![]() In a borough where poverty and an eroded infrastructure meant very limited access to instruments and music education, young music makers created with what they could find. The spirit of invention was particularly vibrant against a backdrop of empty lots, boarded-up windows, and burned-out buildings. Turntables became laboratories for musical experimentation as old sounds were remixed in new ways. The venues for the emerging art of Hip Hop were public parks and community recreation centers, sheets of cardboard laid out on city sidewalks became dance floors, and brick walls were transformed into artists’ canvases. In music, Latin and Caribbean traditions met and mingled with the sounds of sixties and seventies Soul, Disco, and Funk. ![]() ![]() Construction on the Cross Bronx Expressway, which began in the postwar period and continued into the early 1970s, decimated several of the minority neighborhoods in its path city infrastructure was allowed to crumble in the wake of budget cuts, hitting the less privileged parts of the city most directly and strikes organized by disaffected blue-collar workers crippled the entire metropolitan area.Īmidst the higher crime and rising poverty rates that came with urban decay, young people in the South Bronx made use of limited resources to create cultural expressions that encompassed not only music, but also dance, visual art, and fashion. Simultaneous with the “white flight,” social and economic disruptions abounded. The Bronx, one of New York City’s five “boroughs,” became populated mainly by Blacks and Hispanics, including large immigrant populations from Caribbean nations including Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and others. As a largely white, middle-class population left urban areas for the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s-a phenomenon known as “white flight”-the demographics of communities such as the Bronx shifted rapidly. ![]() Hip Hop emerged directly out of the living conditions in America’s inner cities in the 1970s, particularly the South Bronx region of New York City. ![]()
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