Whois & Analysis for xxlmag.com

XXL is an American hip hop magazine, published by Townsquare Media, founded in 1997.

History.

In August 1997, Harris Publications released the first issue of XXL.

It featured rappers Jay-Z and Master P on a double cover.

In December 2006, XXL took over the struggling hip hop producer and DJ magazine Scratch (another publication owned by Harris Publications), re-branding it as XXL Presents Scratch Magazine.

However Scratch shut down less than a year later in September 2007.

Hip hop music, also called hip-hop or rap music, is a music genre developed in the United States by inner-city African Americans in the 1970s which consists of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted.

It developed as part of hip hop culture, a subculture defined by four key stylistic elements: MCing/rapping, DJing/scratching with turntables, break dancing, and graffiti writing.

Other elements include sampling beats or bass lines from records (or synthesized beats and sounds), and rhythmic beatboxing.

Rapping (or emceeing, MCing, or rhyming) is a musical form of vocal delivery that incorporates "rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular," (slang) which is performed or chanted in a variety of ways, usually over a backbeat or musical accompaniment.

The components of rapping include "content", "flow" (rhythm,rhyme and cadence), and "delivery".

Rap differs from spoken-word poetry in that rap is usually performed in time to a beat (external meter).

Rapping is often associated with and a primary ingredient of hip-hop music (though there is hip hop without rapping, such as instrumental songs), but the origins of the phenomenon predate hip-hop culture by centuries.

Rapping is also used in Kwaito music, a genre that originated in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is composed of hip-hop elements.

Another form of rap that predates hip hop was boxer Muhammad Ali's rhythmic poetry used to taunt his opponents in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Oxford Companion to Music defines music criticism as 'the intellectual activity of formulating judgements on the value and degree of excellence of individual works of music, or whole groups or genres'.

In this sense, it is a branch of musical aesthetics.

With the concurrent expansion of interest in music and information media over the past century, the term has come to acquire the conventional meaning of journalistic reporting on musical performances.

A music video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes.

Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings.

There are also cases where songs are used in tie in marketing campaigns that allow them to become more than just a song.

Tie ins and merchandising could be used in toys or marketing campaigns for food and other products.

Although the origins of music videos date back to musical short films that first appeared in the 1920s, they came into prominence in the 1980s when MTV based their format around the medium.

Prior to the 1980s, these works were described by various terms including "illustrated song", "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional clip", "promotional video", "song video", "song clip" or "film clip".