Music: hip-hop, 50 years of mutation and expansion

Marie Gicquel, editing by Gauthier Delomez / Photo credits: Marcus Ingram / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP 06:20 a.m., August 11, 2023

By playing a track on two different turntables at a party with his neighbors, the future DJ Kool Herc did not know that he had just invented hip-hop, produced with the "sound system", that is to say the equipment of the poor. That was just 50 years ago. This highly influential culture started at the bottom of the ladder, in the black neighborhoods of New York, and is now the most influential musical genre.

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"It's a way of making music, without necessarily having a knowledge of music theory," explains Olivier Cachin, journalist and rap specialist, at the microphone of Europe 1.

"Rapper's Delight", the essential of hip-hop

A few years after the invention of this musical genre, a disco instrumental resonates on the radio, except that it is muscular by a 15-minute spoken word: The Sugar Hill Gang offers the planet the first rap.

"As always in the United States, it is the commercial success that will legitimize the movement and the artists who came from it," continues Olivier Cachin, "and in this case, the first world hit that made rap known around the world was 'Rapper's Delight' in 1979, the song of The Sugar Hill Gang."

Arrival in France in the 1980s

The hip-hop movement arrived in France in the 1980s, with for example Akhénaton of the group IAM, Dynasty or the rapper Rockin' Squat of Assassin, to become the most fruitful genre with its representatives MC Solaar, Orelsan, Maître Gims (today Gims ed). It is also the musical genre that is best exported abroad.