In the beginning, the house of Hip Hop was built on five fundamental pillars – MCing, DJing, Breakdance, Graffiti, and Knowledge. A house built on rock must stand. The pillars ushered Hip Hop into the 21st century as a cultural phenomenon was formulated by DJ  Afrika Bambaataa of the hip-hop collective,  Zulu Nation. The knowledge of the five elements might not be widespread, but its structural significance should not be understated. With a myriad of styles to hip hop, the “elements provide coherence” to the genre. Let’s break them down:

1) DJing (aural) – This was a new found manipulation of sounds that was used to create music. The innovative breaks and isolation of the percussive beat gave hip hop its initial rise. Kool DJ Herc, who was the first to create hip hop in the 1970s, started this new form of DJing. In the early days, the DJs were the stars and later rappers such as Kurtis Blow and Grand Master Flash with their ingenious rhymes took the spotlight.

2) MCing (oral) – Manifested from the social conditions of the time. This form of “poetic and verbal acrobatics” was derived from ancient African culture and oral tradition. Also known as “rapping” this element removed the veil that isolated the wider culture from the social conditions of many under-served urban communities. The rapid fire wordplay, spoke the truth of stories that weren’t being told and gave rise to a new urban narrative.

3) Breakdance (physical) – Groups such as Shaka Zulu Kings, Zulu Queens and the Rock Steady Crew gave rise to B-Boying/B-Girling. Breaking can be described as “poetry in motion”. Its acrobatics style with influences of gymnastics, Capoeira, martial arts and other cultural influences speaks to the innovative wave ushered in by hip hop culture.

4) Graffiti (visual) – This is one of the most controversial of the elements. As most graffiti artist leave their artwork in public places and “tag” it by leaving their names. TAKI 183, made this form of artistic representation famous and in neighborhoods such as Wynwood, Little Haiti and Opalocka, we can see this art form’s widespread integration with bursts of energy and vibrancy on buildings throughout the cities.

5) Knowledge (mental) – This element is the thread that weaves all the other elements together. “Knowledge of self” refers to the Afro-diasporic mix of spiritual and political consciousness designed to empower members of oppressed groups,” according Travis Gosa in his book entitled The Fifth Element of Hip Hop: Knowledge. This quote merges with the vision that Bambaataa had of hip-hop as a force for social change.  Bambaataa states that “America has systematized our minds to be into materialism”, but instead of buying into this notion, we should think about how we can give back to our communities. 

Hip Hop is more than art, but a social movement that values art as a form of disrupting the norm and creating dialogue that encourages societal change.

In the 1980s, the next wave of musicians from New York came to light. At the forefront was Run-DMC, a trio of middle-class African Americans from Queens who fused rap with hard rock, defined a new style of hip dress, and became staples on MTV as they brought rap to a mainstream audience. They were signed to Profile Records, one of several new labels that took advantage of the growing market of rap artists.

Def Jam Records had three of the dopest hip-hop artists on their label; LL Cool J, rap’s first romance rapper; the Beastie Boys, the first white hip-hop trio who broadened rap’s audience and popularized digital sampling and Public Enemy, who rapped on African American social awareness similar to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s song, “The Message” which was released in 1982.

During the Golden Era (1989–1993) De La Soul—whose debut album on Tommy Boy Records, ‘3 Feet High and Rising’ pointed hip hop in a more conscientious direction while female rappers such as Queen Latifah, MC Lyte and Salt-n-Pepa offered lyrics pointing to feminism, black awareness and female urban narratives. Hip-hop artists including DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince from Philly and M.C. Hammer, from Oakland raised the roof in pop, dance, and commercialism.

The most impactful response to New York’s hip-hop scene, came from Los Angeles, beginning in 1989 with N.W.A.’s dynamic album, ‘Straight Outta Compton.’ N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude) —Ice Cube, Eazy E, MC Ren, DJ Yella and Dr. Dre—led the way as West Coast rap grew in prominence. Their graphic, violent tales of real life of the inner cities, and those of LA rappers such as Ice-T, MC Eiht, MC Breeze and of East Coast counterparts such as Schoolly D and the Hilltop Crew gave rise to the genre known as gangsta rap. In the early 1990s, Death Row Records built an empire around Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and the rapper-actor Tupac Shakur, causing a rivalry with New York City’s Bad Boy Records led by Sean “Puffy" Combs. This developed into a media-fueled hostility between East Coast and West Coast, which culminated in the still-unsolved murders of Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.

By the mid 1990s, hip-hop was artistically dominated by the Wu-Tang Clan, from New York City’s Staten Island, Mobb Deep, Nas, Hit Squad, Diddy, Gangstarr, Biggy Smalls headed by Diddy- rapper, producer, and president of Bad Boy Records, and the Fugees, who mixed pop music hooks with politics which later launched the careers of rappers, Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill.

Although long believed to be popular with urban African American males, hip-hop became the best-selling genre of popular music in the United States in the late 1990s. Its impact was global, with formidable audiences and artist pools in cities such as Paris, Tokyo, Sydney, Cape Town, London, and Bristol, England (where the spin-off trip-hop started). Hip Hop was responsible for generating huge sales in fashion, liquor, electronics, and automobiles that were popularized by its artists on MTV and The Box and in hip-hop-based publications such as The Source and Vibe. A canny blend of entrepreneurship and aesthetics, hip-hop was the wellspring of several staple techniques of modern pop music, including digital drumming and sampling (which introduced rap listeners to the music of a previous generation of performers, including Chic, Parliament-Funkadelic, and James Brown, while creating copyright controversies).

As the century turned, the music industry entered into a crisis, brought on by the advent of digitizing. Hip-hop suffered at least as severely as or worse than other genres, with sales tumbling. Simultaneously, though, it solidified its standing as the dominant influence on global youth culture. Even the popular “boy bands,” such as the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, drew heavily on hip-hop sounds and styles, and rhythm and blues and gospel had adapted so fully to the newer approach that stars such as Mary J. Blige, R. Kelly, and Kirk Franklin straddled both worlds.

In the early 2000s, hip-hop’s creative centre moved to the South. Following the success of the experimental OutKast and the stable of New Orleans-based artists that emerged from two record companies—Cash Money and No Limit Records (which was both founded and anchored by Master P)—the chant-based party anthems of such rappers as Juvenile, 8Ball & MJG, and Three 6 Mafia brought the sounds of the “Dirty South” to the forefront of rap music.

Back in New York, 50 Cent achieved multi-platinum status with 2003’s album, ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and Eminem, became perhaps the world’s biggest rap star when 8 Mile (2002) enjoyed huge popular and critical success while his song, “Lose Yourself” won the Academy Award for best song. Both were proteges of Dr. Dre, former member of NWA. However, he started working behind the scenes on a brand new venture and didn’t release an album after 1999.

Dr. Dre’s legacy, though, was visible in the extent to which hip-hop had become a producers’ medium. In the 21st century, the music—born from the sonic creations of the deejay—saw its greatest innovations in the work of such studio wizards as Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, and the Neptunes. The focus on producers as both a creative and a commercial force was concurrent with a widespread sense that the verbal dexterity and poetry of hip-hop was waning.

Hip-Hop had become associated with pop music, with the intricacy and subversive nature of earlier MCs largely being pushed to the “alternative underground” scene spearheaded by rappers such as Mos Def and Doom. The dissatisfaction with the state of mainstream hip-hop was so common that in 2006, Nas released ‘Hip Hop Is Dead’.

Still, major stars continued to emerge. Many of the biggest figures continued to rise from the South, including Atlanta’s T.I. and Lil Wayne from New Orleans. Hip-hop celebritism now often came hand-in-hand with multimedia success, such as a burgeoning film career for rapper, Ludacris. The genre continued to be assimilated deeper into nonmusical culture, with some genre’s early stars—LL Cool J, Ice Cube, Queen Latifah, Ice-T—established as familiar faces in movies and television. Snoop Dogg headlined rock festivals alongside Bruce Springsteen.

Perhaps no one represented the cultural triumph of hip-hop better than Jay-Z. As his career progressed, he went from performing artist to label president, head of a clothing line, club owner, and market consultant—along the way breaking Elvis Presley’s Billboard magazine record for the most number-one albums by a solo artist. Barack Obama made references to Jay-Z during his 2008 presidential campaign. On Jay-Z’s 2009 album “The Blueprint 3” he claimed to be a “small part of the reason” for Obama’s victory.

Kanye West, one of Jay-Z’s early producers, emerged as one of the most fascinating and polarizing characters in hip-hop following the success of his 2004 debut album ‘The College Dropout.’ Musically experimental and fashion-forward, West represented many of hip-hop’s greatest possibilities with his penetrating, deeply personal lyrics. However, his political stances in recent times has caused outcry around the industry. 

The music’s global impact continued to expand. No single artist may have better personified hip-hop in the 21st century than M.I.A. M.I.A. wrote politically radical lyrics that are set to musical tracks that drew from diverse sources around the world. Not only was her album ‘Kala’ named the best album of 2007 by Rolling Stone, but M.I.A. was also listed as one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People”—illustrating the reach and power of a music born decades earlier on litter-strewn playgrounds.

Rapping (or rhyming, spitting, emceeing, MCing) is a musical form of vocal delivery that incorporates "rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular", which is performed or chanted in a variety of ways, usually over a backing beat or musical accompaniment. The components of rap include "content" (what is being said), "flow" (rhythm, rhyme), and "delivery" (cadence, tone). Rap differs from spoken-word poetry in that rap is usually performed in time to an instrumental track. Rap is often associated with, and is a primary ingredient of hip-hop music, but the origins of the phenomenon predate hip-hop culture. The earliest precursor to the modern rap is the West African griot tradition, in which "oral historians", or "praise-singers", would disseminate oral traditions and genealogies, or use their formidable rhetorical techniques for gossip or to "praise or critique individuals." Griot traditions connect to rap along a lineage of Black verbal reverence that goes back to ancient Egyptian practices, through James Brown interacting with the crowd and the band between songs, to Muhammad Ali's quick-witted verbal taunts and the palpitating poems of the Last Poets. Therefore, rap lyrics and music are part of the "Black rhetorical continuum", and aim to reuse elements of past traditions while expanding upon them through "creative use of language and rhetorical styles and strategies. The person credited with originating the style of "delivering rhymes over extensive music", that would become known as rap, was Anthony "DJ Hollywood" Holloway from Harlem, New York.

Rap is usually delivered over a beat, typically provided by a DJ, turntablist, beatboxer, or performed a cappella without accompaniment. Stylistically, rap occupies a gray area between speech, prose, poetry, and singing. The word, which predates the musical form, originally meant "to lightly strike", and is now used to describe quick speech or repartee. The word had been used in British English since the 16th century. It was part of the African American dialect of English in the 1960s meaning "to converse", and very soon after that in its present usage as a term denoting the musical style. Today, the term rap is so closely associated with hip-hop music that many writers use the terms interchangeably.

Rapping can be traced back to its African roots. Centuries before hip-hop music existed, the griots of West Africa were delivering stories rhythmically, over drums and sparse instrumentation. Such connections have been acknowledged by many modern artists, modern day "griots", spoken word artists, mainstream news sources, and academics.

Blues music, rooted in the work songs and spirituals of slavery and influenced greatly by West African musical traditions, was first played by blacks and later by some whites, in the Mississippi Delta region of the United States around the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. Grammy-winning blues musician/historian Elijah Wald and others have argued that the blues were being rapped as early as the 1920s. Wald went so far as to call hip hop "the living blues." A notable recorded example of rapping in blues music was the 1950 song "Gotta Let You Go" by Joe Hill Louis.