A Hip-Hop Story
by Kevin Powell
Hip-hop has always been about making something out of little or nothing. Few knew that that something would become the biggest pop music innovation since rock and roll in the 1950s. Now the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum presents Roots, Rhymes and Rage: The Hip-Hop Story, a major exhibit opening November 11, 1999. Occupying three floors of the museum, the exhibit looks at the history and influences of hip-hop on popular music and culture. Costumes, video, live demonstrations and computerized interactive terminals immerse the visitor in the four elements of hip-hop culture: MCing, DJing, dancing and graffiti writing.
Hip-hop was born in New York City in the mid-1970s as a vehicle for inner-city youth to throw parties on their blocks and at area clubs, and for them to make money as DJs and promoters. Early hip-hop was largely a “throw-your-hands-in-the-air” music, taking its cues from the funk of James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic. However, hip-hop remained largely ignored outside of New York City’s ghettoes until the fall of 1979 when the crossover success of the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” brought hip-hop national and international attention. It wasn’t long before hip-hop pioneers like Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow were making records.
Now a billion-dollar industry, hip-hop has become the voice of young people on the planet breaking down racial, ethnic, gender, class, language and regional barriers. Hip-hop is manifest everywhere, pushing the sales of entities as different as high profile designers and soft drinks, and turning rappers like Will Smith and LL Cool J into box-office stars. Like rock and roll in the 1950s, hip-hop has become the great cultural bridge in these times-it is the pop culture of young America today.
Hip-hop is and has been a part of my life for at least the past 20 years, dating back to that momentous fall 1979 day when I first heard the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” on a New York City radio station. I knew that cats “rapped” on the streets, at block parties, yet my boyish mind never gave the concept much thought. But to hear a speaking pattern from around the way, as we say, on the airwaves was nothing short of miraculous to me. I bought a 45rpm of “Rapper’s Delight” for 99 cents-which I still own-and drove my mom nuts as I quickly memorized those corny, yet catchy rhymes.
Back then, I could not have imagined participating, 20 years later, in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s hip-hop exhibit this November. I have literally come of age along with hip-hop, from the tight-fitting jeans I once wore (a different color for every day of the week), to the African medallions we proudly displayed in the late Eighties; from those below-the-behind balloon jeans of the mid-Nineties, to the expensive, name-brand suits many of us hip-hop heads now prefer.
Serving as curatorial consultant for this exhibit is so surreal because not only do I feel like I am revisiting important markers in my life, but also because this examination of the culture is an incredible acknowledgment of hip-hop as a major musical innovation. Like rock and roll before it, hip-hop has literally transformed youth culture worldwide. And just as rock created entire industries around its energies-record labels, promoters, magazines like Rolling Stone, and, of course, “rock journalists"-many of us in love with hip-hop have benefited from this art form’s infiltration into the bloodstream of American life. I certainly owe my career as a music writer, and specifically, as a hip-hop journalist, to this phenomenon.
It is only fitting, then, that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, itself born of the long saga that is rock, houses this exhibition. In a sense, rock and hip-hop are kindred spirits. Both are rooted in black music and language, both came to dominate the American pop culture landscape, and both, because they have been able to re-invent themselves time and again, are with us forever.
Exhibition Essays
Lesson Plans
Al Green's White Leather Jacket With Embroidery
Photo by Design Photography
Collection of Al Green
