ABSTRACT

There is no doubt that hip-hop is now one of the fastest growing musical genres in the world. As an expressive art and one of the fastest growing youth-driven popular cultures in the world, the hip-hop genre has enjoyed a lot of media attention both positively and negatively. Musically, hip-hop is a combination of styles which thrives on hybridity, and according to Perkins (1996, p. vii), the genre is ‘based on all previous musical forms … [fusing] the verbal and performance vernacular to an expanded rhythmic base’. Its underlying characteristics rely on creating a groove which rests on urban street conscious culture that is broad and diverse. This culture extends from music to street arts (graffiti), fashion and sports. Summarizing the origin of hip-hop, while emphasizing its socio-political and economic forbear, Tricia Rose (1994, p. 21) writes:

Hip-hop emerge[d] from the de-industrialization meltdown where social alienation, prophetic imagination, and yearning intersect … [It] is a cultural form that attempts to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutality, truncated opportunity, and oppression within cultural imperatives of African-American and Caribbean history, identity and community. It is the tension between the cultural fractures produced by post-industrial oppression and the binding ties of black cultural expressivity that sets the critical frame for the development of hip hop.