Hip hop 50th anniversary: Grandmaster Flash to Stormzy - a history of rap and hip hop

Tupac Shakur. Dr Dre. Missy Elliott. Eminem. Run D.M.C.

Lil Kim. Outkast. Jay-Z. LL Cool J. Nas.

What do these musical legends all have in common? They're famous hip-hop artists, and the genre they helped build into a worldwide phenomenon turns 50 this year.

Hip-hop is a style of music created by the black community in cities across the United States from the early 70's. It has many styles, and has evolved a lot over the years, but usually involves rapping or talking rhythmically over a beat or some pre-recorded music.

Most hip-hop artists you know and love today couldn't have achieved incredible success without the work of people you may never have heard of, such as DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa.

We've taken a look at some key moments in hip-hop's early history.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s one of New York's poorest areas, called the Bronx, had a lot of problems. There was a lot of fighting between different gangs.

Hip-hop became the voice of the streets, where the local community used it as an outlet to voice their opinions and struggles during a very hostile time in their neighbourhoods.

They found an escape in music and dancing at block parties, thrown in apartment buildings in the area.

One of these parties stands out among the rest - Cindy Campbell's 'Back To School Jam' thrown in a recreation room in building 1520 on Sedgwick Avenue, on 11 August 1973.

This was when disco music was at the height of its popularity, but Cindy's brother DJ Kool Herc, who was DJ'ing the event, wanted to play the music he and his predominantly black peers grew up on - funk and soul.

At the time, music was listened to by playing a big disk called a vinyl record on something called a table, which spins the disk.

Herc would play the breakdowns of the records. A musical breakdown is when one or a couple of instruments get solos - usually the drums or percussion - the vocals and other instruments stop.

Every song Herc played, had a break in it. Then he took it one step further - instead of using one turntable he'd use two, and would extend the breaks - the percussion parts of the music - between the two disks he span.

He called this the merry-go-round, and was, according to many people, the birth of what we know today as hip-hop.

A fellow DJ from the east side of the Bronx called Afrika Bambaataa was an ex gang-leader who was fed up with the violence in his community.

He formed the Zulu movement, which would organise events where gang members from the Bronx could compete in breakdance competitions and listen to music.

It started off as music-oriented youth organisation in a tough neighbour of New York - the Bronx but was so popular that it became a world movement.

As the popularity of this type of DJ'ing grew, more people started experimenting with it.

A DJ called Grandmaster Flash who loved electronics and science started using his hands to manipulate the vinyls on his turntables, to make them stop and start spinning.

This became known as scratching - because the needle that travels round grooves in the records (to make the sounds) 'scratches' the vinyl when the DJ pulls the record back and forth.

While this new way of playing music is where hip-hop was born, these days when you think of a song falling under that genre, it's likely you'd think of rap.

People had been singing and talking over music for years before Herc's party in 1973, but it wasn't until that type of DJ'ing emerged and rhythmic rhyming was combined with it, that we would get the early version of what we now know as hip-hop.

When Grandmaster Flash would DJ in parks, he would offer the mic up to anyone who wanted it.

Five of these people were regulars and became very popular, and so a crew was born - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

Parties turned into concerts, and eventually the Furious Five became one of the first hip hop supergroups.

Hip hop was still an underground art form. No hip hop records had been made... yet.

In 1979, a musician and record label owner called Sylvia Robinson went to a party with her niece in Harlem.

It was here that she heard her first rapping DJ, and she decided she wanted to put the style on a record.

She found three people in New Jersey:

Together, they became the Sugarhill Gang, and their first record, Rapper's Delight, released in 1980 became the first ever hip-hop song to enter the American (and British) charts.

The style was very much like a block party or a park jam, as the gang were passing the mic between each other - and the popularity of the track just exploded.

Because it was the first hip hop song to be recorded, and got the style of music heard across the world, many people thought the Sugarhill Gang were the pioneers of rap.

Many members of the established hip hop community weren't happy about it. They argued the Sugarhill Gang weren't rappers or MCs and they didn't come from the birthplace of hip hop - the Bronx in New York - rather from New Jersey 90 miles away.

Back in the Bronx, things were going from bad to worse.

Poverty was at an all time high, many people were unemployed, buildings abandoned, and the people were angry - largely because no one else seemed to know, or care about the conditions in which they had to live.

So Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five decided to tell the world what was going on in their area.

They wrote a song - The Message, and for the first time hip hop was used in a political way.

Hip-hop was fast becoming part of the mainstream all over the world, and so it was only a matter of time before a hip-hop song would reach the top of the charts.

Vanilla Ice's Ice, Ice, Baby skyrocketed to number 1 on the US Billboard after its release in 1990, but there were many who weren't happy about it.

Many critically-acclaimed black rappers were struggling to get exposure for their music - music that originated in the black community.

But here a white person took the musical style of hip hop, made a song and got to number one.

In response, Vanilla Ice told the New York Times in 1991: "My being white had something to do with it, but not as much as they say it does."

The 1990s are often called hip-hop's golden era - with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Nas, Missy Elliott and Jay-Z regularly at the top of the charts.

In the UK, Grime was born from hip-hop - British electronic rap that started in the black communities in East London in the early 2000s.

A style of music that originated in one of the poorest neighbours in New York, hip-hop is now one of the most forms of music in the world - with big artists like Drake, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Stormzy and Kendrick Lamar rising to global fame in the last decade.

Now 50 years on from its birth hip-hop is a genre that continues its evolution.

Who is your favourite hip-hop artist or group? Let us know in the comments below.