The Influence of Hip Hop on Advertising & Popular Culture
Let's look at the ways Hip Hop has shaped and impacted popular culture.

Nowadays, hip-hop is one of, if not the most popular genre of music in the world. Having hip-hop stars all around the world like Mohammed Ramadan in Egypt, or Eminem in the USA, they all participate in the same genre of music.

With a genre so popular around the world, it of course comes with an amount of influence that can change trends, and the world with enough time and power.

In this article, I hope to highlight ways in which hip-hop has influenced popular culture, which is what we call “pop” culture. I hope to also point out specific artists who influenced pop culture with their music or their behavior, like Kanye, Soulja Boy, or Pop Smoke.

Clothing trends

One of the most popular and renown influence the hip-hop scene has exerted on popular culture is the clothing trends. This started at the start of hip-hop and stays strong even now. Just one word from a rapper makes thousands if not millions follow a specific trend.

For example, we can take the song “Dior” by Pop Smoke. In this song he raps the usual drill that is rapped in drill music but adds the words “Mike Amari, Mike Amari… Christian Dior, Dior” and just these words were enough for many people to start blindly buying Dior just so they can get closer to their favorite artist.

Another more important example could be Kanye West with his clothing brand Yeezy. Yeezy made a storm in the market making Adidas most of its current profits before they cut off the artist for reasons I will not mention as he said many things that should not be repeated.

Yeezy made an impact worldwide where people purchased clothes to get closer to an artist. However, these specific clothes shaped the clothes industry that we see today. With the empty leggings, or the shoes that Kanye made that were unorthodox and unusual but still made as much profit as the top shoes in the world.

Soulja Boy is also a good example of how hip hop can influence pop culture. Every time Soulja Boy is seen in public he always wears a type of “rich man” clothes or accessory, mostly Gucci.

General videos of rappers also involve a lot of times accessories or fast cars and rappers flexing their money. We can remember how Takashi 6ix9ine got a 1-million-dollar chain and kept flexing about it for as long as we remember, or the bars “Gold on my wrist” said by many rappers continuously.

These small references to riches and accessories influenced the pop culture to make it so focused on being rich and having money and getting as many women as possible in as little time as possible so you can look like the strongest man of the bunch. All this influence can be considered as part of clothing trends since accessories, shoes, leggings, shirts and hoodies are all parts of clothes.

Another type of influence that hip-hop had on pop culture is the cultural influence that came with rap. Which is the type that we will see next in the article.

Cultural influence

The next type of influence is the cultural influence that the gangster rap scene brough the USA and the upbringing of hip-hop did as well.
To take it into 2 sub-parts, I will divide this part by talking about the gangster rap scene first and then the upbringing of hip-hop.

With the rise of gangster rap, we could see a lot of gang activity worsening, being publicized and fantasized about by fans who haven’t participated in a gang activity in their life.

The music that came from NWA and 2Pac or Biggie and many other rappers made people want to look gangster and do gangster stuff. This influenced mostly African Americans living in the USA, the foreigners didn’t really listen to hip-hop at that moment like the US and they didn’t get as influenced by their culture as the US did. People started wearing blue and red to represent their gang where many weren’t about the life that they showed. This made being someone tough and gangster popular with people like drake or underground artists that never really participated in gang action rap about it like they were about that life just because it was popular culture for them.

Rap music also influenced people’s thoughts as music listeners became obsessed with having multiple women at once or cheating on people. For example, we can take future where they made a whole toxic masculinity movement on social media to preach misogynistic quotes in hopes of making it a popular culture and to spread it to the world.

Another example is the war that divided the two coasts of the USA when 2Pac and Biggie were having problems. Problems between 2 hip-hop artists split pop culture into 2 for a period of time before the 2 sadly died after they dropped disstracks on each other.

Now for the second sub-part, we have the upbringing of hip-hop. With Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, and the other founders came a lot of new terms one of them being “Graffiti”. I have explained the upbringings and the foundation of hip-hop with the many new terms it brought out in a previous article. However, I will only talk about graffiti here as it was the one that influenced pop culture in a way that it even spread to all the genres earning its own genre of art, apart from being tied to hip-hop.

Graffiti is now an art we teach about in classes; it is considered as street aet and as a form of self-expression that is done usually illegally. Graffiti used to be done by people in gangs and poor African Americans that had nothing to do other than graffiti so they can oppose the government.

Now it is done by everyone to express their emotion, you can even see graffiti of random things like a love letter or two names together. It has lost a bit of it’s meaning but if you want to express the oppression you are seeing coming from the government you can always rely on graffiti (as long as it’s legal of course).

Conclusion

To conclude this article, we can say that hip-hop influenced the pop culture scene with the clothes and by creating a whole new form of art. The examples we took are Pop Smoke with “Dior”, Kanye West with “Yeezy”, Soulja Boy, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, NWA, 2Pac and Biggie.

The other kind of influence was graffiti which became an art of its own serving as a message in revolutions and in places we call “hoods”.

Sources: My knowledge, nothing else really.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorVWW9ywG0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPTlvQ1Zet0

https://youtu.be/U4Md8ZGtUN8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41qC3w3UUkU