The 90s Part 5a: Hip-Hop’s Effects Part 1

There are some things you should never mix...oil and water...nitro and glycerin...tequila and—well, it’s not a good idea to mix tequila with anything other than salt, lemon and maybe some fruit juice…

They used to say this about rock and rap music, too...and they were pretty adamant about that…

When rap and hip-hop started seeping into the mainstream in the middle 1980s, it immediately polarized people...those who didn’t (or refused) to get it, were aggressively dismissive of what rap brought to the table...

“that’s not rap…it’s crap!” …. “this isn’t music…it’s just bad poetry over beats stolen from another record”…

It took a few years, but by the time we got into the 90s, hip-hop and rap was becoming a very powerful musical and cultural force…today, it is the genre when it comes to driving culture…after half a century of being in charge, rock has fallen to second place…

Not only that, but a chunk of the rock scene was co-opted into hip-hop, creating a new series of hybrid sounds…

The original post-punk alt-rock population also aged...the older, set-in-their-ways crowd was pushed out by a new generation who didn’t have any preconceived notions or baggage when it came to these new sounds...to them, rap was just another form of exciting new music...

So, by the end of the 80s, there were signs that punk, funk, rap, hip-hop and metal were all becoming inextricably intertwined...but who knew that in a few years we’d all be talking about this thing called “nu metal?”...

This is part 5 of our look back on the alt-rock of the 1990s…