How Did/Do You Experience(d) Hip Hop?

[OGBama]

For those who ask is Hip Hop culturally relevant and/or irrelevant today, think of how you experience(d) it on a personal level and you will get various answers. Think of how the generation after us who won't remember video countdown shows and magazines aimed at Hip Hop experiences Hip Hop. There is Hip Hop being created by adults who don't act nor dress like teens and it is anywhere outside of terrestrial radio to be found.

I ain't from NY so for me I experienced Hip Hop via mass media e.g. Rap City and Yo! MTV Raps. Didn't read The Source until 1998, but knew it existed. Bought my first CD in 2010. No one in my family put me up on Hip Hop so I educated myself about it.

 

[redvillage]

Wooop
I was never really surrounded by hip-hop culture, but there was always someone close to me who listened to it.

When I was around 6-7 my neighbor who was a year older than me would 'borrow' his big sisters Eminem CD's and bring to my house. He explained the whole story to me: how his mom was fucked up, how the song Kim was about him killing his baby momma and 97 Bonnie & Clyde was about disposing the body with his infant daughter in the car... He (my 7-8 yr old friend) also explained drugs to me lol. I wanted to be Eminem soooo bad, listened to nothing but him, D12, 50 Cent and the occasional Dr. Dre song for like 4-5 years. Then I started playing the guitar and gradually lost interest in any music that wasn't categorized as 'rock'.

Around 8th or 9th grade another friend who was deep into hip-hop started putting me on to shit like N.W.A., Pac, Big L, and Biggie. I rediscovered Eminem and Dr. Dre and went on to familiarize myself with genre and the culture.

Atm I think hip-hop is both interesting and annoying. It's officially the new rock'n roll, and has been for a minute - which means that everybody wants to do it, and when everybody wants to do something A LOT of redundant trash is gonna be generated. But it also means that the genre is exposed a lot of new influences and so I think there's more original hip-hop out there than ever - at least from a sonic perspective; lyrically hip-hop has a harder time evolving (I'm guessing because the black american experience sadly hasn't changed all that much). I suspect in the next 20 years hip-hop will slowly dissolve into a bunch of sub-genres just like what happened to rock music. It'll be a bit sad and pretty interesting.

I'll stop writing before this becomes a full-blown dissertation. I swear hip-hop is a breathing essay. I have certain reservations about it, but only the kind of reservations that you have about something you care about. I don't have shit but music, and hip-hop probably makes up 50% of what I listen to...and at least 80% of the contemporary music I listen to is hip-hop or r&b.

So that's my experience of, or perhaps my thoughts on, hip-hop.

 

[kapikap]

I experienced hiphop in nyc at a very early age. i would hear it on the boombox by the local street kids a little older than me or at the local schoolyard near the handball courts. hiphop came out hard at a time when disco and rock were at war with each other. but my shining moment was discovering the late night rap shows on public sponsored radio. it was the shining moment to tape all the radioshows and sleep with the little boombox by my pillow, with my finger on the pause button. this was the end of the 70's and early eighties.

 

[southern]

Hiphop had always been a community thing for me. My friends and I would sit and watch RapCity almost everyday after school. Its crazy because I was more into R&B music, but hiphop was more about a culture. So I tuned in just to see what was happening in. When we were able to buy our own music, we'd just sit around the CD player , listening to whatever the latest music was.

Today i get hiphop mainly from social media, or music streaming services, in my case Apple Music/Beats1. Its just not the same as kicking it with the fellas.