Scientists Say Hip-Hop Has Biggest Impact on American Music

Scientists in the United Kingdom have declared American hip-hop music as having the biggest impact in the country's cultural history. Yahoo! UK and the Press Association report that research teams from Queen Mary, University of London, Imperial College and Last.fm, analyzed 30 second-long segments of roughly 17,000 songs that appeared on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1960 and 2010. The study found that three different musical revolutions occurred in the U.S.; one in 1964 when the Beatles and Led Zeppelin were at the head of the "British invasion" of American pop music, 1983 when "New Wave" music took over and in 1991 when hip-hop made it's big entrance onto the charts. The study says that hip-hop's impact in '91 was the far most reaching of the three.

"For the first time we can measure musical properties in recordings on a large scale," says Dr. Matthias Mauch, an author from the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary. "We can actually go beyond what music experts tell us, or what we know ourselves about them, by looking directly into the songs, measuring their make-up, and understanding how they have changed."

The study also said that, "The rise of rap and related genres appears...to be the single most important event that has shaped musical structure of American charts in the period we studied."

The scientists claimed that hip-hop had a much more profound impact than the "British Invasion" citing that the revolution in the '60s was following existing trends while hip-hop was more original.

Filed Under: Hip-Hop, United Kingdom

Categories: News