American hip hop music can trace its roots back to western Africa and in some foreign cultures. The vocal style of popular rap can be associated with the griot tradition from Africa, where the griots wander from place to place singing their music and telling about history and traditions. Street performers, with their freestyle artform, dramatically influenced the impact of American hip hop music over the years.
Another influence in American hip hop music arose out of New York during the post civil rights era. More and more people found that rallying to celebrate personal events was a worthwhile thing to do, and so gradually, the legendary block parties started to materialize. No longer do disc jockeys stay underground in the club scenes, they started finding new outlets to expose their art of beat driven mixes of soul, funk, and cultural music, performing at block parties all around, entertaining a wide range of audiences. Their sound started getting known, and American hip hop music began to penetrate the music scene.
The important thing about American hip hop music is that it wasn’t always been confined in a definition as other music genres were. The limelight was focused on the darker side of rap music for a while, due to its amassing of its own sense of notoriety in a bad way. Meanwhile, DJ dance music was making its way to the center of the scene and sealing its own place within American hip hop music. The underground clubs were rapidly rising into mainstream, and soon an inevitable clash of the two sub-cultures will begin.
Street performers carry with them tapes of DJ mixed beats, and performs their awesome break dance moves to gather crowds, adding up to the hype that is American hip hop. Meanwhile, the definition of concert performances during the heyday of American hip hop music took on a whole new dimension of their own, soon devolving into competitions instead of planned exhibitions. Prominent rapper groups would battle all comers, arousing the crowd to judge who the winner is with their applause.
The world of American hip hop music soon began to deteriorate as more of its artists become victims of bad lifestyles. The world of the american hip hop music entered a tailspin, as two of its stars,Tupac Shakur and the Notorious BIG, got murdered. The criminal acts committed by many popular artists came into people’s attention and the genre started to suffer the effects.
Now, American hip hop music has begun a resurgence in a more defined and acceptable manner. Gone is the violence and degrading lyrics, replaced with more thoughtful and positive music, with artists once again expressing their creativity with themed albums targeted more to rebuilding the popularity of American hip hop music in today’s world, with themes of love and community being the more prevalent topics. Whether this new incarnation will be as welcomed by the people as the former one was remains to be a question, but one thing’s for sure, that it definitely is off to a good start.