HM’s Food & Wine Magazine

Putting on baggy pants, talking in the ascent one can hardly understand and behaving like a hooligan is not the hip hop culture. Many do not know what hip hop is actually. Some just define it as one of the musical genre in which the ’singer sings without breathing and like a conversation’. The person who gives this statement is the die hard fan of the hip hop music synonymously used as rap music. But what this fan said is not the true hip hop.

Hip hop is not just the music. It is a culture that developed in the late 80s of twentieth century among the African American youngsters in United States. Hip hop is the urban youth culture associated with music dance and arts. Nirnaya Da Nsk a popular hip hop artist of Nepal who came into limelight with his ‘Hamro Gaule Jiwan’ totally agrees to it. He adds, “Hip hop is the medium of expressing oneself. Rap music is a narration of the story like Nepali folk songs do.” Hip hop culture has four basic elements, Break dance, Rap Music, Graffiti Painting and Dj-ing. Through these medium one can express oneself and tell others a story about anything, says Nirnaya.

“There are many who are following it blindly and without understanding what hip hop is”, says Nirnaya. Nirnaya got exposure to the rap music and the newly evolving culture during his school days while he was in the US. The hip hop culture in the inner city streets of big cities like New York was experiencing the tremendous growth of this African American culture. Hip hop became the means of gang fights and hooliganism during 1980s in its initial phase. The culture was taken as the means of conflict and such conflict reached to the extent of gun firing and killing each other. Conflict grew from the competition between two groups by singing and dancing and in extreme form became the war of rappers. The conscious practitioners of hip hop envisaged the need of a movement to correct the image of hip hop culture.

In Nepal, at the present context needs similar movement, says Nirnaya. Here people are blindly following hip hop and using it in wrong way. “Using foul language is not hip hop. Here rap is used in wrong ways without understanding” adds Nirnaya. He further asks the aspiring rappers to tell positive stories not unnecessary things through rap.

Rap and hip hop culture entered Nepal during early 1990s.

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