Once derided as a flash in the pan, rap emerged as the dominant popular musical style at the end of the twentieth century. Many people call it rap, but the later coinage “hip hop” better catches its essence—the beat. Possibly the most amazing thing about rap is the ability of new practitioners constantly to refashion and revitalize the genre by incorporating new musical influences and inspirations. While the basics have remained— a strippeddown funk beat with talky vocals—rap has fused with rock, jazz, reggae and every other contemporary popular music form.

Rap developed in the 1970s on the streets of New York City, where DJ Kool Here, DJ Hollywood and others set up turntables, sound systems and speakers on a corner and blasted out a sound collage, starting with a big, fat, booming bass, overlaying samples and scratches, topped off by a call-and-response chant. Indebted to the Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Jamaican reggae toasters and James Brown, as well as deeper rooted African American rhythmic and lyrical traditions, rap brought black popular culture back to the street.

Since the first recorded rap song, the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), which many critics dismissed as a novelty, rap has continued to rejuvenate itself just when it seemed to have reached a dead end. When the boastful rappings of early MCs like Kurtis Blow began to sound tired, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five brought a social conscience with their astounding 1982 single, “The Message.” Run DMC added hard rock guitar for 1984’s “Rock Box” and the crossover hit “Walk This Way” a 1986 remake of an Aerosmith tune. The Beastie Boys began to fuse punk, metal and rap beginning in the mid-1980s. Their License to Ill (1986) was the first no. 1 hip-hop album and the bestselling rap album of the 1980s.

At the same time “gangsta rap” was emerging on the West Coast. NWA (Niggaz With Attitude) and Ice-T rapped and rocked hard, spewing incendiary lyrics, mostly about hurting and killing people, particularly women and cops. Their first-person narratives about the harsh and violent realities of ghetto life shot them to the top of the hip-hop charts and excited much social comment and media-driven controversy. In New York, Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy took a more directly political stance. Led by Queen Latifah, female rappers began to combat the rampant misogyny of much gangsta rap, with women emerging as more than novelties for the first time on the hiphop scene.

By the 1990s, rap was part of mainstream American culture, from the streets of the ghettos to sitcom theme songs and advertising jingles. Still, hip-hop culture continued to assemble and deconstruct new forms of popular and unpopular music.