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 Crew, who had built an impressivereputation throughout the Bronx, Crazy Legs had to audition, or moreaccurately, duel.

    `It wasn't about winning or losing, it was about how you maintainedyourself within a battle. We lost the battle, but we proved that we'ddeveloped our skills and that we were hungry. In 1979, you got to understandthat was the first time the dance was dying out. So when I got intoRock Steady, breaking was already dying out. Thank God I ran into thepeople that I ran into throughout the early 80s within the Bronx andManhattan and started re-establishing Rock Steady Crew again. Eventuallythe original leaders of Rock Steady saw what I was doing and they decidedto give me the Crew and then I became president of the Rock Steady Crewin 1981.'

    Respect, identity and competition were important factors for breakdancers,Crazy Legs states, but then so too was impressing the opposite sex.

    `The high point at the jam [was] where everyone just starts battlingeach other, trying to do the dopest moves and get the most props. So thatby the time you've finished you're either one of the dopest B-boys or you'vegot some honeys checking you out, now you have some girlies. A lot of B-boysdid it for the girls. The competitiveness was important, but girls werevery important as well.'

    Kid Freeze, aka Clemente Moreno, another of breakdancing's mostrenowned exponents, recalls his introduction to the craft in the late 70s.

    `I was walking down my block. I see these two kids with a boom box,and they had Kangols on. They had the music going and I seen them, theywere hitting the floor, they were doing fancy footwork and I just stopped,amazed at what they were doing: "Oh, that's kind of cool." Next thing youknow, my luck, my father is walking down the block from work and sees melooking at these guys. Any time I'd be hanging out with guys that havemaybe fancy hats or nice sneakers that were expensive, he thought thateither they were drug dealers or something about them wasn't right.'

    After Freeze's family relocated from the Bronx to Queens in 1976,he had the opportunity to pursue his interest.

    `You choose your weapon ? either the microphone, the turntables,the spray can or the floor as a B-boy.'

    He attained the name Kid Freeze during tryouts to join local crewthe Dynamic Rockers at the Galaxy Disco in Queens. The dancing was ascompetitive as any gangland initiation ceremony.

    `They had guys from Manhattan, they had guys from Brooklyn, guysfrom Queens, Staten Island. We were battling to get in the group. So I seenthis kid who had on Kid Freeze [on his shirt] and I said: "Listen, do you wantto battle for this name?" So he goes: "All right, if you win, I'll take off myshirt." And he was in the same group, Dynamic. So I battled him and secondround I went down, I took him. He took off his shirt and said: "Here, youdeserve it. You're really good and I can see you're really going far.'"

    Brooklyn native Nelson George, author of The Death Of Rhythm andBlues and Hip Hop America, got his first taste of the emergent new music atone of Herc's shows at Taft High School in the Bronx.

    `The sun hadn't gone down yet, and kids were just hanging out,waiting for something to happen. Van pulls up, a bunch of guys come outwith a table, crates of records. They unscrew the base of the light pole, taketheir equipment, attach it to that, get the electricity ? Boom! We got aconcert right here in the schoolyard and it's this guy Kool Herc. And he'sjust standing with the turntable, and guys were studying his hands. Thereare people dancing, but there's as many people standing, just watching whathe's doing. That was my first introduction to in-the-street, hip hop DJing.'

    Melle Mel remembers a physical frame which matched Herc's imposingaudio set-up.

    `This huge character, and he had a beard. He really was like fuckin'Hercules, he was built and shit. He was, just from my images of right now,just this really mythical character. Even before I was able to go to a Hercjam, I heard about him for about a year and a half.'

* Junior Wants To Play ? From Disco To Hip Hop

Frederick Braithwaite started out as a graffiti artist working along theLexington Avenue line with the Fab Five crew ? hence his nom de plume FabFive Freddy. Before working as a promoter, recording artist and later a TVpresenter, he witnessed some of the earliest DJ parties.

    `I was part of the disco era. This is disco before it became commercialdisco, when it was underground. DJs giving parties in schools, at restaurantsthat they would take over at night and they would simulate "posh"clubs. That scene, those particular DJs that played what was then known asdisco, those guys inspired the generation that became the pioneers of hiphop. So I was around as the transition took place in the mid-70s.'

    That transition involved disenfranchised black youths reclaimingmusic from untouchable star musicians whom they could no longer readilyidentify with.

    `Let's say a group like Earth Wind & Fire ? that particular time, theywere wearing elaborate, gaudy costumes. It was something that seemedvery far away from what a ghetto kid on the street could realistically hopeto attain, or be part of.'

    Disco had left many urban black kids behind. Its celebrity-strewnmecca, Studio 54, could just as well have been on another continent.Impresario Michael Holman saw this desire for ownership of an indigenousmusic and the frustration with vacuous records produce a climate similar tothe one which engendered punk. However, he emphasises the fact that peergroup acceptance took several years.

    `The people in the neighbourhood were into the artists who werecoming out of California and from other places. Local groups and local rapartists who were rapping over turntables in the park were not quite thatpopular, especially with the older people from, say, mid-twenties up.'

    Where punk had been a year zero explosion, hip hop was built blockby block over several years, devouring its immediate past rather than ridiculingit. Disco was its most recent antecedent and provided a fertile genepool. However, many other early hip hop jams and record releasesemployed rock signatures and percussion effects rather than dance music,because it was too `soft' to freestyle over.

    Before hip hop finalised its blueprint, disco kids in the Bronx werealready hooked on the breakbeat sections the DJs would emphasise, as FabFive Freddy recalls.

    `When these particular records would come on, they would give areal interesting vibe to the party, The atmosphere, the energy wouldchange. Kids that knew how to breakdance would start dropping to thefloor doing these crazy moves. This is before things had names and titles soit wasn't breakdancing and it wasn't hip hop, it was just energy.'

    Fab Five Freddy notes that the development of a cultural alternativeto disco was at least partially inspired by working class blacks beingexcluded from the mainstream.

    `When you would go to these disco parties, particularly when theywere given in the cities, or at colleges. The crowd was primarily a collegecrowd. They would sometimes put on the flyers: "No sneakers". That wouldbe a reference to what you could say was the hip hop kid, or the real urbanfoundation type of kid.'

* My Adidas ? Hip Hop Fashion Statements

The sneaker was becoming an item of almost mythical importance to breakdancers,according to Michael Holman. Woe betide anyone who stepped onthe toes of the early B-boys.

    `Back in the old days of hip hop, the sneaker of choice would be shoesthat would be actually old school even then. They would have been ten-year-oldstyles, like the plastic shell toe, the shell-toed Adidas sneakers.These were kids who, what they owned was on their backs and on theirfeet. So when you talk about sneaker etiquette, or sneaker intrusion, you'retalking about this idea of, God forbid, you were to step on someone's sneakers.I don't know how they did it, but you would keep your sneakers spotless.Absolutely clean. And you're going through the subway system, youare going through New York City ? it's not one of the cleanest cities in theworld. How they would keep them clean I have no idea. Stepping onsomeone's sneakers could easily be a death sentence.'

    Some of the more interesting fashion statements were made bycombining sneakers with exotic sportswear ? sailing and skiing apparel ? sportingactivities that were way beyond the wearer's economic compass.

    `That has always been part of black fashion, mocking them [affluentwhites], mimicking it, taking that fashion and turning it into their own.'

    Despite the confluence of areas like breakdancing, graffiti and music,the embracing of hip hop as an umbrella term was still some way down theline, according to Fab Five Freddy.

    `There really was no comparison, there was no analogy. There wasno four elements of hip hop at this point in time. Basically, you had graffitigoing full steam, completely independent of what was going on in hip hopfor the most part.'

* Watch The Closing Doors ? The Graf Squad

Graffiti had decorated urban trains in New York since the early 70s. Theorigins of this DIY impressionism, or `guerrilla art', are variously credited toGreek teenager TAKI 183 and Jean-Michel Basquiat, aka Samo, thoughterritorial wall markings were a fixture of New York's urban environmentin the previous decade. In the 70s they simply grew in size and ambition,often bedecking whole tenement walls as well as subway trains. This threwthe authorities and graffiti artists into a headlong confrontation that is stillsmouldering today on several continents. Fab Five Freddy was one of graffiti'searliest adherents and advocates. According to his observations, itsgrowth sprang from a quest for identity and recognition common to all hiphop's constituent forms.

    `Graffiti artists come up with another name, another persona, paintit all over the city on the trains and everything and ? "Hi! That's me! I'm justas big as an ad for Marlboro cigarettes or Coca-Cola or any other bigproduct.'"

    Michael Holman first came to New York in 1978 to work on WallStreet as a credit analyst. But he immediately became infatuated with thesubway graffiti that decorated his route to work.

    `I would get in the subway, about to get on a train, and these trainswould go by with these amazing burners, graffiti burners, multi-colouredname tags. They would take up the whole train and I would watch them goby and just think, my God, this is amazing. Other people on the platform ? doyou see this? And they were all sort of in their own world and not evennoticing. I guess it was all old hat to them and just boring vandalism and Iwas just shocked. It was the first tug, the first pull into that subculture.'

    Like Fab Five Freddy, Holman believes that the different strands ofhip hop ? graffiti, breakdancing, DJing and MCing ? were only considered asa collective entity some time after the event.

    `It never really plays out the way you think it would in a neat packagethat historians would like to see it. There wasn't at that time anybodysaying, "OK, this is like a hip hop happening." No one was saying that,because it wasn't that yet.'"

    At this stage, the dominant persona in this new culture was the DJ.

    `It really is important to note that the DJ was truly the importantartist then. It wasn't the MC, it was the DJ who made the party happen. Itwas the DJ who was the producer, who was the one supplying the soundtrackfor the breakdancers and for the B-boys.'

    However, some loose movement was definitely stirring, signified asmuch as anything by a new dress code.

    `It was slowly becoming apparent to everyone uptown and downtownthat this was something like the rock 'n' roll of the 60s, which had itsown look, style, fashion. This was a subculture that had its own fashion,dance, aesthetic, music, lexicon if you will.'

    It wasn't subtle, but Big Bank Hank of the Sugarhill Gang credits Hercwith creating a compelling distraction from the turmoil of inner-city life.

    `You could hear his system, with no exaggeration, three blocks away.He had a countless number of speakers, bass bottoms, subs, mid-range,tweeters. And he'd hook up ? they'd plug into the street lamps. Lights wouldgo dark from how much power was being drawn and the parties that hewould throw. Oh, man, it was like something you'd see at the Superbowl. Itwas people losing their mind and no violence, and that was the key ? noviolence. To have that many people together and nobody wanted to fight.Nobody wanted to shoot. Everybody going home safe.'

    Afrika Bambaataa freely credits DJ Kool Herc with being the `father'of hip hop, its founder and guardian, and also his chief inspiration.

    `By 1969 he had that feeling of playing this style of music with breakbeats,something like they were doing in Jamaica with the version type ofmusic. They would take the instrumental style and a lot of the DJs wouldtoast ? as what you call rapping today ? on the record.'

    However, it is easy to overstate the importance of the Jamaican influenceon New York hip hop. Herc, for example, was `Americanised' veryswiftly once he arrived in the country, playing basketball and involvinghimself in local graffiti activities. Despite the precedents set by U-Roy, I-Royand other toasters, reggae records proved generally unpopular when heplayed them. It is debatable whether parallel developments in Kingstonreggae and Bronx hip hop are any more than coincidental. DJ battles inNew York did mirror the soundclashes of Jamaica, but would almostcertainly still have arisen without the historical precedent. The simpleconnection between the two was competition.

    And the competition was about to liven up.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Hip Hop Yearsby Alexander Ogg Copyright © 1999 by Alexander Ogg. Excerpted by permission.
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