This week, we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of this essential American art form’s birth by looking at its origins, its evolution and its future, from every corner of the map.
Jackie Lay/NPR
This email usually arrives in your inbox on Saturdays, but this week it’s a day early, courtesy of a major music milestone: Today is hip-hop's 50th birthday. As NPR Music’s editor for hip-hop and R&B, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, throughout all the planning we’ve done in the months leading up to this celebration, about how hip-hop culture has become nearly synonymous with American culture in part because it has maintained its regional identity. That’s always an aim of rap coverage at NPR Music — from scene reports of sample drill in NYC to interviews of indie figures like Open Mike Eagle to criticism spotlighting Memphis upstart GloRilla and interrogating Atlanta, the current rap capital, from all angles. Our series All Rap Is Local, designed especially for this anniversary, gets even more granular with 14 pocket histories of scenes from around the nation, both prominent and underestimated.
We've been celebrating for a month (after diving into planning around the start of the year), and it’s great to have all these essays now available to read, but that's only the beginning. The full extent of our commemoration of this landmark includes dedicated work from twelve of our member stations, series on All Things Considered and Morning Edition, special episodes of Code Switch and It's Been a Minute, an extended conversation on All Songs Considered, and more. It’s thinking about seminal albums, breakthrough moments, rap’s politics and style, the verses that rewired something in us, the party that birthed it all and what the future might bring. (You can find all of it — and we’ll keep adding more – at this collection of stories.) As we dive deep into the heritage and history of this groundbreaking music, may we try to set the table for another 50 years.
All Rap Is Local: The playlist (Over 120 songs on Spotify and YouTube)
NPR’s radio special on the moments that have changed hip-hop history
On All Songs Considered, a podcast conversation about the communities where hip-hop comes from, where it might go, and how it’s managed to stay local even as it has grown into a globally dominant cultural force
Pop Culture Happy Hour’s team surveys NPR colleagues and rappers like Common and Big Freedia to learn about the verses that changed their lives
From All Things Considered, a series on key chapters in hip-hop’s half-century evolution, including: the story of hip-hop's first night and how a party in the Bronx gave birth to the genre; how hip-hop made its first record, 'Rapper's Delight'; how Yo! MTV Raps helped mainstream hip-hop; and the birth of trap music and the rise of Southern hip-hop. Listen to the entire series in our NPR One app.
From 2020: a very necessary celebration of the glorious, endlessly innovative, peerlessly influential gumbo that is Southern rap
Tiny Desk
Claire Harbage/NPR
Rap at the Tiny Desk: We’ve compiled every hip-hop concert in our long-running series, from Wu-Tang Clan and Rakim to Megan Thee Stallion and Tyler, the Creator … and Mac Miller and The Roots and Migos and Trina and Juvenile and — OK, there are too many classics to name them all — all in one place.
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