Retrospect for Hip-Hop: A Golden Age on Record?

Abstract

The Sugar Hill Gang made the first popular Hip-Hop record just twenty-four years ago. Since then rap has seen its progression and regression, its open-armed acceptance and outright denunciation. Hip-Hop serves as the rebel teenager of music – wildly and fervently accepted by its friends and admirers, yet seldom understood by its detractors and uninformed bystanders. Bill O’Reilly, a conservative right-wing extremist and television journalist for FOX News, recently declared (on his O’Reilly Factor) that “Hip-Hop will be extinct in twenty years.”