Hip-hop as a musical form began among the youth of the South Bronx, New York, in the mid-1970s. Individuals such as Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash were some of the early pioneers of this art form. (Fernando 43) Through their club performances and music promotion, hip-hop steadily gained popularity throughout the rest of the 1970s. The first commercial success for hip-hop was the song "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang in 1979. (Potter 45) This helped bring hip-hop into the national spotlight. The 1980s saw the continued success of hip-hop with many artists such as Run DMC (who had the first rap album to go gold in 1984), LL Cool J, Fat Boys and West Coast rappers Ice-T and NWA which became popular. Today, in the late 1990s, rap music continues to be a prominent and important aspect of African-American culture. Hip-hop was a way for young people in inner-city black neighborhoods to express what they felt, saw, and experienced, and it became a form of entertainment. Hanging out with friends and rapping or listening to other people rap kept young black men out of trouble in the dangerous neighborhoods where they lived. The dominant culture didn't have a type of music that met the needs of these young people, so they created their own. Thus, hip-hop originally emerged as a way “for inner-city [black] youth to express their daily lives and struggles” (VOT, 125). Hip-hop is now seen as a subculture that includes large numbers of white, upper-middle class youth, who have grown to support and appreciate it. Many young people in America today are considered part of the hip-hop subculture because they share a common love for a type of music that combines catchy beats with up-tempo music and thoughtful lyrics to create songs with a distinct political stance. Hip-hop lyrics talk about the problems that rappers have seen, such as poverty, crime, violence, racism, poor living conditions, drugs, alcoholism, corruption and prostitution. These are serious issues that many within the hip-hop subculture believe are being ignored by mainstream America. Those within the subculture recognize and acknowledge that these problems exist. Those within this subculture consider "the other group" to be those people who do not understand hip-hop and the message its artists are trying to send. The dominant culture is the suppressive one, or the oppositional one, because it ignores these problems and perhaps even acts as a catalyst for some of them..