Although rap currently stands at the center of American music, for much of the genre's history, its relationship to the charts was...fraught. Radio was notoriously reluctant to play the brash new style, and major labels took over a decade to embrace its commercial potential. So how did hip hop make it? How did it grow from a regional fluke into a global phenomenon?
To learn more, we spoke to Amy Coddington, the author of "How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race." Her work recovers rap's tortuous path through the financialized complexity of the '80s music industry—navigating around established Black radio stations that refused to play it, as a key part of multi-racial dance music coalitions, and through eye-catching MTV videos that reimagined the white-coded mainstream. The results push past the "authentic-or-not" dichotomy that defines hip hop history, revealing how rap was shaped—and driven forward—as much by pop trifles as hardcore truth tellers. After all...you STILL can't touch this.
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