50 Years of Hip-Hop: How a generation fostered creativity from urban despair and racial barriers
Hip-hop, a subculture and an art movement, was born when urban youth in crime and poverty-ridden neighbourhoods in South Bronx in New York City sought street corners to hang out and found ways to express their despairing selves. In the late 1970s, South Bronx was rocked by a manufacturing decline and an expressway that ended the local businesses. The emerging hip-hop movement gave the youths a recreative space to voice their despair and hardship, which grew to become a global phenomenon. Here's a look at the pioneers
Curated By: Madhu Kapparath
Rap group The Wu-Tang Clan ( L to R: Ol' Dirty Bastard; GZA; U-God; Method Man; Raekwon; Masta Killa; Inspectah Deck) in New York City on April 1, 1994. The Staten Island-based clan's combination of street credibility, neo-Islamic mysticism, and kung-fu lore made them one of the most complex groups in the history of rap. A defining aspect of hip-hop was the heavy use of sampled music from various genres ranging from jazz to rock, since no copyright laws protected music from being sampled then. The clan went a step further, sampling sound clips from their collection of 1970s Kung Fu films!
