Hip-Hop music, or to use the more popular marketing term, Rap music, was the most popular, influential, and controversial form of black and Latino urban popular music throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It emerged in the early to mid-1970s in the Bronx, though in later years, distinctive East Coast and West Coast styles would emerge and clash, sometimes with fatal results for its performers. Rap and Hip-Hop culture entered mainstream America's collective consciousness as a novelty, resulting from the massive success of the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." "Rapper's Delight" contained all the elements that would characterize Hip-Hop's essence: spare instrumentation, rhythmically spoken rhymes, and the borrowing of previously existing musical elements to construct a new song ("Rapper's Delight" borrowed heavily from Chic's then-current hit, "Good Times").

Music is only one part of Hip-Hop culture, which encompasses four major elements: rapping, deejaying, breakdancing, and graffiti-writing. Beyond...