Introduction
Hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambataa is often credited with coining the name “hip-hop”. When asked during a lecture at Cornell University how the youth movement that he helped to create was named, he referred to the words “hip” and “hop” as they were chanted by rappers in their rhymes saying, “I liked that sound … I said, ‘This is hip and when you feel the music you gotta hop to it, so that’s when we called it ‘hip-hop.’”(Chang, 2014)
However, the true nature of the hip-hop movement is not that simply defined. Hip-hop names a musical and cultural phenomenon that might have begun as a local youth arts movement but has now grown into a “generation-defining global movement” (Chang, 2005) which has not only claimed to have saved lives and changed the way minorities all over the world express their frustrations (Chang, 2007) but is also a major commercial industry. (Tate, 64)
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However, the focus of this wider analysis is then narrowed to specifically examine the impact of the movement on South African youth culture. This progression naturally follows the historic timeline, from the birth of hip hop in the 1960s and through to its progression onto an international stage during the 1990s to the early 2000s, which parallels its influence in South Africa before and after the demise of the apartheid government in