Hip Hop- Gangsta Rap

Hip-hop music (also referred to as rap or rap music) is a style of popular music. It is made up of two main components: rapping (MCing) and DJing (audio mixing and scratching). Along with break dancing and graffiti (tagging), these compose the four elements of hip-hop, a cultural movement that was initiated by inner-city youth, mostly African Americans in New York City, in the early 1970s.

Typically, hip hop music consists of one or more rappers who tell semi-autobiographic tales, often relating to a fictionalized counterpart, in an intensely rhythmic lyrical form making abundant use of techniques like assonance, alliteration, and rhyme. The rapper is accompanied by an instrumental track, usually referred to as a "beat", performed by a DJ, created by a producer, or one or more instrumentalists. This beat is often created using a sample of the percussion break of another song, usually a funk, rock, or soul recording. In addition to the beat other sounds are often sampled, synthesized, or performed. Sometimes a track can be instrumental, as a showcase of the skills of the DJ or producer.

Hip-hop began in New York City when DJs began isolating the percussion break from funk and disco songs. The early role of the MC was to introduce the DJ and the music and to keep the audience excited. MCs began by speaking between songs, giving exhortations to dance, greetings to audience members, jokes and anecdotes. Eventually this practice became more stylized and became known as rapping. By 1979 hip-hop had become a commercially popular music genre and began to enter the American mainstream. In the 1990s, a form of hip hop called gangsta rap became a major part of American music, causing significant controversy over lyrics which were perceived as promoting violence, promiscuity, drug use and misogyny.

Nevertheless, by the beginning of the 2000s, hip-hop was a staple of popular music charts and was being performed in many styles across the world. This may involve removing the words and replacing them with Indian ones, mixing the original track's chorus and replacing it with local words. Sometimes the tracks are mixed so much that it is hard to tell if it is the original or not.

Although hip-hop music originated in the United States, it has spread throughout the world. Hip-hop was almost entirely unknown outside of the United States prior to the 1980s. During that decade, it began its spread to every inhabited continent and became a part of the music scene in dozens of countries. The spread of the music was intertwined with that of hip hop culture - as elements such as break dancing gained popularity, so did rappers and hip hop groups.

Gangsta (“gangster”) rap first came to prominence on the East Coast. Schoolly D, of Philadelphia, presented graphic tales of gangs and violence such as “PSK—What Does It Mean?” (1985); and Boogie Down Productions, formed in New York City by DJ Scott LaRock (Scott Sterling) and KRS-One (Lawrence Krisna Parker), offered hard-hitting depictions of crack-cocaine-related crime on Criminal Minded (1987). In Houston, Texas, the Geto Boys’ sex- and violence-dominated music was the subject of outrage in some corners. But gangsta rap became a national phenomenon in California, where a distinct school of West Coast hip-hop began with Eazy E’s Los Angeles group N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude).

In Oakland, Too $hort had become a major regional force, and his profane and sexually explicit style influenced N.W.A. member Ice Cube’s early writing. It was N.W.A.’s controversial album Straight Outta Compton, however, that shifted hip-hop’s geographic centre. The most distinguishing characteristic of N.W.A.’s approach was the very plain way that violence was essayed: as plainly as it occurred in the streets of south-central Los Angeles and neighbouring Compton, argued the group. Hyperrealism was often conflated with myth and declarations of immortality; exaggeration became a kind of self-protective delusional device for listeners who were actually involved in the dangerous lifestyle N.W.A. was chronicling.

In the mainstream press and among African Americans nationwide, N.W.A., by virtue of their name, single-handedly reignited a debate about the word nigger. Its appropriation by black youth transformed it into a positive appellation, argued Ice Cube. For many, the persistent misogyny in N.W.A.’s work, which was alternately cartoonish and savage in its offensiveness, was less defensible.

As N.W.A. splintered, the group’s importance multiplied with each solo album. Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990) employed Public Enemy’s production team, the Bomb Squad, and introduced New York City listeners to the West Coast sound, known by this point as gangsta rap. In 1992 N.W.A. producer and sometime rapper Dr. Dre released the California rap scene’s most influential and definitive record, The Chronic; its marriage of languid beats and murderous gangsta mentality resulted in phenomenal sales. Most significantly, it launched Death Row Records and the career of Snoop Doggy Dogg.

As early as 1988, other important artists from California began making an impression. Like Too $hort, Ice-T relied on his self-styled image as a pimp to propel sales; though his lyrics were well-respected, his single “Cop Killer" (1992), like gangsta rap in general, raised controversy. N.W.A.’s influence could be heard in groups like Compton’s Most Wanted, DJ Quik, Above the Law, and countless other gangsta groups, but by the early 1990s groups had surfaced whose approach was the antithesis of N.W.A.’s violence and misogyny. The jazzily virtuosic improvisers Freestyle Fellowship and the Pharcyde, of Los Angeles, and Souls of Mischief, of Oakland, owed more to East Coast abstractionists De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest than to gangs. Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s Death Row Records and Bad Boy Records were engaged in a “coastal battle.” Life imitated art imitating life; the violence that had been confined to songs began to spill over into the world, culminating in the tragic murders of the Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace), a rapper from New York City, and Tupac Shakur (2pac), a California rapper.