Hip-Hop 50-for-50: Playlist and Commentary Vol. 3 — Funkin’ Lesson
Though hip-hop was born in New York’s party scene, it didn’t take long for the music and culture to find its footing as music’s most potent tool. Hip-hop proved a towering platform for sharing information and inspiration.
The most verbiage-heavy form of popular music to date, the art of rapping owes at least as much to the long lineage of Black oratory as it does to its musical predecessors. Rhythm, cadence, and inflection are often of a piece with the message MCs delivered in their rhymes.
Hip-hop’s transition from park jams to records paralleled what Chuck D dubbed “the era of R&B — Reagan and Bush.” Reaganomics and Bush’s crack deluge turned inner cities to war zones. As ’80s jingoism replaced ’70s consciousness , a nation high on its own supply was more than happy to simply conceal and ignore its unseemly underbelly. Hip-hop emerged organically as a voice for the voiceless.
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