Hip-Hop has Biggest Cultural Impact on USA

Love it or hate it, hip-hop is without a doubt one of America’s biggest music genres. UK researchers have confirmed its dominance and revealed that when it comes to cultural impact and influence, hip-hop reigns supreme.

Forget Madonna, Michael Jackson and The Beach Boys - it’s Run DMC, Dr Dre, Missy Elliot, The Black Eyed Peas and their fellow hip-hop greats that shaped the face of contemporary America.

Science meets music

Using a uniquely developed scientific approach the team embarked on a mission to uncover what genre of music has had the biggest impact on American society over the past five decades. After meticulous analysis they identified three key periods in which certain genres stole the hearts, souls and ears of stateside music lovers.

The winner was hip-hop! The study was a joint effort from students at Queen Mary, the University of London and Imperial College, as well as global radio station, Last.fm. The project saw researchers study samples drawn from over 17,000 songs released from 1960 to 2010. All tunes made it to the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and represented 86% of all entrants over the past half a decade.

A custom built algorithm was then used to categorise each song according to its individual musical properties. From aural styles, tone characteristics and chord patterns to instruments and editing equipment, no note was left unturned. Using the data researchers were then able to identify three key musical ‘revolutions’ that dominated the charts. So what where they?

In 1964 The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and other outrageous new UK groups pioneered what we now refer to as the "British Invasion." 1983 ushered in an era of “New wave and post-punk rock” while 1991 saw a surge in the popularity of “Hip-Hop” beats. Lead researcher, Dr. Mattias Mauch asserts that "Hip-Hop's big entrance into the charts in 1991 was said to be the most far reaching." Why? Mauch maintains that while groups such as The Beatles "merely followed existing American trends," hip-hop played an integral role in empowering the USA’s marginalised black youth community and still continues to do so today.

An accurate insight into US culture

As far as cultural relevance goes, the researchers contend that their study is backed by cold hard science, with Mauch saying that "those who wish to make claims about how and when popular music changed can no longer appeal to anecdote, connoisseurship and theory unadorned by data."

The study also represents the increasing role that digitised science is set to have in cultural analysis projects of the future. Armand Leroi, evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London and researcher on the project explains that with the help of digital technology, “culture can — and should — be studied scientifically.” The results of the study were published in the Royal Society Open Science journal and have already created quite the buzz in both the scientific and musical communities.

To read about more interesting discoveries in science, technology and nature read the following articles: First Picture of Thunder Snapped and Bat-Dinosaur Fossil Discovered in China.