On 11 August 1973, there was a party at an apartment building at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue in the Bronx. The host, Cindy Campbell, was a black immigrant teenager from Jamaica who wanted to earn some extra cash to buy back-to-school clothes. So she put up flyers around the neighbourhood, and convinced her 18-year-old brother Clive to DJ.
Known as DJ Kool Herc (a shortened version of his nickname, Hercules), Clive was locally famous for his physical size and strength and for a style of DJing that involved using multiple turntables and records to stitch together short, percussive passages of R&B music called “breaks” into extended loops of sound, a technique that he called “The Merry-Go-Round”. At his sister’s party, he cued up two copies of James Brown’s Sex Machine album and went back and forth, extending the break from “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” while exclaiming street phrases over the music to encourage the dancers. And so, hip-hop was born.
As with most origin stories, the tale of how Kool Herc invented hip-hop is actually a set of clues that point in several directions at once. First, there is the fact that the Campbells were from Jamaica, where the practice of DJs rhyming over extended instrumentals had been part of the island’s musical culture since the Forties. By the late Fifties, “toasting”, or the art of boasting and telling stories over instrumentals and encouraging dancers, had become central to the fierce, island-wide competition between mobile sound systems sponsored by Kingston producers such as Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd and King Tubby.
King Tubby, a protégé of Reid, showed a particular genius for taking the instrumental B-sides of R&B, ska and rocksteady records, and isolating and emphasising specific elements of the instrumentals and beats to create hypnotic music. As American R&B labels began to fade, reducing the supply of imported instrumental B-sides, Jamaican producers began to specialise in the production of original one-off instrumental recordings called dubplates which their DJs could toast and rhyme over. Arguably, then, hip-hop was simply a late American inner-city variant of a style of music that had originated in Jamaica at least two decades earlier.
Yet the realities of life in the Bronx in 1973 were equally important to the development of hip-hop. Jamaica was largely an island of farming towns where people gathered outside to listen to music. New York was a city of totemic skyscrapers caught in a seemingly irreversible spiral of crime, drugs and social decay. If the formal innovations that define hip-hop nearly all originated in Jamaica, the spirit and texture of the music clearly came from New York.
To grow up in New York City in the Seventies, as I did, was to experience the Biblical ten plagues on a more or less daily basis. There were rats everywhere, as city workers often failed to pick up the garbage. Alcoholics and drug addicts slumped against the sides of buildings in pools of their own urine. Playgrounds were littered with syringes, and later crack pipes. Summer evenings were regularly punctuated by gunfire, as police refused to get out of their cars. The terrifying rapidity of the city’s social breakdown sent around two million middle-class and professional residents, not all of them white, fleeing to the suburbs of New Jersey, Westchester, Connecticut and Long Island.
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