Hip Hop was born at a birthday party in the bronx on August 11, 1973, in the recreation room of an apartment building in the west Bronx, New York City. The location of that birthplace was 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, and the man who presided over that historic party was the birthday girl’s brother, Clive Campbell—better known to history as DJ Kool Herc, founding father of hip hop.
DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) was born April 16, 1955 in West Kingston, Jamaica and migrated to the Bronx, New York in 1967. His classmates at Alfred E. Smith High School referred to him as Hercules because of his size and avid trips to the weight room. Herc started out as a graffiti artist in a group called the Ex-Vandals, but was introduced to deejaying when his father bought a PA system and didn’t know how to hook it up.
DJ Kool Herc’s signature innovation came from observing how the crowds would react to different parts of whatever record he happened to be playing: “I was noticing people used to wait for particular parts of the record to dance, maybe [to] do their specialty move.” Those moments tended to occur at the drum breaks—the moments in a record when the vocals and other instruments would drop out completely for a measure or two of pure rhythm. What Kool Herc decided to do was to use the two turntables in a typical DJ setup not as a way to make a smooth transition between two records, but as a way to switch back and forth repeatedly between two copies of the same record, extending the short drum break that the crowd most wanted to hear. He called his trick the Merry Go-Round. Today, it is known as the “break beat.”
By the summer of 1973, DJ Kool Herc had been using and refining his break-beat style for the better part of a year. His sister’s party on August 11, however, put him before his biggest crowd ever and with the most powerful sound system he’d ever worked. It was the success of that party that would begin a grassroots musical revolution, fully six years before the term “hip hop” even entered the popular vocabulary. Kool Herc and his MC crew The Herculords “started a movement which recycled the creativity of black American jive jocks back into the USA”. The relationship between hip hop and reggae became more important again with reggae artists and rappers collaborating with each other, from Yellowman and Afrika Bambaataa to KRS-One and Shabba Ranks. Hip hop and reggae still influence each other in both directions.
Reference:
Editors, H. (2009, November 16). Hip hop is born at a birthday party in the Bronx. History.com. Retrieved October 9, 2021, from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hip-hop-is-born-at-a-birthday-party-in-the-bronx.
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