This was the true break with history-the end of the beginning, if not the beginning of the end.Īs complicated as it was creative, as contradictory as it was all-conquering, the story of hip-hop's eventual aesthetic takeover starts in the '80s. It's never what you do, but how it's done." And it's true that hip-hop was a continuation of a much longer story about black American culture. Hip-hop was about poor kids taking broken pieces of the world around them and putting them back together. There's an old saying that no idea's original: "There's nothing new under the sun. ![]() The '80s was hip-hop's first real decade, the era when everything started to blow up. To techno, to house music, to disco, to dancehall-and to hip-hop. ![]() American popular music today owes everything not to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, but to the sparks of the late 1970s that took full flight in the '80s. And we grew up being told one thing, but knowing something else was true. White people were listening to white people performing older black music at Woodstock (not to slight Jimi). So here we are, in 2017, still feeling the cultural and artistic reverberations from events that happened long after the '60s became American culture's supposed pivotal moment.īut the fact is that it wasn't the late '60s when everything changed-at least not in popular music. ![]() And of course the white male baby boomers had the loudest voices. History got all fucked up when everyone thought that the Baby Boomers had the most important story to tell. This feature was originally published on October 25, 2017.
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