Over the last four decades hip hop has served as a radical force for repositioning black culture to the centre of the popular imaginary, first in the United States and then across the globe. Political in its affirmation of an identity counter to the mainstream, in its use of musical styles at once technologically advanced and derived from non-Western sources, in the content and form of its lyrics, hip hop is a site of poetic appropriation of alternative ways of life. DJ Afrika Bambaataa defined the genre as coming to life through at first four central elements - in his eyes rap, DJing, b-boying and graffiti - and soon a fifth; knowledge.

In December 2006, gifted New York rapper Nasir Jones shocked the world of hip hop by declaring the death of the genre; “Hip hop is dead”. A sentence judged severe by many at the time, sounding like a desperate marketing attempt to sell an album and jumpstart a career that was on the rocks. Nas’ leitmotif was however, beyond the controversy whipped up by the media, the pretext for a profound and uncomplacent reflection on the state of hip hop. The genre, without a doubt due to an excessive commercialisation, seemed to have lost its essence, ceding to the calls of a savage capitalism and thus cutting ties with the social outsiders who, across the planet, had given it a form, a language, spaces of expression and a racial, social and political conscience. KRS-ONE countered this with his now famous “I am hip hop” and “Hip hop is alive”, arguing that hip hop is about transmission but also spiritual recreation and that its life and death would not merely be dependent on a bastardised image produced essentially by the media and desired by the establishment.

And so we are thrown into a (re)definition of what hip hop is, what it was or what it will be tomorrow. Is it the same hip hop that moved from basements to the mass media, from the streets of impoverished neighbourhoods to the international stage for the enjoyment of millions? Can we still talk of hip hop culture when, at first considered a sub-culture, it has today been permeated by pop culture and has seen its influence extend more and more everyday to fashion, theatre, dance, music, painting, performance and cinema, to the point that it has disappeared and become completely unrecognisable? This leads us to ask whether hip hop wanted to change the world or was simply using subversion to ask to be part of it. Or in our search for a definition, should we simply stop at the genre’s aesthetics (MCing, DJing, graffiti, Bboying, fashion etc.) and attempt to understand the relationship between hip hop and Blackness, the history of the people at the origin of the genre? Given the context within which hip hop was born however these questions prove to be perilous, leading us inevitably to reflections of a social, racial, economic and political order.