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Originally Posted by louder
hip-hop and rap are essentially the same thing
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Gotta go ahead and disagree with you on that one bro.
To Rap is to perform an action; namely, to engage in a vocal & verbal form of communication that is essentially a style of singing. But it's really more of a specific type of lyrical delivery, containing elements of poetry and song derived from scat and be-bop, where words and sounds take on some of the role of percussion instruments. As opposed to most styles of singing, rap acts as more of a metronomic devise than a melodic one.
But rap is also a genre of music, or has been in the past. In the early '90s, for instance, when lyrics were so dominant as to make the musical elements of the genre kind of incidental, "Rap" was used to describe most music that contained rapping. But I think that the evolution of electronic music, specifically trip hop, DJ's began to cultivate a unique brand of music that now plays just as large a part in the greater genre as the vocals do. That really took off, and currently O don't believe "rap" is a suitable descriptive term for the genre. Hip-Hop seems to be the end result of 20-30 years of musical evolution. When DJ's and producers started to craft sonic identities based on their personal styles, they were reaching back to the early days of the genre, and imitating the beat-making techniques that early rappers used (tape decks & vinyl records, samples and other things that people who couldn't afford drum sets and didn't know how to play instruments used to keep time and punctuate their vocal delivery) so in a sense hip hop existed, then kinda stopped existing, then came back as a high quality makeover of itself.
Now the music and the vocals are two inseparable parts of the genre, which is why rap isn't a valid substitute term for hip-hop.
Instrumentals like those championed by J Dilla, FlyLo, Dibia$e, Dan the Automator, Dj Shadow, etc. are all examples of music that is part of the same musical movement as everything from Grandmaster Flash to Yeezy, but none of them are "rap" artists. They're certainly hip hop though. And the same would be true of an unaccompanied rapper free styling over nothing. It's all hip hop. Most hip hop contains at rap, but the two are not really the same thing.
It's just the colloquial semantics surrounding the trends in the culture that have made it this way. Not any hard & fast rule. Call it what you want.