privileged and the mistreated to be heard. These cultural translations cross borders. While the music may be from a foreign country, the message is something that many people can relate to- something not "foreign" at all.
Even when hip hop is transplanted to other countries, it often retains its "vital progressive agenda that challenges the status quo." Global hip hop is the meeting ground for progressive local activism, as many organizers use hip hop in their communities to address environmental injustice, policing and prisons, media justice, and education. In Gothenburg, Sweden, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) incorporate graffiti and dance to engage disaffected immigrant and working class youths. And indigenous young people in places as disparate as Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Norway use hip hop to push their generation's views into local conversation.


Hip-Hop is Music!
Hip hop music typically consists of a rhythmic style of speaking called rap over backing beats/instrumentals. Hip hop music is part of the hip hop culture, which began in the Bronx, in New York City in the 1970s, (two other elements are b-boying (also known as breakdancing) and graffiti). The term rap is sometimes used synonymously with hip hop music, though it originally referred only to rapping itself.
Rapping, also referred to as MCing or emceeing, is a vocal style in which the performer speaks rhythmically and in rhyme, generally to a beat. Beats are traditionally sampled from portions of other songs by a DJ, though synthesizers, drum machines, and live bands are also used, especially in newer music. Rappers may perform poetry which they have written ahead of time, or improvise rhymes on the spot. Though rap is usually an integral component of hip hop music, DJs sometimes perform and record alone, and many instrumental acts are also defined as hip hop.
Hip hop arose in New York City when DJs began isolating the percussion break from funk or disco songs for audiences to dance to. The role of the MC was originally to introduce the DJ and the music, and to keep the audience excited. The MC would speak between songs, giving exhortations to dance, greetings to audience members, jokes and anecdotes. Eventually, this practice became more stylized, and came to be known as rapping. By 1979, hip hop had become a commercially recorded music genre, and began to enter the American mainstream. It also began its spread across the world. In the 1990s, a form called gangsta rap became a major part of American music, causing significant controversy over lyrics which were perceived by some as promoting violence, promiscuity, drug use and misogyny. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the 2000s, hip hop became a staple of popular music charts and is now performed in widely varying styles around the world.

The roots of hip hop are found in African American and West African music. The griots of West Africa are a group of traveling singers and poets, whose musical style is reminiscent of hiphop. Within New York City, griot-like performances of poetry and music by artists such as The Last Poets and Jalal Mansur Nuriddin had a great impact on the post-civil rights era culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Hip hop arose during the 1970s when block parties became common in New York City, especially the Bronx. Block parties were usually accompanied by music, especially funk and soul music. The early DJs at block parties began isolating the percussion breaks to hit songs, realizing that these were the most dance-able and entertaining parts; this technique was then common in Jamaica and had spread via the substantial Jamaican immigrant community in New York City, especially the "godfather" of hip hop, DJ Kool Herc.

The reasons for the rise of hip hop are found in the changing urban culture within the United States during the 1970s. Perhaps most important was the low cost involved in getting started: the equipment was relatively inexpensive, and virtually anyone could MC along with the popular beats of the day. MCs could be creative, pairing nonsense rhymes and teasing friends and enemies alike in the style of Jamaican toasting at blues parties or playing the dozens in an exchange of wit. MCs would play at block parties, with no expectation of recording, in the way of folk music. The skills necessary to create hip hop music were passed informally from musician to musician, rather than being taught in expensive music lessons.
Along with the low expense and the demise of other forms of popular music, social and political events further accelerated the rise of hip hop. In 1959, the Cross-Bronx Expressway was built through the heart of the Bronx, displacing many of the middle-class white communities and causing widespread unemployment among the remaining blacks as stores and factories fled the area. By the 1970s, poverty was rampant. When a 15,000+ apartment Co-op City was built at the northern edge of the Bronx in 1968, the last of the middle-class fled the area and the area's black and Latino gangs began to grow in power.

By the end of the 1970s, hip hop was known in most every major city in the country and had developed into numerous regional styles and variations. Outside of New York City, New Jersey and Philadelphia, where hip hop had long been well-established, the 1980s saw intense regional diversification.
Beginning in the early 1980s, hip hop culture began its spread across the world. By the end of the 1990s, popular hip hop was sold almost everywhere, and native performers were recording in most every country with a popular music industry. Elements of hip hop became fused with numerous styles of music, including ragga, cumbia and samba, for example. The Senegalese mbalax rhythm became a component of hip hop, while the United Kingdom and Belgium produced a variety of electronic music fusions of hip hop, most famously including British trip hop.
Hip hop also spread to countries like Greece, Spain and Cuba in the 1980s, led in Cuba by the self-exiled African American activist Nehanda Abiodun and aided by Fidel Castro's government.
Hip-hop has globalized into many cultures worldwide. We now find hip-hop in every corner of the globe, and like the South Bronx, each locale embodies a kind of globalism. Hip hop has emerged globally as an arts movement with the imperative to create something fresh by using technology, speech, and the body in new ways. The music and the art continue to embrace, even celebrate, its transnational dimensions while staying true to the local cultures to which it is rooted. Hip-hop's inspiration differs depending on each culture. Still, the one thing virtually all hip-hop artists worldwide have in common is that they acknowledge their debt to those Black and Latino kids in New York who launched this global movement in the first place. As hip-hop is sometimes taken for granted by Americans, it is not so elsewhere, especially in the developing world, where it has come to represent the empowerment of the disenfranchised and a slice of the American dream. American hip-hop music has reached the cultural corridors of the globe and has been absorbed and reinvented around the world.

How WE are using Hip-Hop:

Emcees4P.E.A.C.E. is working to preserve the culture of Hip-Hop by promoting the "5th element" of Hip Hop, which is KNOWLEDGE, and actively tries to educate the masses about the history and foundational elements of true Hip Hop culture. MC4P is using Hip-Hop as a vehicle for teaching awareness, knowledge, wisdom, understanding, freedom, justice, equality, peace, unity, love, respect, responsibility, overcoming challenges, economics, mathematics. science, life, truth, facts and faith.

Emcees4P.E.A.C.E. is serving as a worldwide youth outreach organization and our goal is to properly educate the youth of all diversities through the cultural movement of Hip Hop.

• Unity Through Hip Hop

• TAKE IT TO THE STREETS

• P.E.A.C.E. (of the Mind)

• Education through Arts, Music, and Culture

• The Movement of T.R.U.T.H.

• The Hip-Hop Movement

• The Global Alliance

• Youth Kultural Konnectionz and Interactionz