History

Hip-hop made its debut in the Bronx, right in the heart of New York City. Hip-hop flourished as a lifestyle and music genre during the 1970s. Originally, in its infancy, hip-hop was known as disco-rap due to the fact that the common vocal style for hip-hop was rap and the music at that time, with its beat oriented style, sounded a lot like disco. Hip-hop, as it is now known, got its name from one of the first artists of its time, Cowboy Keith of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

It is rumored that one day he was teasing a friend of his who had just joined the Army by saying the words, hip, hop, hip, hop, in a mockery of the formal military marching cadence. Later on he, finding the scene to be amusing, managed to work this into his music via stage performance and called it hip-hop which caught on with the major artists of that time. They began using not only the name but the dance moves as well. Poetry also had a large influence on early hip-hop. Hip-hop lyrical structure of the time was based loosely off the verbal styling of the poetry that was common in coffee houses and popular hangouts all over New York City during the era of its rise to stardom.

Hip-hop finally managed to start making ground as a major musical genre during the late 1970s and earlier 1980s as recording became ever more popular and open to the public. The very first hip-hop record to go into major circulation is claimed to be the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" which was recorded in 1979. During this time several artists popped up all over the east coast causing a widespread epidemic of both hip-hop music and its lifestyle.