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Pop rap (or hip pop) is a pop music influenced style of hip hop that replaces the jazz, funk, and electronic music-influenced elements of hip hop with pop-influenced melodic hooks. The style became popular in the early 1990s, as hip hop music found commercial success. Pop rappers such as Vanilla Ice were more radio-friendly than the explicit lyrics of gangsta rap such as Ice-T.

The first commercial successful rap song mixed up with pop and funk was Der Kommissar by the Austrian musician Falco. It was among the Billboard Hot 100 (#72). Pop-rap has been popular since its beginning in the late-1980s, after various hip hop artists commenced entering the mainstream. LL Cool J just may have been the very first pop-rapper in history, when he rose to prominence on his 1985 debut album Radio. When he joined Russell Simmons' Def Jam label and decided to try merging rap with pop and R&B influences, some people were skeptical that it would ever work.

But in the end, one of LL's singles, the rap-ballad "I Need Love", actually became a success. The origins of Pop-rap lay in artists like Tone-Loc, and DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince putting emphasis right on their good-humored, storytelling skills, to great chart success. The were followers who also began recording similarly amiable party tunes and novelties.Since there had been a possibility of accepting this as real music, other emcees started to play up rap's connection to pop, R&B, and dance music.

Many pop-rap hits sampled hits as a backing track, "U Can't Touch This" by MC Hammer being the prime example, lifting the bass riff from Rick James' "Superfreak." Pop-rap artists were sometimes taken to court for the use of borrowing hooks from previous songs by other artists.

Other pop-rap M.C.s devleoped their own sounds, such as LL Cool J and Salt-N-Pepa. Very little of this commercially minded music was met with acclaim from hip hop enthusiasts or critics, however - Puff Daddy's "loop it and leave it" style of sampling, which most of the time just consisted of rapping over someone else's instrumental, was criticized.

• Pop music
• Alternative hip hop (opposite of Pop rap)