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West Coast Hip hop


1978 in Los Angeles

Seattle - Portland - Cascadia - Sacramento -

West Coast hip hop is a hip hop music subgenre that encompasses any artists or music that originates in the West Coast region of the United States. The gangsta rap subgenre of West Coast hip hop began to dominate from a radio play and sales standpoint during the early 1990s with the birth of G-funk and the emergence of Suge Knight & Dr. Dre's Death Row Records.

Some believe that the five elements of hip-hop culture, which include B-boying, beatboxing, DJing, graffiti art, and MCing, existed on the East and West Coasts of the United States simultaneously during the mid-seventies. This theory runs in opposition to the more generally accepted belief that the fundamental elements of hip hop were born and cultivated exclusively on the East Coast, in New York City in particular, in the most early stages of the culture. Although it is agreed that hip hop was given its name in New York, some say a culture that closely mirrored the East Coast hip-hop culture had emerged in the West, existing from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area during the same period. The culture is widely believed to have been a mutual creation which evolved from interaction between people who identified with elements from their respective coasts.

A number of events laid the foundations for West Coast hip hop, long before the emergence of West Coast rappers such as DJ Flash & The Rappers Rapp Group, Eazy-E, Ice T, and Too Short. According to geniusrap.com, "a cataclysmic event helped give rise to it out West: the Watts Riots of 1965." In 1967, Bud Schulberg founded a creative space entitled Watts Writers Workshop, intended to help the people of the Watts neighborhood and provide a place for them to express themselves freely. Out of this background the Watts Prophets formed, its members having moved to the West Coast from southern states such as Texas and Louisiana.


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