50 Years of Hip-Hop: How a generation fostered creativity from urban despair and racial barriers
Hip-hop, a subculture and an art movement, was born when urban youth in crime and poverty-ridden neighbourhoods in South Bronx in New York City sought street corners to hang out and found ways to express their despairing selves. In the late 1970s, South Bronx was rocked by a manufacturing decline and an expressway that ended the local businesses. The emerging hip-hop movement gave the youths a recreative space to voice their despair and hardship, which grew to become a global phenomenon. Here's a look at the pioneers
Curated By: Madhu Kapparath
A small crowd gathers to watch a young man from the Bronx windmill on a piece of linoleum to the sound from a boombox, New York, circa 1980. Taking on Bronx's abandoned buildings and vacant parking lots, DJs and MCs set up mobile sound systems as they did in Jamaican culture. Sheets of cardboard became dance floors for break-dancers, and walls transformed into canvases for graffiti as the youth strove to express themselves with remarkable dexterity.
