You're listening to Code Switch, I'm B.A. Parker, and I'm Gene Tembie.

So by now, we all kind of know the so-called origin story of hip-hop, right?

Because it's become something of an American myth.

So this is the way the legend typically goes, right?

It was five decades ago, five decades ago, this week, as a matter of fact,

on a hot-ass August day in 1973 in the South Bronx.

A neighborhood full of black Caribbean and Latino immigrants?

Yup, and everybody is turning up at this party,

and somebody starts rhyming over a breakbeat of a song that a DJ's playing.

Shout out to DJ Cooler.

And in the five decades since that eureka moment, or I guess,

that yo-oh moment, hip-hop has morphed and expanded.

It's birthed all kinds of subjongers and regional variants

and reshaped our language and fashion and politics.

You got hyphae and jerkin and chopped and screwed and trapped and drilled.

I mean, is it reggae time on hip-hop?

Like, what about trap EDM?

I mean, hip-hop is many things.

It's the music, it's product, it's culture,

it's even kind of shorthand for blackness.

And as hip-hop evolves, the contradictions within it become more obvious, right?

So hip-hop is fight the power.

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