the.com/hip hop

means A music and cultural movement built on rapping, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti that grew out of Black and Latino communities in New York City.

from The word itself is party slang before it was a genre name — MCs in the Bronx in the 1970s used rhythmic filler phrases like 'hip hop' to ride a beat while passing the mic, the way scat syllables fill jazz. One popular account credits early rapper/DJ figures (Keith Cowboy among them) with popularizing 'hip hop' as a rhythmic chant mimicking soldiers marching cadence. The phrase stuck to the whole culture almost by accident — a throwaway sound that became the name for the music, the dance, the art, and the attitude it spawned.