Hip Hop- A Culture of Resilience, Resistance, and Revolutionaries
Happy 50th Anniversary Hip Hop!
A short history of hip hop:
Hip hop celebrates its 50th anniversary this year! We join in celebrating the birth of this revolutionary movement in music and honor the artists who contributed to the culture, technologies, and industry of hip hop. The triumphs of hip hop culture and artists are wide spread across the world and their excellence influences every aspect of popular culture. They are powerful voices in social politics highlighting the pleasures and rage of being Black or Brown in America.
Hip hop developed in the 1970s in the South Bronx region of New York City. During this time, New York City’s economy was in disarray. Manufacturing companies moved out of the city in search for more space for facilities, and middle class white people followed. All that was left in the Bronx was working class Black, Latine, and Caribbean immigrants. As the city’s wealth disappeared, so did the resources. Young people, demonstrating the amazing resilience of black and brown peoples and communities, developed music to express and confront their rage and pain for their redlined neighborhoods left to fall into despair. Hip hop is the music of protest, of resilience, of revolutionaries.
Clockwise from Top Left: Jay-Z, Eminem, Lil' Kim, Tupac, The Notorious B.I.G., Ice Cube, Missy Elliott, Queen Latifah, Rakim, Salt-N-Pepa and Spinderella, Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre. This is just some of the many legends and pioneers of hip hop, hailing not just from the place of origin, NY but from all over the United States.
CONTRA-TIEMPO shares stories of resilience and resistance through their dances and community centered performances. Hip hop music and rhythms can be heard in performances, thumping out of rehearsal studios, and inside the earbuds of company artists. joyUs justUs features Las Cafeteras,- “a sonic explosion of Afro-Mexican rhythms, electronic beats and powerful rhymes that document stories of a community seeking to ‘build a world where many world fit.’- from their website. We celebrate Las Cafeteras and hip hop artists who hit us hard with truth-telling poetry while unleashing our joy through beats and rhythms.
CONTRA-TIEMPO dancers, Dalphe Morantus and Jasmine Stanley performing to an original song, “Brown” by Las Cafeteras. Photo by Christopher Duggan Courtesy of Jacob’s PIllow.
The Evolution of Hip Hop Music
The mixing and cross fading of cultural exchanges among Black, Latino, and Caribbean youth, the new genre of music contained—and continuously expands— variety and variation of rhythm, beats, and spoken language in music. Early hip hop music sampled soul, disco, and reggae tracks. Generally, however, hip hop has common elements such as:
A strong, rhythmic beat: A rhythmic beat is the strongest unifying factor of hip hop music. It carries the song steadily forward and serves as a backdrop for vocal performance.
Vocals: The majority of hip hop songs incorporate rapping as their main vocal style—a rhythmic, usually rhymed type of chant that interplays with the beat. Other vocal styles include singing, spoken word, autotune, and ad-libs.
Breaks: “Break” is a term for long percussive periods in a hip hop song. Modern hip hop songs often include breaks to emphasize an instrumental section, hearken back to the genre’s roots, or encourage dancing.
These aspects of hip hop were introduced and popularized by early artists like DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash. Their music combined varied and cross-cultural musical styles, while also developing hallmark techniques such as scratching and sampling.
CONTRA-TIEMPO is a community built of rhythm feeling connection through the spaces between the downbeats and upbeats of being alive. Contratiempo refers to the space between beats, the off-beat, the opposite side, the upbeat, or against. CONTRA-TIEMPO refers to the spaces between then and now, of history and present, of here and the future expressing this through dance, music, storytelling and resistance against systems of oppression.
From New York City and the East Coast, hip hop spread throughout the US, the music of these subversive abolitionists creates an underground network, broadcasting that a revolution of change is forthcoming. Through speakers and turntables a movement of liberation begins and spreads widely throughout all of America. In the 1980s and 1990s, the West Coast and L.A. in particular emerged as a creative center for hip hop, home to artists like Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg. The late 90s saw the dominance of groups like the Wu Tang Clan and the Fugees,
Hip hop music continues to expand and innovate, birthing a wide range of sub genres such as trap, grime, chillhop, Latin hip hop, and conscious hip hop.
The interconnection and distinctions of Latin rap, Hispanic hip hop and Reggaeton by such artists as MC Ceja, Vico C, Risidente, Tego Claeron, Bad Bunny and Ivy Queen have connected the embodied histories of resilience, resistance, and rebellion in Afro-Latine cultures. Hip hop influences every major area of industry and society informing politics, fashion, social behavior, language, world arts and cultures, policies and laws, food and flavor with the richness of hot spices, rhythm, dancing, and spirit-filled radical joy.
A Culture of Hip Hop
Hip hop culture extends beyond music. Hip hop dancing connecting through ancestral, social and communal relationships are important features of hip hop culture. It’s “a means for seeing, celebrating, experiencing, understanding, confronting, and commenting on life and the world.” hip hop culture includes:
DJing: the artistic handling of beats and music
MCing, a.k.a, rapping: putting spoken-word poetry to a beat
Breaking: hip hop’s dance form
Writing: the painting of highly stylized graffiti
Theater and literature: combining elements and themes in drama, poetry, and stories
Knowledge of self: the moral, social, and spiritual principles that inform and inspire ways of being.
Ladies of Hip-Hop. March 29, 2021. Works & Process at the Guggenheim. Ladies of Hip-Hop are a transformative dance organization that gives women a platform to be seen, heard and felt within the context of hip hop culture.
Hip hop culture centralizes the interrogation of power- who has it? Hip hop is a revolutionary movement against white supremacy and systemic racism, it is speaking truth to power, it is of the people against the machinery of human degradation, it is the voice of rebels speaking of and to the revolution in rhythms and beats.
CONTRA-TIEMPO dancer, Ruby Morales, breaking during a performance of “joyUS justUS” in Des Moines Iowa, at the Des Moines Performing Arts Center. Photo by Dan Welk
Through CONTRA-TIEMPO, we use dance to express that same knowledge of self. We blend hip hop with salsa, Afro-Cuban, contemporary dance, and original music to create physically intense and politically astute performance work that moves audiences to imagine what’s possible. We create communities where all people are awakened to a sense of themselves as artists and social change agents who move through the world with compassion and confidence.
As a Los Angeles-based activist dance company, we wield the power of art to influence social change, live out our values, and teach others to engage in art activism! Explore our engagement offerings, upcoming events and performances, and virtual engagements for a taste of what we bring to the Los Angeles community and beyond! Join our familia and connect with us, or support our movement by purchasing from our shop or donating today!
Bibliography
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hip hop music guide: History of hip hop and notable artists. MasterClass. (2021, June 16). Retrieved September 16, 2022, from https://www.masterclass.com/articles/hip hop-guide
hip hop: A culture of vision and voice. The Kennedy Center. (n.d.). Retrieved September 16, 2022, from https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/resources-for-educators/classroom-resources/media-and-interactives/media/hip hop/hip hop-a-culture-of-vision-and-voice/
Pq, R. Hip Hop History: From the Streets to the Mainstream. Icon CollectiveCollege of Music. (2022, June 23). Retrieved February 7, 2023, from https://iconcollective.edu/hip hop-history/
Hall, J. A guide to the birth and evolution of hip hop. Red Bull. (2022, January 21). Retrieved February 7, 2023, from https://www.redbull.com/in-en/history-of-hip hop