Is Hip hop a music Genre

Aficionados know that hip-hop is a diverse culture, encompassing emceeing, deejaying, graffiti, and break dancing. The music of hip-hop culture is called “rap.” Rap music? That’s what everyone called it when it first hit the mainstream, because that’s what it’s called. Referring to rap as “hip-hop music” is like referring to “electronic dance music” as “rave music,” and, up until around 20 years ago, was about as correct.

The blame for this one falls squarely on radio stations. Rap music was seen as highly confrontational by its very nature when it hit the national scene: there were no sub-genres at that time, it was all just rap. Radio stations needed a way to distinguish the Fresh Prince from Public Enemy, and since rappers referred to their culture as hip-hop, they jumped on the term. Soon, consumers and critics began using the term to describe rap music—and fans of rap began correcting them, a pastime of which they would soon grow very tired.

For better or worse, the term stuck. As rap splintered into a dozen or so sub-genres in the late ’90s, hip-hop became the catch-all term for whatever they were playing on the radio. And, as all of those sub-genres have largely homogenized again, it’s now just a catch-all term for everything involving rapping—even underground artists have started referring to their music as hip-hop. Radio stations aren’t exactly bastions of free creative expression, but passive-aggressively telling a musical genre what to call itself seems particularly egregious.