Hip-Hop Music Then and Now

Hip-hop is defined such as the urban youth culture associated with rap music and the fashions of African-American residents of the inner city. In my opinion this definition is ever so slightly outdated. Perhaps back in the late 80’s and early 90’s this would be an appropriate definition, but today, I think hip-hop is defined as something far more modern and different. Today, it is 2013, hip-hop is no longer an underground genre that is only associated with African Americans and inner city life; hip-hop music and life is actually extraordinarily popular and mainstream.

Scanning through my car radio, on a daily basis, you hear a great deal of stations that are entirely hip-hop; a lot of the pop stations play hip-hop music as well. But back in the 90ies, there weren’t as many hip-hop oriented station, and the ones that were hip-hop only, had far less listeners than they do today. Today, hip-hop attracts a much more diverse crowd than it has in the past; it used to be mostly African-American audiences, if not entirely.

Today, there is a good amount of white rappers who are just as talented and successful, in their genre and field as the black hip-hop artists. One of my favorite hip-hop artists for example, is Mac Miller. He is white, Jewish, and from the suburbs outside of Pittsburgh. There was no one quite like that back in the early 90s. Back then, the music was far more angry and aggressive than it is today; it was about turf wars, and gangs, killing, and surviving the so-called “thug life.” It was artists like Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur,