Hip hop music in the Pacific Northwest

Northwest hip hop is hip hop or rap music that originates from the Pacific Northwest of North America, encompassing major cities such as Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia. Northwest hip hop music mixes elements from various genres of music to form a sound different from its southern neighbor, West Coast hip hop. For many years the scene existed mainly as an underground genre, but recently Northwest hip-hop has seen more and more mainstream acceptance, with artists such as Macklemore gaining nationwide attention.

During the late 1970s, high school kids from the Rainier Beach, Rainier Valley, and Central District areas in Seattle started to perfect early hip hop forms of dancing in the northwest defined as bopping. Many of the local underage clubs and high schools in south Seattle held formal contests called bop-offs where dancers would compete against one another.

In the early 1980s, soldiers positioned at Tacoma's military bases provided the foundation for a growing hip-hop fan base in the Northwest. This increased demand for hip-hop coincided with some of the first hip-hop dances in Seattle, which were held at public-housing recreation centers and featured the Emerald Street Boys and Anthony "Sir Mix-A-Lot" Ray. Simultaneously, "Nasty Nes" Rodriguez launched the Northwest's first all-rap radio program, Fresh Tracks, and soon Nasty Nes began airing self-produced tracks by Sir Mix-A-Lot, as well as the Emerald Street Boys, MC LeRap, PDQ, and Andy Hamlin. Fresh Tracks was a 30-minute show that played on Sunday nights on KKFX 1250 ("KFOX" and formerly KKDZ), and consisted of a mix of new songs and a mastermix created by Nasty Nes (Stranger article). These mixes were made up of songs by The World's Famous Supreme Team, Malcolm McLaren, Run-D.M.C. and others (Stranger article). Due to the show's popularity, the station's producer allowed Nes to expand it to a Monday through Friday, 9pm to midnight show called NightBeat that featured prominent R&B songs as well as intermixed rap songs (Stranger article). As Seattle's music scene evolved, so did the Seattle breakdance and graffiti crews, including B-Boy groups like Silver Chain Gang, Circuit Breakers, and Breaking Mechanism, and graffiti writers such as Spaide, DadOne, and Spraycan. At this time the Northwest was considered an empty canvas, which lagged behind other regions in creating a unique identity that was associated with hip hop. With this space there was room for an eclectic group of identities to form, however none were successful in formulating a Seattle identity.

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