Hip Hop Movement

Hip Hop Movement

The Hip Hop Movement offers a critical theory and history of hip hop culture as stated by Reiland Rabaka^[1] in his book The Hip Hop Movement: From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation. This movement is connecting R & B, the Civil Rights Movement, and hip hop culture.^[2]

The four elements of hip hop culture are graffiti, rapping, DJing, and break-dancing. Rabaka argues that the hip hop movement is just as deserving of critical scholarly inquiry as other black popular music, such as R & B. Hip hop has been documented to 1973 by Steven Hager.^[3] The word "hip hop" first appeared in print on September 21, 1981, in The Village Voice in a profile story of Africa Bambaataa written by Hager, who published the first comprehensive history of hip hop culture with St. Martins' Press. Taymullah Abdur-Rahman in a blog in The Huffington Press compares hip hop to The Civil Rights Movement.^[4]

Taymullah Abdur-Rahman opined "We couldn't reproduce Frederick Douglass but we had KRS1. We didn’t try to imitate MLK but we had Chuck D. We remembered Harriet Tubman when we looked at Lauryn Hill. We didn’t need the Queen of Sheba, we had our own Queen...Latifah"^[4][5] Jeff Chang in his book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop states, "there was no manifesto. The kids who started it were simply trying to find ways to pass the time, they were trying to have fun. They grew up under the politics of abandonment and because of this, their pastimes contained the seeds for a kind of mass cultural renewal."^[6][7]

Todd Boyd in his book The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop, says "I would suggest that you might get a better read of what's going on in the world of Black people today by listening to DMX on It's Dark and Hell is Hot than by listening to repeated broadcasts of Martin Luther King speeches."^[8][9]

Ronald "Bee-Stinger" Savage^[10] is the first known elected official in New York State in printed articles to come out of the Zulu Nation that paved the way for hip hop culture,^[11] Ronald Savage has inspired many people with his fight to help change the laws of the statue of limitations against child molesters in New York State (Child Victims Act) making another statement of the Hip Hop Movement.

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