For the First Time in America, Hip-Hop Has Taken the Pop Crown From Rock. Where Does Its Staying Power Come From?

For a music genre, staying vigorous for more than 40 years is no small feat. Rock came out of the 1940s and 1950s, and counting from the 1960s, when it entered its golden age, its prime lasted about 30 years.

Hip-hop is having its best moment — though only, of course, for Americans.

Nielsen, the market research firm, surveyed the U.S. music market over the first half of 2017 and found that hip-hop (R&B included) had passed rock to become the most popular kind of music. In the second half of the year, hip-hop kept up the pace.

The numbers showed hip-hop taking 24.5% of the U.S. music market in 2017, ahead of rock's 20.8% — the first time hip-hop had taken the crown of popularity from rock since Nielsen began tracking the figures in 1991.

Of the ten most popular albums of 2017 in the report (a ranking that combines album sales, track-equivalent album units, and audio and video on-demand streaming-equivalent album units), seven were hip-hop or R&B. The highest-placed of them was Kendrick Lamar's DAMN., at No. 2.

Matthias Mauch, one of the authors of The Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960–2010, put it this way: "Hip-hop didn't just come out of nowhere — we saw that trend of the chord-poor sound rising years before."

The study looked at what different musical styles did to the evolution of popular music. It picked out 1964, 1986 and 1991 as three turning points: 1964 stood apart because soul and rock renewed themselves, 1983 brought new wave, disco and hard rock, and 1991, pushed along by hip-hop, was the moment that reached furthest. That year, N.W.A's Niggaz4Life became the first hip-hop album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

The "rising trend" Matthias Mauch described also reads as the arc of hip-hop's whole history, from its birth until now.

Hip-hop was born in the 1970s and entered what is called its "golden age" in the late 1980s. In that stretch, still run out of New York, hip-hop showed a range of technique and subject matter it had never had before: Rakim brought a different sort of rhyme scheme to it, Boogie Down Productions ran experiments sampling the Beatles, and a set of artists steeped in jazz formed the Native Tongues circle, using a renewed culture to put out Afrocentrism and to show people that hip-hop didn't have to bare its teeth all the time.

In the mid-1990s, the feud between the West Coast and the East Coast kept turning up in the headlines. A West Coast that had found a style of its own and an East Coast whose hip-hop kept evolving looked like needle against needle. In the west, gangsta rap burst out of Compton with N.W.A at the front, and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg went on to work funk into hip-hop. In the east, Nas and Jay-Z — not yet enemies — picked up the tradition of the people before them and went on painting the street in vivid detail.

The quarrel between the two coasts rose to a matter of life and death because of the personal grudge between 2Pac and Biggie, with threats to finish each other off written into the lyrics. Looking back at those years now, what people mostly feel is the loss of two artists of the highest rank. (Though who killed them is still unsettled.)

2Pac's name came from the Peruvian revolutionary leader Tupac Amaru II. Both of his parents belonged to the Black Panther Party, the radical organization set up to fight for Black civil rights, and his plainspoken delivery and his hard work speaking for other Black people inspired many who later joined the business. Biggie, born Christopher Wallace, was raised by his mother, who had to work two jobs to keep the family going, and he had sold drugs on the street while he was still very young. Musically, a full, soft voice and a gift for telling stories in lyrics made him a legend too.

Around 2000, Marshall Bruce Mathers III — Eminem — arrived and widened hip-hop's audience. There had been white rappers before him: the group Beastie Boys succeeded as early as the 1980s, but that success was built on mixing hip-hop with punk. Eminem took white listeners by storm playing by hip-hop's own rules.

In recent years hip-hop has held people's attention by speaking for Black Americans, by changing itself, and by producing new artists. For a music genre, staying vigorous for more than 40 years is no small feat. Rock came out of the 1940s and 1950s, and counting from the 1960s, when it entered its golden age, its prime lasted about 30 years. After the 1990s rock still had influence, but it was already looking tired.

Take hip-hop's popularity apart and you find things it shares with every genre that came up from below: a tight link to the social and cultural soil it grew in, music turned into a wider way of living, a steady turnover of artists, a pace that keeps up with technology, and a hold on the global market.

So what is special about hip-hop?

1. Hip-Hop, a Lens on Black American Life Today

Hip-hop started on the streets of New York in the 1970s, a dangerous place where unemployment and crime both stayed high. In 1979 alone there were more than a million crimes, large and small. (For comparison, the figure for 2013 was 435,000.) The line in "The Message," one of hip-hop's early landmarks — "It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under" — is a picture of life there.

Rappers usually come out of brutal circumstances, and plenty of them were raised by a mother alone, with the father gone. They watched people killed in the street, and many sold drugs there themselves while still young. Hip-hop was on one hand a shelter from all that, and on the other a way to describe their own lives — which made the lyrics as dangerous as the street.

And when people from the bottom got rich through music, they picked the most direct way to show it. Like a compressed spring finally let go, the deeper the grudge their poverty had stored up, the more extravagant the display once the money came.

Todd Boyd, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote in The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop: "If you want to better understand the Black experience today, listening to DMX's album It's Dark and Hell Is Hot will do more for you than listening to a Martin Luther King speech."

A claim like that was bound to draw argument, so he explained further in an interview with NPR: "Martin Luther King's speeches and demands had a specific historical context, and it's very necessary for us to understand that. But if we want to talk about the present and the future, hip-hop music is more relevant."

2. Taking the Banner of Protest From Rock

Anything touching on racism has always set off waves in America, and that voice was already in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, before hip-hop existed. Once hip-hop arrived, it took the banner of the subject from folk and rock.

From "Fight the Power," which Public Enemy wrote in the 1980s for Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, to people now chanting the lyrics of Kendrick Lamar's "Alright" on their own at Black Lives Matter confrontations, many hip-hop records have come to stand for the sound of protest.

Kendrick Lamar, now 30, comes from Compton, the city that produced gangsta rap; his father belonged to a street gang. Watching Dr. Dre and 2Pac's "California Love" at the age of eight was the first thing that set him on his way in music. His work still goes into the dangers of the street, but next to the plain menace of early gangsta rap, what Kendrick Lamar does more of is lay out the problem itself, as a way of asking people to pay attention. That has given him one identity more than his predecessors — hip hop activist.

The Wikipedia category for hip-hop artists who take an active part in politics, in fact, holds more than 50 names. The number isn't large, but it runs the length of hip-hop's history, from 2Pac to Nas, and from Kendrick Lamar to Chance the Rapper, the 2017 Grammy Best New Artist.

What separates hip-hop from other genres is how much argument it causes. Sex and violence are used without cover, and the worship of things is impossible to hide.

That double nature has produced a contradictory and interesting result in a consumerist America. On one hand, hip-hop plays to the trend — some analysts argue that it is feeding consumerism. On the other, hip-hop's habit of thinking about society and criticizing it also makes it endlessly self-questioning and mocking, with the point aimed at social phenomena and at its own evolution alike.

In that sense hip-hop is not purely angry. It is self-mockery, self-justification, showing off and protest, mixed together.

Rock, by contrast, leaned on a pure anger that has been draining out of modern society. Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, said: "The counterculture of the '70s has become a mainstream culture today. Thirty years ago, Rolling Stone was born into a society where everyone was rebelling against something. Today, kids are already so free — what is there left for them to rebel against? Rock has become programming on every commercial TV channel. Rolling Stone may regret losing its original role as an outside observer, but looked at another way, more and more people have started to hear what we argued for at the beginning…"

Rock was a settlement of sex and drugs too, but the Baby Boomers were far more romantic than hip-hop's practitioners — the biggest difference being that they sincerely believed they could change the world. Beyond "resistance," they took an incurably optimistic view of new technology, a new world and the new drift toward globalization.

In the 1980s, a rising neoconservatism pushed down rock's rebellious spirit. The Baby Boomers moved into the middle class and, like their own parents, started wanting stability and security, and rock lost the people who mattered most to it.

By the 1990s rock, slowly absorbed by commercial interests, had closed out its golden age, and one aftereffect was a shortage of young, energetic creators. Say "rock artist" now and the names that come first are still likely to be from before the 1990s.

3. Tailor-Made for Consumerism

From the day it was born, rap fit together with business without a seam. As the musical part of hip-hop it naturally carries something rebellious and showy, but that didn't shut commercial culture out. For consumerism, which had soaked into global culture by the 1990s, the fit not only supported the growth of a genre but worked both ways, letting fans anywhere understand what fans elsewhere were saying without any obstacle.

Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop, said this about Roc-A-Fella Records, the label Jay-Z set up: "This is sending a message: hip-hop can be anything to its fans. It's not just music, not just entertainment — it can be the clothes they wear, the language they speak, the books they read, even the money they spend."

The combination is called the "hip-hop lifestyle." You can see it in the hip-hop looks and streetwear on every block, and even within the entertainment business alone you can find hip-hop crossing over: artists who made their names in music have become the subject of film and television, and shows tied to hip-hop, such as Empire and Atlanta, have turned up on screen.

Talk about who best represents hip-hop folded into daily life and you cannot get around Kanye West. Ten years ago the words attached to hip-hop and Kanye West might have been formidable producer, singer who made the switch successfully, and leading figure of Chicago rap. Now the first reaction is more likely to be Yeezy sneakers, controversy and lifestyle. He and his wife, Kim Kardashian, spare nothing in putting their lives on show; her street shots in Yeezy look about as effective as a proper runway presentation. In Kanye West, the hip-hop people see is a brand.

Thanks to social networks and to hip-hop's link with lifestyle, hip-hop music itself has found different ways to promote itself. Kanye West is the example again. In 2010 he announced on Twitter that GOOD Music, the label he founded, would give away music every Friday for a stretch of time. The campaign, meant to push his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, not only had fans waiting for new music at a set hour each week, it also let the label give plenty of newcomers exposure, since the free tracks usually featured artists it had signed. By the time he was promoting The Life of Pablo in 2016, on top of sharing all sorts of trivia on Twitter to raise attention, he had another trick — playing an early version of the album at the Yeezy Season 3 show.

On Forbes's list of the highest-paid entertainers, the hip-hop artist Diddy came first once again. His income came from hip-hop tours and also from his partnership with the vodka brand Cîroc.

"I'm not just a celebrity endorser, I'm a brand builder, a luxury brand builder." Perhaps nothing describes hip-hop's consumerist streak better than that line of his.

4. Hip-Hop's Fresh Blood

Even measured 30 years after each one started, hip-hop in 2010 was in far better shape than rock in 1990. On the 2010 year-end album sales chart, Eminem's Recovery came first, and a green Drake placed eighth with Thank Me Later.

Hip-hop has its own way of making new blood: newcomers can sharpen their technique on mixtapes, and labels can promote them by putting a veteran alongside a rookie. Lil Uzi Vert, up for Best New Artist at this year's Grammys, first reached No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart on a track with Migos.

The pattern Drake showed — a rapper recognized the moment he appears — has held up to the present: Chance the Rapper took Best New Artist at the 2017 Grammys. This singer out of Chicago was strongly shaped by gospel, so there is always a good deal of Christian theology in his work. Given that his father once worked on Obama's campaign team, his own interest in social and public questions is perhaps no surprise.

Hip-hop and R&B newcomers also took most of this year's Grammy Best New Artist nominations. Go by Billboard's 2017 charts and hip-hop's young strength is fuller as well: the average age behind the year's 20 best rap albums was 29.6, while the average behind the year's 25 best rock albums was about 32.

Being young means having the energy to put work out often. Streaming has built a way of consuming music in which a huge volume of releases is within reach. People will still look forward to work from rock masters of 60 or even 70, but while those masters take their time over something fine, rappers may well have filled up the playlist already — Future, 33 in 2017, released two albums within a week and sent each of them to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

Eminem opened hip-hop's door to white audiences. In July 2000 he became the first white artist on the cover of The Source, hip-hop's "bible," and over the next decade he became America's best-selling artist. He wrote the struggle of his own life and the decay of Detroit into his songs, and with machine-gun speed and dizzying rhyme schemes he won a respected place in a field run by Black artists.

Given where America stands now, the return of extremism means the fight against racism will only get louder. Eminem's four-and-a-half-minute freestyle at the BET Awards was a fair sample of hip-hop's protest voice. As the rapper Joyner Lucas sang in "I'm Not Racist": Eminem standing against Trump was the coolest moment, because even though he's white, he let us know he is on our side.

After HBO's The Defiant Ones aired, sales of albums by Eminem and Dr. Dre rose, and the season-one soundtrack of Empire reached No. 1 on the Billboard album chart in its first week out, the first television soundtrack since 2010 to top the chart in its opening week.

Rock, meanwhile, once bound tightly to Black people, has grown whiter and whiter, and its audience has narrowed as a result. Margo Jefferson wrote a passage like this in Ripping Off Black Music, in Harper's: The night Jimi died, I dreamed that this was the newest step in washing Black people out of rock, so that history could record rock as a white invention. I dreamed that a future generation would be taught this way: rock may have Black origins, but white people made it flourish.

That is no daydream. In 2011, a listener poll at a New York rock station found that of the 1,043 most popular songs, only 22 (about 2%) were written by Black artists, and 16 of those came from the long-dead Jimi Hendrix — the same Jimi from Margo Jefferson's dream.

All of it, of course, comes from free expression. There are many reasons hip-hop cannot grow inside China's mainstream culture, and that is certainly one of them.

Cover image: Wiki Commons