In honor of Hip-Hop 50, the legacy of the culture can be experienced first hand with The Hip Hop Museum Tour. On Oct. 21, the six-city tour will make its way to Atlanta where visitors will be able to witness hip-hop artifacts from1973-1990.
The tour will also provide attendees with a glimpse of The Hip-Hop Museum which is scheduled to open in the Bronx, New York in 2025.
The tour kicked-off in New York and will travel to Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte, Los Angeles, and Miami. Each stop will celebrate the contributions each city has made to hip-hop.
ADW recently spoke with hip-hop historians and curators, Pete Nice and Paradise Gray, who shed light on the exhibit.
With 2023 being the 50th year of hip-hop, how does it feel to educate the next generation on this culture?
Paradise: It means a lot to me, and just thinking about my own contributions. It keeps me humble and mindful of the great people that came before me whose names are not normally mentioned.
Pete Nice: Paradise and I have had the great opportunity to be curators. We’ve done pop-up exhibitions over the past couple of years. And with the collaboration with Mass Appeal, and the sponsorship of CÎROC Ultra-Premium Vodka, we’ve been able to take our pop-up exhibition and present it in a new form. So it feels like it’s 1989 again.
The tour kicked-off in New York City, but you all will be in Atlanta this week. How does Atlanta’s impact on hip-hop play a role?
Pete Nice: Paradise and I are old enough to remember when Atlanta was not the epicenter of hip-hop. But Atlanta was always like a huge tour stop. One of the things that we’re incorporating into this exhibit, as it travels, is an exhibit devoted to the city that we’re in. One thing that really has its roots in Atlanta is the Fresh Fest. The founder, Cedric Walker, is from Atlanta. And Jermaine Dupri was once a dancer for Whodini. And his father Michael Mauldin was a producer of the Fresh Fest. Atlanta just took those seeds that were planted early. By the 1990s, OutKast came and the city has progressed ever since.
Initially, some thought that hip-hop would fade away. Now that the culture has made it to 50, how does it make it to another 50 years?
Paradise: As far as I’m concerned, hip-hop ain’t going nowhere because we’re not going nowhere. Hip-hop is still rocking because we say so. You know what I’m saying? We set the trends. We set the fashion. We set the dance. We are the barometer. You want to know what’s hot, check for us in our community. The Black community created the culture of hip-hop, which is more than just rap music. There’s an imbalance nowadays that everybody’s just focused on rap music, and not the dance element, not the art element, not to DJ culture. All of these things came together with knowledge, wisdom and understanding to create the original five elements of hip-hop. And as long as we remember that, rap music and hip-hop comes from our community, it comes from us.
About Post Author
