THE COME UP

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, its the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artistsnearly all of them people of color from some of Americas most overlooked communitiespushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the countrys youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.