50 years of Hip Hop- How Come?

Fair enough. As I represent the Motown Motor City ... Detroit Tiger style, custom fit 59fifty. Never leave home without ............

Tom Selleck 

@coltrane1

I do not use whether or not something was a hit as criteria for judging the quality of music or it’s lack thereof. Quality is not a popularity contest. The guy who was voted president at my high school in my senior year had the IQ of a walnut.

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Why does this music’s “longevity” “surprise” you?

@simao: “Ready for some blasphemy? I prefer "Mercy Me" over "What's Going On" -- and Robert Palmer's cover of it over the original.”

Yeah, you’re right. At least you’re self-aware.  
Preferring Robert Palmer’s cover of “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” to Marvin Gaye’s original is indeed blasphemy.

@perkri 
”Old white guys discussing rap and hip hop.

Hilarious.

You do all realize, it was born out of jazz?

It is the urban music of our time and is a reflection of the disenfranchised of large groups of people.“

Ay yi yi, where to begin with this.  Unintentionally comical.  

1) A patently ridiculous introduction: a bigoted assumption that everyone writing here is “an old white guy,” with the clear presumption that, even if this bigoted assumption of a large group of people were true, such people having an opinion on the subject is inherently “hilarious.”    

2) A statement that is simultaneously laden with condescending didacticism while being highly questionable: “you do all realize, (hip hop) was born out of jazz?”

3) If #2 wasn’t delicious enough, the already-potent self-importance starts to ooze out of the pixels when this dandy is typed:
“It is the urban music of our time and is a reflection of the disenfranchised of large groups of people.”

Wow.  
One of those pernicious, gross, bourgeois-white-folks-terms for “black folk stuff,” “urban music,” used while (in unintentionally-hilarious fashion) attempting to virtue-signal “awareness” of racial injustice.  
It’s almost too beautiful.  
How grateful we should all be that you would instruct us all as to the “disenfranchised people,” with their “urban music.”  

You are comfortably unburdened with explaining how hip-hop was “born out of jazz.” This is likely because, 
a) it is far easier to look good and smart with such a casually-issued oversimplification/virtue-signal than it is to actually make a cogent argument, and, 
b) it is wildly ambitious if not impossible for one to persuasively argue that hip-hop was “born out of jazz.

Jazz is jazz. Classical is classical. Pop is pop. “Pop” is just short for “popular.”
Hip-hop is pop.  
Popular music.
Pre-determined samples, beats, overdubbed instrumental tracks, with recorded vocals performing pre-composed verses and pre-composed choruses.  Perhaps a pre-composed bridge or some facsimile thereof.
A 3-4 minute pop song. 

How this is “born out of jazz” is beyond me.