It's Bigger Than:Hip-Hop:The Songs That Shook America.

"This real hip-hop and it don't stop" - Hip-Hop, Dead Prez.

Like it or not (and I very much do), you can't argue that hip-hop hasn't changed the musical surface of the world. From its humble beginnings in 1970s Bronx block parties it has grown and grown until rappers and DJs have become household names, festival headliners, Glastonbury festival headliners, stadium fillers, film stars, millionaires, and even billionaires. 

Dr Dre, Jay-Z, and P-Diddy are never going to have to worry about paying their electricity bill again. But if you were looking to tell the story of hip-hop via the songs that shaped it how would you even begin to narrow it down? You've got to have innovators like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, the bands that revolutionised the scene, Public Enemy and NWA, in the late eighties would surely feature, and megastars like Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, Drake, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, and Migos would certainly warrant a place as well as more culturally leftfield proponents like The Wu-Tang Clan, De La Soul, and Danny Brown.

Hip-Hop:The Songs That Shook America (BBC4/iPlayer) narrowed the story down to just six tunes and not one of those artists I've mentioned above made the cut. Which, on the surface, seems insane but stay with the programme and you soon realise that the show's executive directors Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, Tarik "Black Thought" Trotter (both members of Philadelphia outfit The Roots), and Alex Gibney (a documentary heavyweight:- Freakonomics, Enron:The Smartest Guys In The Room, Citizen K) have chosen have been picked because they tell an important part of hip-hop's story and, in each case, proved to be a game changer in the genre.

As an impressive list of talking heads (Chuck D, Pharrell, LL Cool J, John Legend, Fab 5 Freddy, Nas, MC Lyte, Dame Dash, Roxanne Shante, Ludacris, Jermaine Dupri, Babyface, L.A. Reid, Monie Love Funkmaster Flex, Hank Shocklee, David "Mr DJ" Sheats, Al Sharpton, and Tarana Burke, founder of the Me Too movement) testify. The film makers haven't placed the songs in chronological order but, as I'm quite anal like that, I have done. Starting with Run-DMC's Rock Box, the third single of their debut, eponymous, album in 1984.

MTV had launched in 1981 and for the first three years you'd have struggled to find a black face on the channel. It was wall to wall hair metal from the likes of Van Halen, Def Leppard, Quiet Riot, and AC/DC or at least it was until Run-DMC releaed Rock Box. Walk This Way may be the tune we think of as the game changer, the moment hip-hop met rock, now but it was Rock Box that first fused those forms. Walk This Way was merely a happy result of Rock Box.

Hollis, Queens, where Run-DMC hailed from, was, at the time, a hotbed of crack dealing with unemployment at a record high. This was the background both Run and DMC grew up and went to school against. When Run was moved to a school in Harlem he heard Grandmaster Flash and decided hip-hop was the way out of Hollis for him and his friend DMC.

After their initial DJ dropped out, Jam Master Jay (described as a "very cool dude") was called in and Run-DMC became a band. Their first single It's Like That (b/w Sucker MCs) smashed it, the sequel Hard Times did too, and the album did pretty well. But Rock Box sold over two million copies. Billy Squier's The Big Beat (later sampled by everyone from Beck to Britney Spears, Dizzee Rascal to Jay-Z, and Kanye West to Little Mix) was the inspiration although it wasn't directly sampled on this occasion.

With the beat in place, once Run had painted "psychedelic echo chamber crap" all over Eddie Martinez's guitar work, him and DMC laid down their raps and left the studio for the day. Only to return to find that producers Russell Simmons (Run's brother) and Larry Smith had completely smothered the song with guitar. Way too much guitar for Run and DMC's liking, they wanted the beat and the rhymes to be the focus of the record.

Jam Master Jay loved it, by most accounts Jam Master Jay loved everything, so the band agreed to release the record in two versions. One with minimal guitar (for the DJs and the hip-hop heads) and one with maximal guitar (for more rock oriented fans). But things didn't go as planned. DJs loved the guitar heavy version and they all chose to play that one out.

While hip-hop videos were shown on Video Music Box on New York's own WNYC-TV network, MTV proved a tougher nut to crack. It was widely held that middle America did not want to see hip-hop or black artists in general. It took Michael Jackson's label, Epic, to threaten to pull their entire catalogue before that situation was remedied. MTV crumbled and played Beat It. After that videos started appearing from more mainstream acts like Lionel Richie, Prince, Kool and the Gang, The Pointer Sisters but it was Run-DMC's Rock Box that was the first hip-hop video to be shown on MTV.

There were plenty of white people in the video to Rock Box so as not to freak out the conservatives and that ploy worked. As the band themselves put it, it crossed them "the fuck over" and Run-DMC's success would go on to inspire Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, Rage Against The Machine, Linkin Park, and, er, Blink 182! When Jam Master Jay was murdered in 2002 a road in Hollis was named after him and, in 2009, Run-DMC became the second hip-hop act (after Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five) to be inducted, by Eminem, into the rock'n'roll hall of fame. Three kings from Queens had added rock to rap, brought rap music to the mainstream, and changed the game for ever.

Two years later further changes were afoot in hip-hop and in New York City. Marley Marl & MC Shan's 1986 record The Bridge gave the hip-hop world its first battle rap. A concept that would grow and grow with beefs between Drake and Meek Mill and between Jay-Z and Nas and spiral completely, fatally, out of control with Tupac and Biggie.

It all began with a quarrel, played out on wax, between the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx. Representing the Bronx were Boogie Down Productions with KRS-One their lead rapper and in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge, in the biggest housing project in the whole world, were Queensbridge's Marley Marl, MC Shan, and Roxanne Shante.

One of the first rap radio shows, Rap Attack, came out of Queens and had Mr Magic and Marley Marl at its helm. Marl, Shan, and Shante wrote a song for Queensbridge Day, a day of celebration and BBQ in the area, and they named it The Bridge. It sampled the "b-boy national anthem", a song described as hip-hop's heartbeat, Impeach the President by The Honey Drippers and it gave hip-hop a new sonic trajectory.

Boogie Down Productions, as a young outfit with KRS-One still homeless at the time, had visited Mr Magic in Queens and he'd told them their music was 'garbage'. For KRS-One, it was like a spear through his heart and his vengeance would go on to become legendary. Back in the Bronx, they quickly created a reply to The Bridge with South Bronx. A song that refuted, violently, claims that Queens had invented hip-hop.

Even though The Bridge had never made that claim. Salt was rubbed into Marley Marl's wounds when he realised that he'd left his tape reel of drum loops in the studio and Boogie Down Productions had availed themselves of it to cut a record dissing Marl. Using Marl's own loops, and one eighth of a second of a James Brown sample, to belittle the man.

Kool DJ Red Alert took pride in launching, and breaking, South Bronx and when MC Shan hit back with Kill That Noise, KRS-One hit back a lot fucking harder with The Bridge Is Over. A track that introduced cursing and personal insults (in which Mr Magic's mouth is used for "sucking" and Roxanne Shante is "only good for steady fucking") and utilised a reggae beat, reggae being big in Flatbush, Brooklyn at the time and synonymous with the threat of violence.

The Bridge Is Over, despite its sentiment, was such a good track that they even went mad for it in Queens. MC Shan had been beaten, KRS-One had won, and, despite some badmouthing, none of the threats had slipped over into real life, it had all stayed on wax. The chief protagonists were civil when they met and when Marl got out of the game, humiliated and angered, Shan & KRS did shows together.

Out of Queens, in the wake of Marley Marl and MC Shan, came LL Cool J, Mobb Deep, Kool G Rap, A Tribe Called Quest, Nicki Minaj, Nas, and 50 Cent. Out of The Bridge, and its successors and answer records, came a tradition of battle rap that when kept to spitting bars can create rich art but when let loose on the streets can end up behind bars. Or even in death.

It's mostly a macho, male, pursuit though and hip-hop, for its first decade, was primarily a male art form. There was Salt'n'Pepa, Roxanne Shante, and MC Lyte but the first to go really stratospheric in terms of both critical acclaim and success was Dana Owens from Newark, New Jersey.

Or, as she's better known, Queen Latifah. The first political, or conscious, female rapper and the one that would go on to inspire Lauryn Hill and Nicki Minaj. The third single from Latifah's 1989 album, All Hail the Queen, Ladies First is the song that the makers of The Songs That Shook America have chosen to tell the story of hip-hop opening up and allowing women to be more than 'honeys' or 'bitches'. Not words you'd risk calling Queen Latifah to her face unless you wanted that face rearranging.

In a toxic era of masculine hip-hop tunes like Tone Loc's Wild Thing and 2 Live Crew's Me So Horny, Queen Latifah was told, of course, that she'd never make it in the business. But she was tough. She'd grown up in Newark, New Jersey which had, in the sixties, seen riots and black power protests. With her friends, she'd journey into Manhattan to hear Grandmaster Flash, Eric B & Rakim, and The Beastie Boys.

Connecting with DJ Mark the 45 King, who was notorious for his obscure and funky record collection and went on to produce Jay-Z and Eminem, and his Flavor Unit Crew, she was soon making her first album, All Hail To The Queen and when Fab 5 Freddy (who, by this point, was so embedded in the downtown art scene that he was friends with Spike Lee, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat) dropped her tunes on his Yo! MTV Raps show it seemed as if Queen Latifah had the chance of a career in the game.

But she didn't want to let her mum, actress and academic Rita Owens, down so she struck a deal. She'd do a year in hip-hop and if she hadn't made it she'd return to her studies. She's not returned to her studies yet. On a European tour with The Jungle Brothers, Latifah met the Battersea rapper Monie Love and the two of them bonded and started working on Ladies First together.

A call for the sisters to get together and put themselves first. Queen Latifah, along with De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, ushered in a new era of conscious Afrocentric hip-hop which would later be picked up by rappers like Mos Def, Common, and Kendrick Lamar (more of whom later). Queen Latifah herself built a solid career for herself in hip-hop and even went on to present talk shows, appear in movies alongside Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and even performed for the Obamas. Barack nodding his head in fierce agreement and Michelle glowing with excitement.

Latifah made it as a woman in hip-hop but had the advantage of being from very near New York. Outkast were men but their disadvantage, and it seems daft now - so much has the game changed, was that they came from the south and hip-hop, serious credible hip-hop, didn't come from the south. It came from either the east coast or the west coast.

Hip-hop music had come out of the south before (Kris Kross, the lewd Miami bass of 2 Live Crew, and the DJ Screw and other chopped and screwed DJs from Houston) but Outkast were the first to really upset the East/West applecart. The lads who would go on to become Big Boi and Andre 3000 met at high school. A performing arts school which goes some way to explaining Andre 3000's theatricality.

They'd grown up listening to Bob Marley, Patti Labelle, and Michael McDonald. To these influences, Andre 3000 added Funkadelic and some of the music they'd hear at strip clubs. Atlanta had a very big strip club scene and Outkast attended strip clubs on a daily basis. So they could hear, or so they claim, the bass music that the strippers danced to!

The producers whose work they heard were a trio called Organized Noize (TLC/En Vogue) and their studio was nicknamed the dungeon. When Outkast, and Goodie Mob, joined forces with Organized Noize the collective took that studio name and started calling themselves the Dungeon Family. Atlanta already had a successful black music scene but it focused mainly on R&B performers like Usher and Toni Braxton. Producer L.A. Reid wasn't up on hip-hop but, as a concession to their pleading, he offered Outkast one track on a Christmas album in 1994.

"What the fuck?" remembers Big Boi now. But the track they provided, Player's Ball, climbed the charts - and continued to do so once the festive season was over (the track not being particularly Yule related at all). It prompted Yo! MTV Raps to cover Atlanta for the first time ever and Player's Ball eventually went gold and spent six weeks at the top of the hip-hop charts.

So they made an album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, and The Source magazine gave it four and a half mics out of five (which put it on a par with Biggie Smalls, Mobb Deep, and The Wu-Tang Clan). When Outkast attended, and won, a Source award they were booed at the ceremony. Uniting the otherwise warring east and west coast rappers at least.

It hurt 3000 and from the stage he offered "the south got something to say". This was taken as a clarion call to other southern rappers and DJs but also meant that Outkast had work to do to prove the haters wrong. They got straight down to it. Elevators (Me & You), the track chosen for this series, from their second album, 1996's ATLiens, was made to sound as southern as possible. Andre 3000 drawls his bars as much as he spits them.

Questlove and Black Thought are, now, humble and honest in admitting their preconceptions of the south clouded their initial view of Outkast and that they were, quite simply, wrong. Nowadays there's no doubt about the south, Atlanta specifically, and its role in hip-hop culture and though Andre 3000 may have moved more into fashion (turbans, riding crops, blonde wigs - he's worn 'em all) and appearing in films with Juliette Binoche and Woody Harrelson, the mantle of southern hip-hop was soon picked up by Gucci Mane, Lil Wayne, Chamillionaire, Migos, and Rae Sremmurd.

Outkast remain the only hip-hop act to have won Album of the Year at the Grammys. Kanye West has won many awards too but most would consider him a serious contender for Twat of the Year most years. His dumb comments on slavery and Donald Trump have not endeared him to many music fans and that's a shame because when he uses his talent for music and not controversy he is one of the greatest musicians that has ever lived.

Jesus Walks from The College Dropout, Kanye's first album in 2004, probably isn't the Kanye track I'd have chosen but the genesis and history of both the song and the artist make for a fascinating programme. Even if the reason for the song's inclusion, a rapper daring to speak about their faith and religion, is a little dubious.

The claim is made that going to concerts is a lot like going to church. You dress up, you raise your arms in the air, and you pay money to feel better. The era of yachts, champagne, clubs and million dollar video budgets was coming to an end. It didn't sit right in the post 9/11, War on Terror, world. There was a yearning, a need, to return to angry, conscious, rap music.

Hard to believe, now, that, over the course of his first few album Kanye West portrayed himself, successfully, as a kind of nerdy backpack rapper whose brush with death in a truck crash had given him a firm belief in the power of God. West had grown up in the dangerous south side of Chicago but his family had moved to the more affluent Lake Shore Drive area of the city.

He started as a producer, influenced by RZA, Dr Dre, and Jermaine Dupri, and when he moved to a neighbourhood of crack dens in Newark, New Jersey he was picked up by Roc-A-Fella Records. Soon his beats ended up on Jay-Z's The Blueprint LP.

Meanwhile, in Indiana, Kanye's friend Rhymefest was working as a janitor and his marriage was coming to an end. Rhymefest was not having a good time. He was not in a good place. A work friend suggested he listen to a tape of ARC Choir's 1997 gospel tune Walk With Me which he did. He'd not been a gospel fan, or even close to one, but this one affected him. 

It made him cry. It sounded like pain, redemption, and resurrection. The jazz bassist Curtis Lundy had played with Dizzy Gillespie and Pharoah Sanders but he'd got heavily into cocaine and he'd joined the addicts recovery centre (ARC) and, as his recovery continued, the choir they had set up. In the choir, he set about rearranging the hymn I Want Jesus To Walk With Me. He wanted his version to highlight the slow pace of transition from addiction to recovery to faith, he wanted to capture the wind, the sound of the ancestors, and the voices of hope. I'm not a religious man but he only went and did it.

Rhymefest knew the story of this song could not just end there and he wanted to transform it into hip-hop. He knew his old friend Kanye was the man to do it and, luckily for him and his bank balance, Kanye agreed. West realised the lyric of the rap didn't need to be biblical as Jesus was already in the (sampled) chorus. He could rap about the sins of man and let the choir present the counterpoint.

John Legend was called in to provide vocals (although his contribution, by the end of it, sounds like a high-pitched autotuned flute) and West insisted on making three, very expensive, videos for the song. Finally settling on the cheapest one. It worked. Soon Rhymefest, a divorced janitor from Indiana, found himself sat next to Oprah at the Grammys watching Kanye dressed as an angel.

Jesus Walks, the series contends and I'm not to disagree - these are more knowledgeable people on this subject than I am, paved the way for rappers like Drake, Childish Gambino, Chance the Rapper, and Kid Cudi to be honest about their faith, their feelings, and their insecurities - and when you're a black man in America you have a lot to be insecure about. In June 2015, Kendrick Lamar (a Pulitzer prize winner who grew up in Compton and saw his first murder when he was just five years old) wrote the modern anthem of the black American struggle - Alright.

Black Lives Matter didn't spring from nowhere. It came from injustice after injustice after injustice, from murder after murder after murder and, in the past, the struggle for civil rights was given its musical analogue by Billie Holiday, by Nina Simone, or by Public Enemy, the latest demonstrations heard mass defiant singalongs of Alright.

In the mid-noughties, Lamar signed to California's Top Dawg Entertainment label and started recording under the pseudonym K-Dot but as time went on he realised he didn't want to hide behind a stage persona, he wanted people to know who he really was, what he was really about, so he started using his real name. The new and improved Kendrick Lamar soon caught the attention of Dr Dre who signed him, via Top Dawg, to Interscope.

His first album on Interscope, 2012's Good Kid, M.A.D.D City reached number two in the national charts and number one on the R&B/hip-hop chart, it went platinum, and it received five Grammy nominations. Kendrick Lamar, after nearly ten years in the game, seemed to be an overnight sensation. So critically acclaimed did he become that Pharrell Williams compared him to Tupac Shakur, Miles Davis, and Bob Dylan.

A tour with Kanye West perhaps made Lamar realise there were still a few steps to climb to reach the top of the hip-hop ladder and, in 2015, he released To Pimp A Butterfly. The album that contained the excellent, deathless, single King Kunta as well as the anthemic Alright. A song that took a long hard look at what Compton, and similar neighbourhoods, were facing - violence, drugs, police brutality, and decided "we hate the po-po (police), wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho".

Police killing black people in broad daylight in America had been happening for years, throughout the history of the nation. What had changed was that people now had video cameras on their phones - and that people weren't going to stand for it any longer. At a protest in Cleveland, Ohio the crowd started singing, as if spontaneously, Lamar's Alright and from that moment on it has remained the song for Black Lives Matter.

As one protestor's t-shirt proudly reads "THIS IS A MOVEMENT NOT A MOMENT" - and so it is - and so it should be. Hip-hop, too, was dismissed, initially as a moment (or even as novelty music) but it has proved, over forty years, that it most definitely is a movement - and it's a movement that shows no signs of slowing. The makers of Hip-Hop:The Songs That Shook America, like the genre it reports on - both educational and entertaining, could wait a few years and easily find six more pieces that adequately reflect the next steps in hip-hop's journey. Or, so rich is the source material, they could dig in the crates and find way way more than six hip-hop tracks and make a second, third, and fourth series. I'm there for it if they do.