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Hip Hop Art Form

Decent Essays

It’s the early 1970’s in New York City, block parties in The Bronx are filled with love and peace while DJ’s are playing soul and funk music. Eventually DJ’s began to isolate these percussion breaks in the songs and this is what unknowingly gave birth to hip hop. Fast forward 40 or so years and today you can see how this art form has progressed. I mean yes, we have Chief Keef and Riff Raff but hey nothing is perfect. Artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Vince Staples, Big K.R.I.T and many more have thoroughly established hip-hop to be sophisticated creativity,scathing self-critique while remaining diverse and inspiring. Hip-Hop has transformed itself into a professional form of expression from routes of not quite yet detailed and rookie beginnings. …show more content…

Children are driving their cars yelling out “I don't have no type, bad bitches are the only thing I like” and we blame the artist themselves however we should look higher up on the pecking order. The reason these artists are doing this is due to them being pressured by record labels who do not care for the culture and are looking for “smash songs”. Greed is dictating mainstream rap culture and the most extreme part is that the artists who you see promoting their wealth are not even the wealthiest ones, they receive a small percent of the money earned off the music Record Label takes on average 63% of the profit gained. Distributors take 24% and the artists make 13%. The 13% includes managers,producers,writers and the artist themselves. Basically everyone who actually made the music. Scarface also says “It’s our culture, stay the f__ out of it. This is our s__. I don’t like when a old ass 75 year old dude that ain’t never been to the neighborhood and never tried to embrace this culture can try to dictate what’s hot and what’s not. That’s what I want the youngsters to do. Protect the integrity of the craft. In 25 Hip Hip will have a new face and a new hero…like rock n roll… Elvis will be the face of Hip …show more content…

I believe hip-hop belongs to nobody, however not being in possession of no-one does not stop one side from exploiting this art form. Artists must stop signing to labels that do not care about the progression and the reputation of the culture. Many new artists today are going independent and are still finding success, including Chance The Rapper, Joey BadAss, Tyler The Creator and many more. Even further artists like J Cole are challenging the stereotypical promotions that labels are doing when he released his album “2014 Forest Hill Drive” with 2 weeks notice and without releasing any singles , he managed to go platinum selling over a 1,033,000 copies . This goes to show that hip-hop can still thrive without depending on labels for wealth as well as we must take the craft into our own

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