Hip Hop

This is FYI. It’s your favorite show.
Time to get going, in case you didn’t know.
Today we’re gonna talk about something cool.
Hip-hop, from the old school.
Hold on, everybody on board.
I promise you, you won’t get bored.
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Transcript

0:02

wow[Music][Music] this is fyi it's your favorite show it's time to get going in case you didn't know today we're gonna talk about something cool hip hop from the old school hold on everybody on board i promise you you won't get bored ready to fly it's f y i i i yeah put your hands up[Music][Music] welcome to for your info english you got it[Music] hello hello hello and welcome to a fresh fresh episode of f-y-i i've been putting this topic off for a while to put office a platform but i've got to be honest i friggin love hip hop when i start to hear a beat i can't help it no lo puedo evitar i got a boogie i've gotta get down[Music] in fact you can hear them both in the same song are you guys a fan of pulp fiction well if you'll remember on the soundtrack there's a song that goes jungle boogie jungle boogie quest and what does he say get down get down get down get down hey did you ever know he was talking about dancing but today we're gonna talk about hip hop the language of the streets the song of the streets and as we'll realize hip-hop has become synonymous with rap as just being a kind of music but as we'll see there's a whole culture behind it there are many elements and as many of us know hip-hop has become a multi-billion dollar industry as well but we've gotta go back to where it all started we are gonna trace it back to its roots to its birthplace in the bronx born in the bronx hip-hop this was in the 70s the decade of the 70s and i think what i'll do as always is i'll read you a basic definition and then we can stop and take a look at different words that come up but it is a genre general of popular music it's popular music developed in the u.s by inner city african americans an inner city means in the heart of the city and caribbean americans as i just said it was born in the bronx although as we can see and we will see hip-hop has developed everywhere there's a thriving hip-hop community in atlanta even in other boroughs of new york city oh here's a little trivia question for you what are the five boroughs of new york city i just gave you one the bronx where hip-hop was born what about the most popular one manhattan queens they've got an amazing rap scene over in queens and don't forget about staten island that's where the wu-tang clan comes from and how could i forget brooklyn the birthplace of the notorious big biggie smalls who is one of my favorite hip-hop artists in fact patrons i have put together a list of some of the songs we're going to talk about and some of the samples because we'll see that hip-hop music relies on samples and samples are just little pieces of a song let me give you an example here to draw my kid wicked hit a drama get wicked that's one that came from public enemy and has been used so much but remember these samples are not just lyrics or vocal samples sometimes it's just a beat a rhythm or a hook and as always you know anytime you want to look at music you got to look at the music that inspired the music so we are going to go way back to the roots but let's continue with our definition it consists of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies wrapping a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted and a chant is uncantico it developed as a part of hip-hop culture a subculture defined by four key stylistic elements remember i said before hip-hop is so much more than just music well the first element it sounds like something from a movie the first element emceeing rapping that's right and what does mc stand for it stands for the master of ceremonies the person who's holding the mic and the word mike is an abbreviation for microphone but you don't want to just wrap acapella you need a dj you need somebody on the turntables somebody preferably who knows how to scratch so an mc a dj and then you need a dancer of course so the third element is break dancing and some of the greatest break dancing i have ever seen was in the subway in new york city and i'm going to tell you guys a little bit about my experience in the 90s the early 90s when hip-hop was in its heyday it was all over the charts and its heyday is su apogeo and all over the charts is and i purposely left out to leave out as omitted the fourth element what do you think the fourth element is did you say graffiti that's right and let me clear something up there's something called graffiti which is art and there's something that's vandalism and you know the difference you can see when somebody really created something and when somebody just wanted to deface public property now let's say you can't find a good dj well don't worry you can just grab a boom box what is a boombox estos radios enormous and i remember the rule when i was a kid was the bigger your boombox the cooler you were oh yeah you could turn it up all the way or as we say crank it and i remember we used to turn the base all the way up and turn the treble all the way down it reminds me of that song i'm all about that bass bout that bass no treble i'm all about that bass bout that bass no treble so what do we do what do we do if we can't find a dj well don't forget you can make a beat with your lips with your tongue your hands it's called beat boxing and this is not an element but more of a sub element one sub sub-element of the genre and i have to be honest i i'm a mean beatboxer mean means well i'll let you be the judge here we go i hope you guys were rapping over that beat hey i do what i can you know what i didn't use my hands i usually use my hands because i've got the microphone over here but next time i see you in person and you give me a beat i'll freestyle in fact if you noticed in our intro i wrote a little rap and many of you know this but i rapped in a song yeah well more of a pitbull style wrapping but we're going to talk about the different styles as well we're going to talk about the pioneers but if you want to hear me rapping or see it on youtube i think it's got over 2 million views just google dj valdi wanna dance and get ready because well i'm a little bit proud of it you know i don't consider myself a rapper but the song went to number one on the maxima fm charts which is the dance music station so i have to say i was pretty proud of it and of course my friend dj valde the producer the dj he was pretty proud of me as well so uh sometimes you gotta try new things you gotta throw caution into the wind aries god i love that expression so hip-hop started getting huge but this was on the streets and the reason why is well nobody was recording this music i mean this music was played at parties many times they were block parties which block in this case is manthana they were parties that took up the whole block with your whole neighborhood so they were very local parties some of them were even in abandoned warehouses well anywhere you could fit some people get a dj in there get an emcee and get people dancing that's the idea so hip-hop came from people wanting to party but then as we start to notice just like any form of expression we start to see a message telling us about that kind of lifestyle telling us about the woes the woes are another way of saying the troubles of people from the inner city but again they didn't have a voice yet so to speak at least not globally now hip-hop is worldwide i could go anywhere and just say jay-z or kanye west or eminem and somebody back oh yeah even in china guys people know this so this is global now it's a global phenomenon so even though it started in the early to mid 70s it didn't begin to get any radio play until around 1979 and you would never hear any songs on you know on tv or anything before that god forbid you know everything before that was i hate to say it but it was a very cookie cutter corta ipega so i guess it was the perfect time the moment was ripe for a new genre a new voice a new form of expression and then little by little people started getting into it you know it didn't happen all of a sudden it was little by little there were a lot of different waves for example the first wave was old school hip-hop and this was kind of influenced by disco the lyrics were very party oriented you know they had to do with partying and having fun just like disco music and if you think about it it makes total sense they were playing this at block parties that gangster rap we know that didn't come about until later but the first my favorite is obviously the first phase it was awesome remember i have a playlist and i keep adding songs to it as they come to mind i shared it on patreon and a quick reminder guys if you're not on patreon you should join our curious community because you get tons of additional content including a bonus episode every week and you can get pdfs with all the vocabulary and expressions you can get weekly classes with me monthly classes as well and so much more join us at patreon.com alberto alonso and then you can go even deeper into each topic into each episode and i want to send a shout out to all my patrons what a wonderful group of people that has gotten together to have some fun to learn and to explore together so a shout out to all of you especially my super duper students javier roberto david jose maria mila alex patricio and edgar and don't forget about my interstellar students isa paco diego and carmen remember if you want to find out more and get a bonus episode every week and classes and vocabulary and so much more and more importantly you'll be a part of a curious community and the first curious person in that community is your teacher me yours truly un servidor so i hope you'll join us take a gander it's patreon.com slash alberto alonso the 1980s ushered in this is a really good expression to usher in if you think about it an ushers so this ushered in what was called the second wave of hip-hop or as they called it new school hip-hop and this had more of an electro sound well remember techno music was very popular at the time too so you always have to look at what else is popular because in the end hip-hop was trying to speak to the masses and how do you speak to the masses by speaking their language so hip-hop has mirrored other forms of music and mixed with it you know one of the classic examples of rock and hip hop just think of it it's walk this way talk this way walk this way which is aerosmith and run dmc i mean that was revolutionary it still is today i mean it's not only an amazing song a timeless song but it attracted hip-hop fans run dmc fans and it attracted rock fans and here they said wait a second we can appeal to the masses and this led to what was called the golden age this was between the 80s and the mid 90s and this is when i was listening to hip hop this is when i was living in new york city and i feel like it was a great moment to be alive and it was amazing dr dre snoop dogg it was huge they were putting out albums the songs were selling like singles the lps were selling i mean it was starting to become a major force as we say a force to be reckoned with um this is also where you saw a bit of a split una di bision between the west coast style and the east coast style there's the famous battle west coast versus east coast that beef is a blanca oh and in the bonus part we're going to take a look at all the slang sos now you'll be able to understand hip-hop songs also we're going to take a look at some of the pioneers and i'm going to tell you about my experiences seeing some of the greats but i'm sure you guys have heard about this this battle between west coast versus east coast or maybe you've heard it as biggie versus tupac and both of them are unsolved murders we'll also talk about that in the bonus part the dark side hey i always like to look at the dark side as well why not and how would i define the difference between west coast and east coast rap well west coast was that gangster rap it was you know i'll shoot your face and blow your face with my get you know it was very violent it was sexist and you know okay as a father i may have liked it back then but i don't want anybody talking to my daughter that way and east coast rap was more just you know jazzy loops in the background uh kind of like there was some hardcore elements it was it was more of a party style so it was more of a throwback to the original hip-hop old-school hip-hop while the west yes they made a new sound with this gangster rap but again most people were like okay we like it you can dance to it but a lot of people didn't identify with it well because most people i know aren't gang-bangers thankfully and at this point hip-hop started to diversify you started getting a lot of groups from the south of course you got outcast they are excellent they're from atlanta and atlanta has a wonderful rap scene again i'm gonna share all of these songs and artists in a playlist so you guys are able to well place the names with the songs and i guarantee you'll probably recognize some of the songs or some of the samples we're going to look at and as far as i'm concerned and again this is just my humble opinion i feel like at the turn of the century i should say the turn of the millennium in 1999 things got a little bit out of control it was all about the bling era and what is the bling era well think about shiny jewelry diamonds bling bling it was all about showing off look at my cars look at my money look at all my girlfriends and in the end it kind of went against what rap was about rap was you know people from the inner city it wasn't people who had a lot of money it was so it changed the whole face of rap and it worked it continued to be successful but again i said in my opinion this is where they went too far i want to hear a good rap song but i'm not interested in how cool you are and then you saw rap fuse with everything now we've got new metal which is corn groups like corn who actually have like a beat box and and wrap samples in their music so now we've seen a fusion of all different kinds which i like that because i think we get some really interesting genres from that like acid jazz trip hop and so on and so forth and the state of affairs today again this is just my opinion now we've got something that is called trap i don't know why they added a tea to it but right now i feel like there's a lot of crying going on in rap i feel like rap has turned into i just wanna walk around i don't even wanna make an effort to rap i'll put on some autotune so i feel like and again maybe this is just me being an old man but i feel like some of the artistry is being lost like because i don't want to hear a grown man cry for six minutes in a song i don't care how good the beat is but there is no doubt no doubt in my mind or in anyone's mind that hip-hop is here to stay in the year 2017 it surpassed rock as the number one genre that's right the most popular genre in the united states and i'll tell you something in the bonus part we're gonna take a look at the essentials the pioneers the songs the samples you need to know also the vocabulary so you can understand all of these hip-hop songs that are ever so popular i'm gonna tell you a little bit about dj cool herc africa bambada and grand master flash those three guys those three innovators are called the holy trinity of hip hip-hop and you know what i know some people right now are thinking ah man i don't like hip-hop i don't like i don't identify with this this kind of music and i know there are naysayers there are also rhyme slayers and players sorry i had to rap a naysayer amino a naysayer a rhyme slayer well to slay his matar peron english espetarlo a rasad s see so the naysayers ram slayers and players i know what you're thinking you're thinking rap this is crap and i get it especially the modern stuff but let's compare it to pop music in a typical pop music song how many lyrics are there or how many how many words are there in the song if you had to count them let's say there are 75 a hundred okay now let's look at an m m song or a biggie small song there are probably ten times or five times more words and they rhyme at the end some would call that poetry but if you think about it it's not just poetry it's poetry that you have to sing so is it really some kind of horrible music that requires no talent i don't think so so hey i got nothing left to say i hope you'll join us in the bonus part today of f y i[Applause][Music][Music][Applause][Music] you