by Olha Romaniuk

Created on: November 07, 2007   Last Updated: February 22, 2008

Alleged fledging MC laziness - lyrics that don't make sense and flashy lifestyles have all contributed to a decline in main street appreciation for hip hop. One music artist, Nas, came out with an album entitled "Hip Hop Is Dead". The title created a stir in the hip hop community, as well as outside of it. Some people said, "See? Even the rappers admit that hip hop has been going downhill for a while."

So what are we to make of these speculations? Is hip hop still as revolutionary and relevant as it had once been? Or it this genre of music going down the same route as the 80's metal bands and disco? Will it soon be considered dated?

To answer those questions, we want to trace the origins of hip hop, in order to compare its relevance then and now. It is hard to determine where one needs to start defining music as "hip hop" per se, though. Sure, we can start with the first official hip hop record by the Sugar Hill Gang. "rapper's Delight" brought out hip hop from the underground into the light of mainstream culture. The level of explosion this urban genre of music received from this record is undeniable, but one can also go back farther to the early 1970's, when DJ Kool Herc introduced the new form of breaking music - break-beat deejaying. He isolated the most danceable parts of funk songs and repeated them for the purpose of all-night dance parties. Thus, the origins of hip hop are not set in stone, but as we see by the first waves of public attention hip hop began creating over thirty years ago, its emergence of the music scene was a monumental event.

Hip hop stepped onto the music scene as a major force to be reckoned with in the late 1970's. Urban underground music was rapidly making its way to the tops of the charts, and ranking in the top 10s. Drum machines and synthesizer technology began to be used by Afrika Bambaataa in the mid-1980's to farther revolutionize and distinguish hip hop from any other preceding types of music before it. Music videos that shortly followed began to showcase other aspects of the hip hop culture, such as the graffiti and break dancers. Early hip hop has often been credited with helping to reduce inner-city gang violence by replacing physical violence with hip hop battles of dance and artwork.

Hip hop addressed issues that were relevant to the segment of population that was not given a voice before. The struggle and the hardships of the unheard, unnoticed people was the reason why old school hip hop addressed good times, parties

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