The article by Jay Ford tells as a story about the Hip Hop, its history and personal feelings about this music. In my essay I am going to explain briefly that I am a part of the Hip Hop era, how its influenced me, my life and the worldview.
In the late seventies, a new and distinctive sound arose from the streets of New York. The sound was Hip Hop, and nearly twenty years later, it has transcended the street parties and music clubs of New York to become a worldwide cultural force. Hip Hop consists of a DJ mixing rhythmic passages of albums on a turmtable while a rapper rapsover the beats. However, Hip Hop is a culture itself, equipped with its own language, fashion, dance moves and look. I believe that Hip Hop is the musical outgrowth of African- American culture, its popularity is not bound by geography or culture. This music is touching everyone who is living in todays society even if we know it or not we can easly observed that Hip Hop is something different and most popular than any other music.
Nowadays, we are living in a society with a lot of different types of music; Rock & Roll, Jazz, Blues, Heavy metal, Classic, Rap, and Hip-Hop etc. Each music has a different tone and style where people listen to it to enjoy, relax, dance, sing, or even study. They listen to it everywhere; home, school, street, and car. They even used the headphones to stay in contact with the music. Each of us has his/her favorite music to listen to. Some love Rock and Blues, Rap and Hip-Hop, where others hate them. However, we are living in one society where everyday people are playing all kinds of music on the streets, stores, job, and neighborhood which touches our ear no matter if we want it to or not we are hearing it. In short, Hip-Hop has become a most profitable and popular music industry on the planet. It has been touching everybody who lives in today’s era, whether he/she know it or not. This music express the way of life and attitude, whether it’s good or bad.
Hip Hop is not only a music its also a fashion which took almost 20 years for the mainstream fashion industry to experiment with. Critics claim that "the fashion industry's sudden interest in Hip Hop stems more from the enormous profit potential of this untapped market of brand conscious consumers than from any creative interest". But whatever its reasons may be, big and small players in the mainstream fashion industruy are looking towrd the Hip Hop community for inspiration.
I remember the day when I started to know what Hip-Hop music and fashion actually were. It was here in the U.S. four years ago, right after I came here. My cousin who is a very big fan of this music introduced me to the new lyrical style, culture, language, and of course music. The country where I came from, Poland, Hip-Hop wasn’t that popular as it is today. Now, everybody knows it and almost everyone listens to it because we are all living in one society where Hip Hop has become one of the most popular music in the world.
In conclusion, Hip-Hop is a popular style of music spread around the world and performed in many styles across the world. It is a popular urban youth culture, closely associated with rap music, style, and fashion of African-American who generated the Hip-Hop music as the one of the most popular music in the planet which we live.