African-American cultural forms and developments are as vast as they are diverse. However, because of white America's consistently racist and oppressive treatment of black peoples in this country there exist certain commonalities between African-American cultures as a result of this continuous subordination. In this paper I will attempt to present some of these existing similarities within hip hop and jazz cultures. Although they are both musically and culturally quite different, each arising out of a particular historical moment with its own distinct musical and cultural practices, there exists enough similarities between that two that it seems a comparison is indeed beneficial in understanding and examining American society in general. The similarities between the two African-American cultures is also quite large. Because of the length of this paper I am limiting my comparison to three very specific points of...