YouTube channel HipHopMadness recently took a look at “How New York Hip-Hop Lost Its Cool” with a new video roughly ten minutes long.
This episode was narrated by Spencer Pearman, written by Robert Blair, and edited by Roman Bill. Music is by Josh Petruccio.
You can check out the video (and a description of the video) below.
How New York Hip-Hop Lost Its Cool
By HipHopMadness
Culture doesn’t just happen. Instead, it’s born out of circumstances that provide the exact conditions needed for growth. In hip-hop, the seeds of the revolution that’d give us the world’s most popular musical artform couldn’t have sprung up anywhere other than New York City, New York. Born of the ingenuity that comes with adapting to your surroundings, hip-hop was formed at the block parties held in the projects of the Bronx.
From there, its breakbeats and call & response rhyming couplets were adopted by youths from Queensbridge, Harlem and Brooklyn. By the 90s, artists such as The Wu Tang Clan had taken that defiant spirit and brought it out to Staten Island and as the genre became a fixture of the musical landscape and demanded its respect, New York cemented itself as the undisputed capital of the culture. Standing as tall as any of the monuments in the city’s skyline, New York vibrated with the energy of the Big Daddy Kane’s to the Biggie’s, Nas’, Jay Z’s KRS One’s and DMX’s.
Yet little by little, its position as the point of origin for hip-hop seemed to hold less and less weight as it was overshadowed by other regional scenes that’d dispossess them of their crown.
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