YouTube has announced that they will celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop this year by launching the FIFTY DEEP campaign.
This month marks 50 years since DJ Kool Herc performed at a party in the Bronx and showed off his DJing invention of scratching records to extend the instrumental breaks in the song. This revelation was the cornerstone for hip-hop as people could dance longer (evolving into breakdancing) and aspiring MCs could rap during song breaks. In honour of the musical milestone, YouTube has launched FIFTY DEEP, “a cultural campaign on YouTube that salutes how far [the genre] come.” Director of Black Music & Culture Tuma Basa wrote a blog post on the new campaign, saying that the mission “is for every generation to dig into the gems of YouTube’s archival treasury of Hip Hop.”They plan to fulfil their mission by collating a visual library of 2,000 videos that “have changed the game” for hip-hop music, having a custom Yoodle (YouTube’s version of the Google Doodle) to pay homage to the phenomenon of type beats, and creating a Google Arts & Culture Hip Hop Hub to collate “a wide range of cultural institutions’ collections and curated stories.”
