The two terms are nearly, but not completely, interchangeable. Rap music was once called a fad, but it's now celebrating a 20th anniversary of sorts. The first hip-hop hit, Rapper's Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang, came out in 1979. I don't put on my hip-hop. Hip-hop represents a realignment of America's cultural aesthetics.
Rap songs deliver the message, again and again, to keep it real.
Rap is the music of necessity, of finding poetry in the colloquial, beauty in anger, and lyricism even in violence. Hip-hop, much as the blues and jazz did in past eras, has compelled young people of all races to search for excitement, artistic fulfillment and even a sense of identity by exploring the black underclass. Invisibility has been a long-standing metaphor for the status of blacks in America. Hip-hop has given invisibility a voice. It's a Friday night, early December 1998, and you're backstage at Saturday Night Live.