Hip-Hop Is NOT A ‘Young’ Genre Anymore
One of the most common untruths you hear regarding hip-hop is that it’s a “young” genre. While that description may have fit 15 years ago, it now sounds ridiculously inappropriate. If you’re tracing the history from the day DJ Kool Herc deejayed a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, hip-hop is 40 years old. If you’re going from the moment “Rapper’s Delight” hit the charts, hip-hop is 34.
Just for perspective, compare that to rock music and R&B.
If you consider the emergence of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis Presley to be the “birth” of rock ‘n roll, that means that the genre was born around 1955. If you had 35 years to that, you wind up at the dawn of the 1990s, just as grunge was about to explode. Was rock music still a “young” genre in the early 90s? Absolutely not. Hip-hop is at a similar place in its history, and while it may be younger than rock and R&B, it is by no means in its infancy. Hip-hop has endured numerous phases and transitions, and there are three generations that can lay claim to it. That isn’t young.
