West Coast hip-hop

West Coast hip-hop is a regional genre of hip-hop music that encompasses any artists or music that originated in the West Coast of the United States. West Coast hip-hop began to dominate from a radio play and sales standpoint during the early to-mid 1990s with the birth of G-funk and the emergence of record labels such as Suge Knight and Dr. Dre's Death Row Records, Ice Cube's Lench Mob Records, the continued success of Eazy-E's Ruthless Records, Dr. Dre's Aftermath Entertainment, and many others. Though the term "West Coast hip hop" may also be used to describe Northwest hip-hop and other movements from the Western U.S., it is primarily associated with the state of California, especially Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

History

African American communities of the Bay Area and southern California emerged as new bases of hip-hop culture in the 1980s. Hispanics in the Los Angeles area have played a significant role in West Coast hip-hop culture.

Early years

Several events laid the foundations for West Coast hip-hop, long before the emergence of West Coast rappers such as Ice-T, Mellow Man Ace, Too Short, Kid Frost and Eazy-E—or even before the emergence of rap itself. According to Syd Caesar, "a cataclysmic event helped give rise to it out West: the Watts riots of 1965." In 1967, Budd Schulberg founded a creative space in Los Angeles entitled Watts Writers Workshop, intended to help the people of the Watts neighborhood and provide a place for them to express themselves freely; one group to emerge from the workshop was the proto-rap group The Watts Prophets.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, political and social justice movements in the San Francisco Bay Area inspired the emergence and growth of hip-hop culture in the region.