For the millennial clubgoer, it might be difficult to fathom a world where hip-hop wasn’t openly embraced on the Las Vegas Strip. Visit any weekend, and you’re likely to see anyone from Cardi B and 2 Chainz to E-40 and Young Thug performing in front of thousands, at rooftop beach clubs and in cavernous, confetti-filled rooms. This weekend in particular will see an unprecedented hip-hop presence on the Strip, as more than 100 artists arrive at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds for Day N Vegas, a three-day fest boasting headliners J. Cole, Travis Scott and Kendrick Lamar and a loaded undercard that includes Tyler the Creator, Migos, Schoolboy Q, Miguel, 21 Savage, Kali Uchis, Juice WRLD and Brockhampton.

Produced by Goldenvoice, the same group that organizes Coachella, Day N Vegas will be the first hip-hop event of this magnitude in Las Vegas. The timing makes sense. Hip-hop is one of the leading genres in music, having surpassed rock in popularity a few years back. But it’s been a long time coming for the city, which has had a contentious history with the genre.

“If you told me 10 years ago that there was going to be a hip-hop festival with this lineup in Vegas—an all hip-hop lineup? Not happening,” DJ Warren Peace says.

Peace has gone to war for hip-hop in Las Vegas. A co-founder of now-shuttered record store HipHopSite; former co-host of KUNV’s defunct Word Up radio show; and a fixture at Las Vegas’ earliest venues, including Club Ra at Luxor, Peace helped pave the way for hip-hop in the city. Ra opened in 1997 and held the first weekly hip-hop party in a casino on the Strip. On Thursdays, you could hear Peace and DJ Mr. Bob spinning everything from 2Pac and Biggie to Nas and Jay-Z. You could even spot Prince or Lil’ Jon in the crowd. “We had legendary status,” Peace remembers.

Ra was the place to be, but in the early 2000s, the hotel-casino decided to change the format. Peace says he was informed of the change before his set one night in 2004, and was explicitly told not to play any hip-hop. But the crowd was there for a hip-hop night, so he played a song from one of the most popular artists of that era, 50 Cent. And, Peace says, he was fired.

“To think back on that now, for playing one of the top hip-hop albums of all time, is just funny to me. But that was the climate back then,” Peace says. “Hip-hop has always had a bad stigma to it [here].”

The stigmatization of hip-hop in Las Vegas peaked in 2006, when then-sheriff Bill Young urged casinos not to book rap acts. In a letter to Nevada’s Gaming Control Board, Young wrote that his insistence was “a legitimate crime-prevention strategy.” Many venues shrugged it off. But even as the Strip began embracing the music, many local artists struggled to get the same love.

“We had to lie and say we were a funk band to get booked,” says Renaldo Elliott, who played drums in the versatile hip-hop band Rhyme N Rhythm, a group active from 2007 to 2015. “We had to do that for a while until we were able to have our name carry ourselves.”

Having hip-hop on the Strip is essential for the city, says Mike Pizzo, a veteran DJ who helped launch HipHopSite and co-hosted Word Up with Peace. “If we as a city want to own the title of entertainment capital in the world, then like every other genre that’s represented here, hip-hop needs to be represented as well,” Pizzo says. He credits Victor Drai for being a visionary and booking hip-hop headliners at his nightclub during peak EDM. Now, other clubs are following suit.

In 2019, hip-hop culture is flourishing on the Strip—and being monetized. There’s graffiti- inspired art at the Palms and the Cosmopolitan. The Jabbawockeez are breakdancing at MGM Grand. Today’s top rappers are performing at Drai’s and KAOS, with old-school titans holding it down at On the Record at Park MGM. Even Drake has a residency at XS and a pop-up store at Wynn Plaza.

“There’s no stopping hip-hop,” DJ Mighty Mi says. A transplant from New York, he played in some of that city’s best-known clubs and produced for rap duo The High & Mighty before moving here in 2007. He remembers going to Fresh Fest as a kid during the ’80s to see acts like Run-DMC and Kurtis Blow. “We were starved for it,” he says. “People are probably starved to see a hip-hop festival here.”

Forty years later, hip-hop’s still around, and only increasing in popularity. Finally, it’s getting its day in Vegas.

DAY N VEGAS November 1-3, noon-1 a.m., $199/day, $429-$899 three-day. Las Vegas Festival Grounds, daynvegas2019.com.