How Hip Hop Differed From Rock and Roll In Its Formative Years
There were significant differences between Hip Hop's emergence as the most popular youth music in the nation, compared to rise of Rock and Roll, though both began as musical forms in Black communities.
First of all, the take off period for hip hop, the time it took from its first commercial dissemination till its conquest of the youth market, was longer than that of Rock and Roll. For Hip Hop, the period was approximately ten years (1979-1989); for Rock and Roll only three ( 1954-1956). Both were maligned and resisted, but it took longer for Hip Hop to conquer youth markets, with the major vehicles for doing so being a single Music Show, MTV, along with music radio stations around the nation, rather than variety shows like Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan, and dance shows like American Bandstand, which helped promote Rock and Roll
Secondly, whereas Rock and Roll was a product of a wave of American Prosperity of unprecedented power and length, elevating the incomes of working class Americans, even those from previously marginalized groups, to the point where they could produce a teenage market for popular music and creating a wave of optimism that affected almost everyone in the nation, Hip Hop was a product of economic stagnation, urban decay, growing inequality, and the decline of post war optimism and Sixties idealism. The South Bronx of the 70's ("broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stairs you know they just don't care') would have been- and actually was- unrecognizable to the people who sang doo wop on the corners and in school hallways in Bronx CONTINUE READING: With A Brooklyn Accent: How Hip Hop Differed From Rock and Roll In Its Formative Years