Hip-hop is turning 50

Hip-hop – the musical genre that spawned from young people living amidst poverty and crime and has grown to shape culture not only in the US but across the world – is celebrating its 50th birthday today.

🤔 Why today?... Though it may feel weirder than a Drake/Bobbi Althoff podcast interview to pin a specific date on the birth of an entire musical genre, many historians agree that August 11, 1973, was the official birthday of hip-hop.

This stems from a house party in the Bronx, thrown on that date by a then 15-year-old Cindy Campbell. As she recounts it, she was looking to keep costs low and hired her 18-year-old brother, who was known for his sound system, to be the DJ.

Her brother’s name was Clive, better known as DJ Kool Herc. And at that party, he did something historians consider the invention of hip-hop. He played the break beats – the funkiest snippets of songs – in a continuous loop on two turntables, so the music, and therefore the dancing, never stopped, WaPo reports.

📈 Hip-hop has since grown into an economic force. R&B/hip-hop currently commands the largest overall market share of any genre in the ~$16 billion record industry, at ~28%. And many hip-hop artists and producers have been able to build upon their musical success to create personal empires – including Jay Z (net worth $2.5 billion), Sean “Diddy” Combs (~$1 billion), Dr. Dre (~$500 million), and Snoop Dogg (~$160 million).