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The Hip Hop Years

Trans-Atlantic Publications

Chapter One

dancing in
the streets

* Play That Beat, Mr DJ ? Enter Kool Herc

Unsurprisingly, many have laid claim to roles as kings or kingmakers of thehip hop tradition. Most students, however, find one name cropping up timeand again. To all intents and purposes, hip hop started the day Jamaican-bornClive Campbell, aka Kool Herc, first set foot in New York in 1967.

    `At the age of thirteen I migrated to the States, early '67, to theBronx. It was winter. It was cold.'

    By 1969, Herc was partying regularly at local clubs, but noticed thatthe crowds he joined would frequently object to the city's distant, cocksureDJs.

     `I used to hear the gripes from the audience on the dancefloor. Evenmyself, 'cos I used to be a breaker [breakdancer]. Why didn't the guy let therecord play out? Or why cut it off there? So with that, me gathering all thisinformation around me, I say: "I think I could do that." So I started playingfrom a dancefloor perspective. I always kept up the attitude that I'm notplaying it for myself, I'm playing for the people out there.'

    DJs needed to establish an identity or niche in this highly competitivemarket. Herc was determined to find records that no one else owned, todistinguish himself from the pack. As an example, he pressed his father intobuying James Brown's Sex Machine LP in 1969.

    `A lot of people wanted that record and couldn't really find it. So alot of people used to come to the party to hear that.'

    Herc did his research, checking out what was being played on localjukeboxes to test a song's popularity and picking up rarities at DownstairsRecords on 42nd Street and the Rhythm Den.

    `This is where your recognition, your rep comes from. You have arecord nobody else got, or you're the first one to have it. You've got to bethe first, can't be the second.'

    While violence has become rap's defining characteristic in the 90s,hip hop actually started out as a means of ending black-on-black fightingtwo decades earlier. The Bronx citizen of the early 70s had much to live infear of.

    `The gangs came and terrorised the whole neighbourhood, theboroughs. Everybody just ran back into their house. There was no moreclubs, everybody ran back into their house. If you did do a house party, ithad to be: "I have to know you. Don't bring nobody who I don't know to myhouse." It lasted for a while until the parents started to come in early, andfind a house full of kids, tearing up the new furniture that she just put somemoney down on. [The kids] were still seeking for a place to release thisenergy.'

    Herc's sister asked him to help out by playing music in the recreationroom of his family's housing block, 1520 Sedgewick Towers.

    `OK, I throw my hand at it, and she rented the recreation room, Ithink for twenty-five dollars at the time. We could charge it at twenty-fivecents for girls, fifty cents for fellas. It was like, "Kool Herc, man. He's givinga party, westside man. Just be cool, that's what I'm saying, come and havea good time. Just don't ditch the programme.'"

    Dodge High School, before it became co-educational, was an all girlsestablishment. Not least for that reason, it became, by reputation, the topvenue for aspiring DJs, as Melle Mel recalls.

    `If you got to do Dodge High School, you was the fuckin' man. AndHerc used to do it every year.'

* Give Me A Break ? The Origin Of The Breakbeat

Searching for further innovations for his sets, Herc patented the breakbeat,the climatic instrumental section of a record, partly through his existingknowledge of the dub plates or `versions' prevalent in Jamaican reggae.

    `I was using some of the breakdown parts. Every Jamaican record hasa dub side to it. So I just tried to apply that. As the years went along I'mwatching people, waiting for this particular break in it, the rhythm section.One night, I was waiting for the record to play out. Maybe they're [thedancers] waiting for this particular break. I could have a couple morerecords got the same break in it ? I wonder, how would it be if I put themall together and I told them: "I'm going to try something new tonight. I'mgoing to call it a merry-go-round." The B-boys, as I call it, the energeticperson, they're waiting just to release this energy when this break comes in.'

    Herc saw a ready-made audience for his `breakdowns'. The merry-go-roundinvolved him mixing sections of James Brown's `Give It Up Or TurnIt Loose' into Michael Viner's `Bongo Rock' and back out into Babe Ruth's`The Mexican'. His audiences loved it.

    The merry-go-round became the blueprint for hip hop.

* To The Beat Y'All ? Breakdancing USA

The first to react to the innovations, naturally enough, were Herc's partygoers.Breakdancers, or B-boys, began to interpret Herc's idiosyncraticstyle with routines of their own. Some historians trace the development ofbreakdancing to the African martial arts form, capoeta, brought to Americaby slaves a century before. No one is entirely sure of the identity of the firstNew York breakdancer, but it was certainly popularised by members of theZulu Nation. The discipline of breakdancing/B-boying was one of fourseparate styles that eventually converged through the late 70s. Up-rockingwas a kind of non-contact mock martial art first seen in Brooklyn. Plus therewere two imported West Coast styles ? pop-locking (a mixture of strutting,robotics and moonwalking) and body-popping (developed on the west coastby Boogaloo Sam).

    Richie Colon took the name Crazy Legs after being given the nicknameby a high school cheerleader. Subsequently the most famous breakdancerof them all, he joined the Rock Steady Crew, a predominantly Latinteam, in 1979. He did so by impressing founder members Jo-Jo and JimmyDee with a new version of the backspin which made the breaker resemblea spinning ball. He attributes the origin of the term B-boy, almost inevitably,to Kool Herc, who would encourage dancing by shouting out to his `B-boys'.Breakdancers, according to Crazy Legs, were simply those partygoers whowould wait on Herc's `breaks' before going into action.

    `A B-boy is a break boy or a break girl. There are people who callthemselves B-boys and don't even know where the term comes from. Thatreally comes from people being outside of the "foundation" when it started.By the time it hit Queens or Brooklyn, or something like that, they may haveheard the term B-boy, but didn't know that it meant a break boy.'

    He chanced on hip hop in the mid-70s and became an immediateconvert.

    `Say about 1977, I experienced my first jam, but prior to that hip hopmusic was just a combination of funk, soul and R&B. It wasn't considered hiphop music, because the culture itself wasn't labelled hip hop culture. The firsttime I ever heard someone on a mic, rocking a mic, it had to be in '77. I wentto a jam in the South Bronx and the Cold Crush Brothers were there,Charlie Chase. My cousin Lenny Len brought me to a jam.'

    In order to join the Rock Steady...