LOS ANGELES, USA (AP) — Remember the first rap song you heard? Some of your favourite rappers and DJs do.

While hip hop celebrates 50 years of life, The Associated Press asked some of the genre’s most popular artistes to recall their first memory of hearing a rap song and how it resonated with them:

Fat Joe remembers the first time Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s song The Message went viral. He’ll never forget the moment when the rap song was being played throughout the housing projects in the Bronx borough of New York City.

“I remember coming down the projects one day in every apartment. Everywhere was playing it. I was like ‘Yo, this is crazy,’ ” the rapper recalled before he recited some of the song’s lyrics: “It’s like a jungle sometimes. It makes me wonder how we’ll keep from going under.”

Fat Joe, who is of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, said hip hop became a way of life for many in his neighbourhood.

He said his first introduction to hip hop came through his brother, who used to be a crate boy for Grandmaster Flash.

“Back in the day, there were no computers, there were no Serato. It was vinyl,” he said. “The biggest honour you can have in life is being a crate boy carrying milk crates full of vinyl… Any party Grandmaster Flash gave, my brother was a crate boy. They wouldn’t pay him in money. They would pay him with flyers to the next party and he would give them out for free. But he was down. When you talk about Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, these are the three founding fathers of the whole culture. I’m there. You know, it’s right here.”

Growing up, Killer Mike witnessed the drug epidemic run rampant in his neighbourhood in Atlanta. But it was Ice T’s lyrics on 6 ‘N the Mornin that helped him conceptualise his plight.

“Crack had come into our community and had started to turn our community upside down,” he said. “When Ice dropped 6 ‘N the Mornin it was the first confirmation for me, as a little kid, that I wasn’t going crazy… They became victims of their addiction… It confirmed all of my youthful suspicions that the world had changed and was never going to be the same again.”

It’s hard for 2 Chainz to pin down the first rap song he ever heard. He could only remember the artistes who made an influential mark on him.

While hip hop saw West Coast usurp its Eastern counterpart as the dominant rap force in the 1990s, 2 Chainz found rap music for the first time — thanks to his older cousins — through the lenses of Luther Campbell aka Uncle Luke and his group 2 Live Crew.

With Campbell in the lead, the group was best known for their raunchy rap albums, including As Nasty as They Wanna Be, that were among the first to boast parental advisory stickers, as well as R- and X-rated videos.

2 Live Crews’ song Me So Horny was particularly controversial. But, for 2 Chainz, his introduction to their music served as an enlightening moment for him.

“It obviously was a lot of profanity, but I enjoyed that music,” he said. “Shortly after that, I was introduced to Too $hort and NWA. My life has been changed ever since.”

Before French Montana moved to the United States, hip hop touched his soul while living in Morocco. At age nine, his ear was caught by two songs, including Tupac Shakur’s Ambitionz Az a Ridah and Gangsta’s Paradise by the late Coolio.

“I didn’t even understand what they were saying,” Montana said. “That’s why I probably get more overseas love than here, because I know what it feels like to be a kid over there listening to things and not understanding. So I had a chance to be on both sides of the world.”

Montana said he was compelled by the way of life described in those two songs.

“It was more of a lifestyle,” he said. “It was more of something new. It was all in your face. It’s a feeling. Certain records you hear sometimes from a new artist, you don’t even know who they are. You might hear it on the radio, you turn around and be like ‘Yo, who is that? What is that?’… There’s no type of information. Just sonically being hooked to something like it’s a drug. It grabs you. It grabs your ear.”

When Soulja Boy’s mother played music around the house she would often listen to a variety of Tupac records.

But it was Tupac’s Dear Mama that stuck with him the most.

“It was one of them ones,” Soulja Boy said. “My mom used to play Tupac a lot when I was a little kid. I heard it growing up. Once I got older, I could understand it more. It’s one of them ones that made me fall in love with hip-hop for sure.”

Diplo is one of the most popular EDM producers and DJs today, but he’s made his own mark within hip hop through collaborations with rap stars like Drake, Lil Wayne, Busta Rhymes, Mac Miller, Snoop Dogg, and Wale.

Hip hop has always been with Diplo ever since his days as a youth in Miami. That’s when he heard Planet Rock.

“It was a huge record growing up in Florida,” said Diplo, who is of German and English descent. “I’m a huge Miami bass fan and loved 2 Live Crew. Probably the first thing I’ve ever bought was a cassette single of Digable Planets Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat). I loved that record. The Pharcyde’s first album. That’s when I started to get into it, when I was like 11 or 12 years old. As a music aficionado, I think hip hop production has always been an inspiration to me.”

Shaquille O’Neal is one of the most dominant forces in NBA history, winning four championships during his backboard-shattering 19-year career. But he also had a short but successful rap career releasing two albums including his 1993 debut Shaq Diesel, which sold more than a million copies, and he’s dabbled into deejaying as DJ Diesel.

The NBA Hall of Famer said his first rap song experience came while he watched the 1984 film Beat Street before his parents bought him the movie’s soundtrack on vinyl. The film followed two brothers and their friends who inserted themselves into the hip hop culture through breakdancing, DJing, and graffiti.