When searching for the earliest reference it would found that it was first referenced in the 1980s. But when searching in the historical newspapers for the phrase “hip hop” what turns up is all about medication for hip disease and pills for the pain. But I was able to find a cartoon from the Washington Post in 1922 which was before the time that the genre of music hip hop was created. In the cartoon, the phrase hip hop is used as gibberish to depict someone speaking Chinese as a person is trying to talk into this new telephone type device that can supposedly talk to China. The cartoon is called “The American Flyer” Railroad. It looks to be a very comic cartoon clip about the new railroad systems and the telephone lines that are being built.

I find it interesting that the phrase hip-hop was used as gibberish at this time because gibberish is kind of like scat. Scat, in my opinion, could be a kind of hip-hop because it was just making sounds to music rather than actual words so I think it was appropriate.