Music

• Urban African-American music incorporates a variety of styles and influences.close up of professional DJ's turntable image by TEA from Fotolia.com
  
  Urban African-American music includes rap, rhythm and blues and jazz, as well as sub-genres of these different styles. What makes these types of music different from other styles, and distinctly African-American, is their rise from oral traditions and the common elements they share, including improvisation, multi-part harmonies and the use of call and response, which dates back to African slave hymns.
  
  

Fashion and Hair

• African-American styles in fashion and hair have come to symbolize a sense of pride in African-American culture.african woman posing image by Elke Dennis from Fotolia.com
  
  The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s has a large influence on contemporary urban African-American fashions. The integration of cultural patterns, such as the kente cloth, into contemporary fashion, combined with the later street style of hip hop influences, has created a distinctive urban African-American cultural fashion flair. Urban African-American hairstyles have long been associated with political and personal statements about culture, music, religion and everything in-between. African-American hairstyles, especially those of women, often take pride in their departure from mainstream hairstyles and have in recent years been accepted as a mark of cultural expression.
  
  

Language

• African-American vernacular English has been a topic of controversy in recent years.Hip Hop Atmosphere image by Denis Plaster from Fotolia.com
  
  African-American vernacular English (AAVE) is a type of American English dialect that is academically recognized as a variety of contemporary American English. AAVE is connected to, although not exclusively, the speech of African-Americans, particularly inner city residents. Various academic institutions sometimes look down on AAVE as slang or a result of failed education in and command of contemporary American English.
  
  

Dance

• Hip-hop dance has traveled from the street to the mainstream.two hip teenagers image by Elke Dennis from Fotolia.com
  
  Dance in urban African-American culture incorporates moves ranging from African tribes to Caribbean styles to hip hop. Many dance styles popular in mainstream contemporary American culture have gained their popularity from African-American dance. Hip-hop dance is the most universally recognized contemporary style of this kind.
  
  

Art

• Graffiti art has been accepted as a valid art form in many urban communities as a way to combat graffiti vandalism.grafitti_2 image by Perth from Fotolia.com
  
  Contemporary urban African-American artists have drawn on the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. A notable contemporary artist is Kara Walker, whose silhouette work echoes the African-American art of the slavery period. Much of her work is known for challenging racial and gender stereotypes. In contemporary urban African-American art, the most recognizable form is hip-hop graffiti art, which has permeated mainstream American culture.
  
  

Literature

• Urban African American Literature has roots in the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement.buch image by Ewe Degiampietro from Fotolia.com
  
  Although urban African-American literature has deep roots in oral tradition, its urban expression grew largely from the Harlem Renaissance with trailblazing authors like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Huston. In the civil rights era as well as during the Black Arts Movement, authors such as Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks along with radical writer LeRoi Jones (also known as Amir Baraka) paved the literary way for black authors to speak out against prejudice and oppression. Today authors such as Toni Morrison (winner of both a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize) and Alice Walker are ardent voices for African-American culture.