I came into this class thinking I’d know next to nothing about hip-hop and its origins, but it turns out I knew more than I thought I did – I just never related it to hip-hop.  In high school, I took a class on urban history and we discussed Robert Moses and his plan to essentially destroy the Bronx with the Cross-Bronx expressway, but I never knew the impact that action had on hip-hop and its formation.   As with most musical genres, the youth are the ones to step it up and channel their frustration into art (that will eventually turn into a worldwide phenomenon).  I question how youth culture can still be so looked down upon but it almost always ends up being capitalized on by the entertainment industry.  It’s about time young people get the respect they deserve for the important contributions to the culture they create.

I still have a lot of questions about spaces and places, but I can tell that the spaces and the places where hip-hop found itself back in the ’80s would be different if hip-hop was created in the 2010s because of gentrification.  When people are displaced, the place where they were originally from doesn’t immediately change, but the space sure does then the place follows.

I also find the way women present themselves in hip-hop very interesting because it’s seen as such a male-dominated art form, yet women are perfectly capable of creating amazing hip-hop.  It’s obvious that Missy Elliot has to be mentioned in this post as she was the introduction of this class.  She “raised” all of the ladies of hip-hop and rap we know today, so she deserves all the respect.  It’s amazing that her career started in ’89 and she’s just as relevant now as she was 30 years ago.