Song Form and the Mainstreaming of Hip-Hop Music

Abstract

Song form in North American hip-hop music has evolved along the genre’s journey from its origins as a live musical practice, through its commercial ascent in the 1980s and 1990s, to its dominance of mainstream popular music in the 21^st century. This paper explores the nature and evolution of song form in hip-hop music and uses them as a musical lens to view the gradual and ongoing mainstreaming of this genre.

With the help of a corpus of 160 hip-hop songs released since 1979, I describe and unpack section types common to hip-hop music­—verses, hooks, and instrumentals—illustrating how these sections combine in different formal paradigms, such as strophic and verse-hook. I evaluate the extent to which formal structures in hip-hop music can be understood as products of the genre’s live performance culture; one with roots in African American oral vernacular traditions such as toasting. Finally, I discuss how form in hip-hop music has increasingly foregrounded the hook (chorus): the emergence of the verse-hook song form, an increase in sung hooks (often by singers outside the hip-hop genre), the earlier arrival of hook sections in songs, and the greater share of a song’s duration occupied by hooks. Viewing hip-hop music’s evolution through this increasing importance of the hook provides a clear representation of the genre’s roots outside of, and assimilation into, mainstream popular music; one of many Black musical genres to have traversed this path (George, 1988).