Is it just me, or does music make everything better?
Most of us have at least one musical genre that can pretty much lift our frame of mind from Monday to manageable in two seconds flat. We have it on our ipods, our ring tones, the CDs in our car – whatever it takes. Maybe we grew up with it. Maybe we adopted it as a way of breaking free from our roots. At any rate, we love it, we can’t get enough of it, and we need it whenever the mood strikes.
For you, if that genre is hip hop, have I got some NYC attractions for you.
Hip Hop tours, which you can find at h3tours.com, offers customized tours that include many or all of these sites, depending on how much time you have and what other NYC attractions you might want to include in your visit. These are all hip-hop though, all Harlem, all perfect for music tours to New York City.
Hip Hop On / Hip Hop Off – You gotta start with this. It’s a bus tour like you’ve never seen before. Your group’s motorized carriage in this case comes with its own DJ and an MC. The DJ mixes hip hop while the MC sings and raps his way through the informational stuff you’d normally get in narrative form. You’ll learn about the history of Harlem and visit truly hip hop sites, like the historic Apollo Theater, MTV’s TRL studio, Bad Boy Entertainment, and the Cotton Club – famous for swing. The bus also takes you to the Graffiti Hall of Fame, which is just what it sounds like – an amazing display from the best graffiti artists in New York City…and the world.
Historical Harlem Tour – I guess this tour is in case you want to do without the DJ. But who’d want that?! This one also takes you to famous Harlem sites, and nostalgia from the birth of hip hop is almost everywhere you look.
Music Studio Tour – How’d you like to visit some of the top hip hop recording studios in the City? And after you’ve seen the technique behind producing that classic hip hop beat, how’d you like to make some for yourself? With H3 Tours you can do just that, taking home a souvenir that puts all other souvenirs to shame: The CD proving you are a recorded artist.
DJ Scratch Lesson – Yep. The turntables, the records, and the actual technique – bestowed on you by professionals.
Studio Museum in Harlem – African-American art, the rich culture of Harlem, hip-hop and beyond. Plus, this museum lets students create their own masterpieces with all the techniques they’ve seen in the other exhibits.
Hip Hop Culture Center – Filled with artifacts from the hip hop culture, you’ll see it from its first steps into existence to its powerful emersion into popular culture as a whole.
Photo by Andyrob on Flickr.
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