What was the first hip-hop album to win ‘Album of the Year’ at the Grammys?
1973. New York‘s The Bronx. A city stirs and a party rages as movement, repetition and expression all culminate together, verging on the brink of what would eventually become a sonic revolution. And it all started at the hands of DJ Kool Herc.
Here was a DJ who had a unique way of creating a specific style which centred on repetition. Forget intros, forget bridges and outros, Herc reached into a song and grabbed what he described as the “yolk” of a record. This was usually a break of some kind, a drum fill or a particular bassline. Regardless of how it manifested, he would queue the section up on both of his turntables and continue repeating it.
The section of the song usually only lasted a few seconds, which meant he was constantly rewinding it on one turntable while playing it on the other before swapping turntables and continuing to repeat that pattern. In those looped breaks, people found a special rhythm that helped them move and groove and helped them express themselves in ways that other genres didn’t accommodate, thereby manifesting itself in a certain form of dancing which we now know as breakdancing.
The music of hip-hop started in this way and was largely instrumental. The original MCs came on to the scene shortly after, but their style involved more speaking to the crowd as opposed to putting different rhymes together. People like Coke La Roc would stand with Herc by the DJ decks and point out what clothes people were wearing, how well they were dancing, or generally talk about what they were bringing into that specific moment. Later, MCs got more creative with their words and started making them rhyme and fall in line with the rhythm of the music.
Hip-hop was very much something that should have been experienced rather than listened to in isolation and analysed. It was a release for those in more impoverished areas in New York, infused with soul and community, away from the glistening disco scene and expensive clubs in Manhattan. It was an isolated event, and it wasn’t until the Sugarhill Gang released ‘Rapper’s Delight’ in 1979 that it became apparent that it was a genre which could sell outside of ‘The Big Apple’.
When did hip-hop become popular?
When ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was released, it climbed to the top 40 of the charts off the back of people’s intrigue surrounding what they were hearing. As is with every new prospect, many chalked the sound off as rubbish; they had no time for the style of rapping and passed hip-hop off as a fad that would be forgotten as quickly as it was adopted. Well, they said the same about rock ‘n’ roll, and look where that ended up.
Hip-hop was a self-prophesying genre that was constantly discovering new aspects of itself. What was originally party music then found a way to become relatable, conscious, and interrogative. The genre continues to find new ways to present itself as offshoots of hip-hop, such as mumble rap, drill and cloud rap, all moseying their way to the right audiences. The genre has always grown in popularity because it has always looks for different subgenres to expand within.
The soundscape saw a plethora of important moments and artists who helped it become one of the most popular genres in the world, but there was no crossing a specific milestone that granted it its crown. With these persistent updates, it was only a matter of time until the genre achieved both commercial and critical success. As many know, one of the biggest prizes in music is the Grammy for album of the year, and as the genre continued with success, it found its way to being important enough to be nominated, but what was the first hip-hop album to win it?
So, which hip-hop album won the first Grammy’s ‘Album of the Year’?
One of the things that people love so much about rap music is the way that it can say volumes marked by a time stamp. This album truly took advantage of the genre’s ability to be a novel communicated within an hour, as it explored feelings of love, isolation, vulnerability, and motherhood. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was, and continues to be, a listening experience like no other, as people still play this record and find themselves moved by the complex nature of every single track.
Released in 1998, Hill took all of the emotions from the multifaceted feeling of love and laid them into an album. This meant talking about her child, about past loves, modern and future love, lust, a lack thereof that special feeling, and all things in between in a bid to create an album which felt like a shoulder to cry on and a hype man all rolled into one. The Grammys seemed to agree with this sentiment, as they awarded the LP album of the year, along with another four awards.
There are plenty of albums in the world of hip-hop that highlight why people are so drawn to this album, but one of the most celebrated is Lauryn Hill’s perfect solo offering.
