music genres

[Victor]

I am sure others have run into this before--but I have not checked the
ADS-L archives for specifics. I am always at a quandary whether to write
"hip-pop" or "hip-hop" (never mind the hyphenation questions or whether
to just give up and recategorize everything as "rap"). I bump into this
question every once in a while, usually when either reading something
that has inconsistent use or trying to compose (no pun intended) a
statement myself. I just peeked on Google and got 25+M ghits on
"hip-hop" and 197M ghits on "hip-pop". But that's misleading. The second
search appears to include everything that popped up on the first. Wiki
article is "Hip Hop" (no hyphen). But searching Wiki for "hip pop"
redirects to the same article. To make matters worse, there is no
difference in pronunciation at all, for most people. This leaves me...
confused. I have long assumed that the two terms are simply
interchangeable, but every once in a while doubt creeps in. Today is one
of those "onces".

There is also an assortment of associated issues--etymology, for one.
Was one initially in dominant use and the other just eggcorned itself
onto it? Or did they coexist from the beginning. Wiki suggests that the
genre--if not the term--originated in the 1970 NYC. Don't know how
accurate that is either. There is seems to be a relation to a style of
reggae that appears to have originated in the mid 1980s, when Jamaican
clubs switched from marijuana to cocaine (we used to call it "coke rap"
or "crap", for short--it really was quite intolerable to listen to for
an unaccustomed ear). But, ultimately, this is not a musicology
question. I am curious how the name evolved.

    VS-)

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