Each of us has our favorite song that played on the radio when we were young. The song that halts our daily schedule while we proceed to repeat every word as if we were the artist performing ourselves.
No matter the genre of music, our favorite songs can inspire our ambitions, help us cope with everyday life and frame our fragile realities.
Rap and hip-hop music and its contagious culture has been spread around the world, leaving its thumbprint abroad. The hip-hop culture was invented Aug. 11, 1973, in the recreation room at 1520 Sedgewick Ave. The "three kings" of hip-hop are Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. Kool Herc is credited with being the first disc jockey, or DJ, to broadcast the new brand to the masses, according to BBC's Rebecca Laurence.
Like many popular underground ideas, rap music and the hip-hop culture, once it reached peak popularity, was seen as profitable. AM radio stations broadcast rap from local New York radio stations throughout America and to the Caribbean. The new medium was also being used by black people as an outcry against white oppression. Songs like "Fight the Power" and "F**k tha Police" allowed the world to experience the anguish of the plight of black Americans. "By the 1980s, hip-hop had become a business and rap music was a valuable commodity. However, according to journalist Christopher John Farley, rap's commodification has also disenfranchised it as a form of resistance," said anthropologist Becky Blanchard.
As a tangible commodity, rap and hip-hop was sold back the the working-class blacks from the upper-class whites who bought out the local rap stations and regionalized FM radio networks. Because rap music was in high demand, it was sold around the world.
South of the border, many Mexicans have adapted their own version of gangster rap called narcocorridos. Al Jazeera's Chris Arsenault writes, "Like U.S. hip-hop, which gives voice to grievances from the ghettos, corridos are used by artists to articulate the experiences of Mexicans at home and in the U.S."
Arsenault goes on to tell the story of Chalino Sanchez, one of the first narcocorridos artists who began writing songs in prison for cigarettes. Like rap pioneers Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, Sanchez was murdered as a result of the vivid stories his music told.
Today, trap music has heavily influenced the hip-hop culture of South Korea. Keith Ape, 21, dropped his dynamic track titled "It G Ma" (which is Korean for "Don't Forget") on New Year's Day and has amassed over 10 million views on YouTube. Despite being the most experienced rapper of his 10-man group called Cohert, Ape is the youngest member. When he was 14, he became a fan of hip-hop after listening to "Life's a B***h" ft. AZ off of Nas' classic album "Illmatic," according to Donnie Kwak, a journalist for Complex Magazine.
Ape's colorful video has today's element of trap music embedded with Korean culture and is surprisingly similar to American rap despite the language barrier.
Hip-hop is as universal as almost anything one can picture. Jay-Z was quoted in the Huffington Post as saying, "I think that hip hop has done more for racial relations than most cultural icons. Save Martin Luther King, because his dream speech we realized when President Obama got elected." We all know that hip-hop music is infectious, but how can it allow people to be unified even with its violent content?
Keith Ape, "It G Ma"
