No, it isn’t
I’d say more like there is something very interesting going on here. Most people who are into hip-hop (in fact everyone) is already aware that all the stuff I listed is probably bullshit. People who consider themselves “hip-hop afers,” on the other hand, might be completely unaware that there’s actually an actual term for social dance music: hip hop.
This is not a new concept. Back at the beginning of the genre you can find people (and bands) who were calling themselves “mixtapes.” In this case “mixtape” is actually slang for a particular kind of mixtape that was popular at the time. They usually had several of them, but the most popular of them were the five tracks on their label’s cassette. These tapes were usually just called mixtapes by the label, and they used the shorthand notation “M-F-x-x,” which is the same way many people would spell “Hip-Hop” today.
These tapes were also a huge success. By the early 90s rap was on everyone’s radar as new stuff hit the world in increasing quantities. Hip-hop was so widely listened to during these years that a word got passed around that made the first hip hop, by some accounts, sound like dance music. This was not hip hop, though – it was hip hop dance music. That sounds like a stretch, but I’ll believe it when I see it. (If we’re talking about “dance music of the 90s” then we’ll have to go back to the 70s and 80s, where it was actually music that people danced to.)
Most people have heard of the New York Times story about the term “dance music” itself. If you’ve been around the blogosphere much lately, you may recall that a large number of our members have been reading this website since around 2005. This was when the term hip hop dance music had finally become a thing, and when it was pretty widely accepted in mainstream media as a synonym for all things hip hop.
The New York Times piece is very detailed of the “factional battle” over what constitutes hip hop dance music. As one of our members described it to me, it is “one of the most significant articles of its time regarding how hip hop was viewed by many people.” To recap this part here: In the mid to late 90s the phrase “dance music” was being used as
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