To mark the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, ASU News spoke with five experts at the university about different facets of the genre:

• LaTasha Barnes, an assistant professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Barnes is an internationally recognized dancer, choreographer and award-winning competitor in Lindy Hop, house dance, hip-hop and waacking, and she teaches hip-hop dance. She calls herself “a tradition-bearer of Black American social dance.”

• Jerome Clark, an assistant professor in the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Clark teaches a course titled “Indigenous Hip-Hop, Resistance and Kinship.”

• Matt Kirkpatrick, a faculty associate in the popular music program in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre. Kirkpatrick is a lifelong hip-hop lover who worked for many years in the radio and promotion fields. He teaches hip-hop music production and history.

• Jorge “House” Magana, a clinical assistant professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre. Magana teaches hip-hop dance and history. He also performs, teaches and judges hip-hop competitions around the world.

• Mako Fitts Ward is an assistant professor of African and African American studies and of women and gender studies in the School of Social Transformation in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and an affiliate faculty in The Design School in the Herberger Institute, as well as director of the Social Transformation Lab. She developed a course on gender and hip-hop, and she is writing a book about hip-hop artists who are women of color and their contributions to community-organizing work.

The birth of hip-hop

While the Bronx house party generally gets the credit for inventing hip-hop, Ward says that current scholars are looking beyond the New York City borough.

“Because of how people moved around the country during the time when we name hip-hop’s origin — the ’70s — we need to think about how maybe it didn’t just start in New York — that it started all over the country in different places,” she said.

Geographic dislocation also makes it hard to pinpoint where Indigenous hip-hop was created, Clark said.

“Indian peoples, through various federal policies, were actively moved by the federal government from reservations to urban centers,” he said.

Some research has pointed to the late 1980s on the West Coast as the birth of Indigenous hip-hop. One of the early groups was WithOut Rezervation, based in California and composed of three men with different tribal affiliations.

What makes hip-hop, hip-hop?

At its core, Kirkpatrick said, hip-hop is beats and rhymes.

“It’s something dope — beat-wise, rhythmic or a loop — and somebody rapping a rhyming pattern over it, whether it’s four- or six- or 24-bar structures over that beat,” he said.

The beats are mastered by the DJ, who selects and plays the music, while the emcee raps the words.

The breakdancers are called B-Boys and B-Girls.

“The thing that makes hip-hop so amazing is that it’s not just a musical genre,” Kirkpatrick said. “You have the importance of the DJ, the emcee, the graffiti, the B-Boying, the dancing — all creating what the culture is.”

Magana said that hip-hop wasn’t called hip-hop in the early years.

“It was called breakers, or just ‘going off.’ It didn’t have a name because it was just life.”

While breakdancing was the first hip-hop dance, often highlighting an individual dancer, Barnes said that the culture also includes moves by people in the crowd.

“We also do make space to celebrate those who didn’t get on the floor but also partied. We usually call those party dances, like the Snake for those who were in the ’80s, and the Roger Rabbit,” she said.

Hip-hop’s evolution

The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” became the first rap song to become a Top 40 hit, in 1979. The 15-minute song, which was cut in half in order to be aired on the radio, had lyrics about friends, cars, girls and celebrities. But hip-hop artists used their music to reflect all aspects of life for Black people in America.

“Everyone knows ‘Rapper’s Delight.’ If you close your eyes and listen, you can hear them rapping that at a house party,” Kirkpatrick said.

“Besides rocking parties and having fun, you have Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and if you listen to their records, it rings true today. A lot of people like to brush under the rug what ‘gangsta rap’ evolved into, but they were referencing what they saw on the streets of Compton.

“It’s a clear evolution from that type of rap, very braggadocious about their sound system and DJ and crew, and fast-forward to drug use and overdoses and depression and gangs, very meaningful things that can be explored. There’s a lot of party, but hip-hop has always had, ‘Hey, look what’s going on in our neighborhood.’

“That’s the genius of Dr. Dre too. We want to have fun and chase girls, but there’s this other thing going on where our homies are getting killed and harassed by the police and we have to talk about it.”

Taking on colonialism

Indigenous hip-hop artists expressed what they were living with, too — colonialism and oppression, Clark said.

“They’re talking about what that looks like both in a national context and specifically what it looks like on the reservation,” he said.

For example, the songs of WithOut Rezervation address loss of tribal land, social injustice, cultural erasure and portrayals of Native Americans as violent or a mascot.

But there’s a wide range of hip-hop created by Native artists, he said.

“You also have songs talking about what it looks like to be a young Indigenous person in an urban context and hanging out with friends, and writing about love and lost love,” he said.

Indigenous hip-hop is a modern cultural act, Clark said.

“The way Indian people are thought about politically and culturally and the ideas of how they should look and act is based on Indian people of the past,” he said.

“And if you don’t resemble that image or that ideal, you are somehow less Indigenous. But we are very much modern and very much still here, and we exist culturally and politically.

“Hip-hop is an act of asserting life. This is one way we can say, ‘We’re here and alive, and we have something to say.’”

A version of this story originally appeared in ASU News.

Photo by Chris Goulet

Want to learn more about hip-hop? Check out our upcoming hip-hop danceand music courses we’re offering in Spring 2025.