Hip-hop turns 50: A look at the past, present and future of the global phenomenon

<p>50 years after its birth, hip-hop has become an integral part of mainstream American culture. With its roots in the voices of marginalized communities, hip-hop is reflected in everything from a rapping <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwiKPoojCE" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pillsbury Dough Boy</a> to dialogue in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcrEvSOdZc4" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">movies</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeR2lI5kMtI" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">speeches on the floor of Congress</a>.</p> <p>"Hip-hop is a culture. It's a far-reaching culture. It's the most dominant youth culture on the planet," said Dart Adams, Boston-based writer and hip-hop expert. "It incorporates DJing, b-boying — or 'breaking,' as it's commonly called — emceeing is one aspect, and of course, you know, there's graffiti art. And all these aspects of the culture come together to form hip-hop. But people's idea of hip-hop is usually relegated just to rap music."</p> <p>What started as <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/07/11/1186407223/50-years-ago-teenagers-partied-in-the-bronx-and-gave-rise-to-hip-hop" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Kool Herc’s innovative DJ party groove in 1973</a> was amplified by new masters of ceremonies, or MCs, spinning and scratching at house and street parties. The new music genre quickly established its signature turntablism, breakbeat deejaying, and scat-style rhyming lyrics. Hip-hop artists would go on to express their tears and triumphs in their songs — they often spoke to political and social oppression. </p> <p>"Hip hop was the way we spread the word. It was the way we let people know that we were in solidarity across time and space," Dawn-Elissa Fischer, co-founder of the Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard University, told <em>Under the Radar.</em> "I was actually in a rural area of the United States, the Ozarks in southern Missouri, at the time where there were a lot of various types of lynchings and police killings and othe