Rap is a kind of music in the hip-hop culture. Hip-hop and rap differ in three main features; musical attributes, culture and community message. Rap is a mix of poetry or poetic lyric, beats and their rhyming. The subject of rap can vary from relationships to commercialism. Rappers like to make references to love, sex, violence, socio-political issues, crime, race and anything that depicts their street life.

Hip-hop is a lifestyle that includes rap, graffiti art, break dancing and DJing. An important technique in Hip-hop is beatboxing, a form of vocal percussion, which involves the art of producing drum beats and musical sounds with mouth, tongue and lips. Singers synthesize the lyrics to fast-paced music, that is often used as a background to dance routines. Hip-hop is about soulful singing. An influential form of hip-hop was Jamaican dub music. In 1967, a Jamaican immigrant, DJ Kool Herc introduced dub in New York.