Fatima Palacios
Ms. Isaac
English 101
May 14, 2014 Rap music has been taking the music industry by a storm and has made a major impact on the hip hop culture. It is a music genre that is heard many places that one could be at like; the car, your neighborhood and even some retail stores. Many people confuse rap and hip hop to be the same thing. Not to be confused there really isn’t that much that is different from each other. Rap is more focused on the lyrical form telling their perspective on the world meanwhile, Hip hop is considered the same thing but it mainly focuses more on the beat and hip hop dancing. So basically hip hop is the culture and rap music is the movement. Although rap music is looked upon as a movement that is…show more content… The rap music genre actually started years ago in Africa with village story tellers who played handmade instruments meanwhile telling stories about their families and events that would take place in the village; these people were called Griots. “Rap is rooted in the pain of Black-American experience which began with slavery. While slaves were working in the fields, they would often sing” (Wood, Joann). In the songs that they would sing, parts of them were called “call and answer.” In this the leader would sing at a certain point in the song and the rest of the slaves would answer the next line. Fast-forward a couple years, in 1978 in New York, historians would consider these two individual DeeJays as the founding fathers of rap: DJ Hollywood and DJ Kool Herc. They were tired of the boring disco music scene so they would obtain their parents records and started spinning snippets of them on their turntables at local gigs. People started enjoying the music so they would tell their friends to tell a friend that these local gigs were all the fun was. The Dj’s then would give the microphone to locals and they would start spitting their stories along with the…show more content… For now I’ll be talking about Biggie Smalls, mostly known as The Notorious B.I.G. He was a rapper from Brooklyn which would be the East Side. Unfortunately he was a great rapper who got his dreams taken away from him because he was brave enough to come to the West side when there was a controversy between the east and west side. He was an artist who was creative and ingenious in which he spoke and continues to speak to generation then and now who go through hardship and the listeners could actually relate. Biggie was such a big inspiration to the generation that not only fans looked up to him but other rappers also found him as an inspiration to the point that there are numerous songs that give Biggie a shout out. According to the article “If Big had lived, the rap game would be very different today. He was so young — just starting to push the boundaries of his genre and tell stories about people whose voices don't get heard” (Kelley, Frannie). He was an artist who really started from the bottom and worked hard to get where he was. Some of his peers that knew him when he was young knew that he had potential in him and thought that he was going to get far in his life but unfortunately the streets lured him in which caused Biggie to go downhill. Some of his songs do include drugs and violence but he didn’t include them just to make a