From block parties and breakbeats to b-boys, sampling, and the global culture of the Hip-Hop
Introduction
Hip-Hop didn't begin in a recording studio, with a record company, producer or a hit record.
It began with two turntables, a stack of old records, a neighbourhood block party and a DJ who realised that the most popular part of the track wasn't necessarily the track itself but the break.
The moment when the drummer took over, and the bass locked into the groove. That was the break and that was when the dancefloor came alive.
From those extended breaks in Funk, Soul and Disco came one of the most influential cultural movements of the twentieth century.
Hip-Hop
What began in the Bronx in the early 1970s would eventually transform music, fashion, language, dance, art, technology and popular culture around the world.
Hip-Hop was a cultural movement that involved DJ’s, MC’s, B-Boys (breakers) and Graffiti artists.
But the story of Hip-Hop is also the story of crate digging, because Hip-Hop didn't simply create new music. It taught a generation of future music enthusiasts to search through old records scanning the liner notes for musicians, or following record labels looking for lost treasures.
A funky drumbreak could become a new beat. The bassline from an old Jazz LP could provide the groove and a forgotten Soul 45 could find itself on a new hit record.
An obscure library record could become a collector's grail because a producer found four bars of music buried inside it.
Hip-Hop took collecting records to the next level, unwittingly creating a generation of musical historians and archaeologists.
01 — THE BRONX: BEFORE HIP-HOP
To understand the birth of Hip-Hop, we need to understand the Bronx.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, parts of the Bronx were experiencing severe economic decline.
Factories disappeared along with the jobs, and the buildings were abandoned. The neighbourhoods were divided by poverty, racial inequality and social disinvestment.
The Bronx was also home to large Black and Puerto Rican communities whose youth needed a positive form of release and were creating their own forms of expression.
There were Block parties, dance crews, and graffiti artists,
Sound systems, DJs, MCs and most importantly, the records.
The ingredients of Hip-Hop were already cookin’. It just didn’t have a name.
Hip-Hop's origins are generally traced back to 73, when legend has it, DJ Kool Herc played a back-to-school party organised by his sister, which gave birth to the legendary block parties
Herc noticed that although the dancefloor loved the music, the people on the floor came alive with the breaks.
Instead of allowing the break to end, Herc developed a technique of switching between two copies of the same record to extend the break and keep the dancers on maximum overdrive.
The technique became known as the Merry-Go-Round. and this was the beginning of something completely new. However the music itself wasn't new, Herc was digging through old records, and that would become one of Hip-Hop's defining characteristics.
02 — THE BREAK
The breakbeat is the DNA of Hip-Hop.
Funk had already transformed the role of the rhythm section when James Brown made the drummer central. The bass became a hook, the guitar took over the percussion, the horns provided punctuation and the groove became the track.
Hip-Hop DJs took that idea one step further by finding the breaks, isolating the groove, then repeating and extending it until they built an entirely new environment around it.
James Brown became essential. As did The Incredible Bongo Band, Dennis Coffey, The Meters, Bob James and hundreds of other artists whose records would eventually become part of Hip-Hop’s blueprint.
One of the most famous examples was James Brown's "Funky Drummer."
Clyde Stubblefield's drumming became one of Hip-Hop's most important rhythmic building blocks with the Funky Drummer becoming the most sampled drum break in history.
The DJ didn't necessarily need the entire record. He needed the parts that could be transformed. The breaks… And this changed the way people listened to records.
DJ’s were looking for the breaks hiding inside these records, and that would eventually create an entire culture of crate digging.
Personally, I remember finding records as a teenager and checking the grooves for breaks when there wasn’t a turntable available for listening. (which was normal in charity shops and carboot sales). You could sometimes find breaks where the grooves became darker or lighter at small sections in the vinyl.
03 — THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF HIP-HOP
Hip-Hop was never just rap music.
The culture developed around four interconnected elements:
1. The DJ
The DJ was the foundation. Creating transitions and dropping the breaks. But most important were the records, and who had the choice cuts. And as the DJ evolved Cutting & Scratching became the skill to master
2. The MC
Originally the MC was there to support the DJ and energise the crowd.
The MC introduced the DJ and provided the hype for the DJ during the set.
3. Breakdancing
The break-boys and break-girls transformed dancing to the break into physical movement of breakin’.
B-boys and B-girls became another essential part of the culture.
4. Graffiti
The visual side of Hip-Hop developed its own language through tags, murals, lettering and art.
Together these elements created something larger than a musical genre. Hip-Hop was a culture, and that distinction remains important today.
Because the music industry eventually commercialised rap, but it would never own Hip-Hop.
04 — GRANDMASTER FLASH, AFRIKA BAMBAATAA AND THE EXPANSION OF THE DJ
Kool Herc was already a legend, but he was not alone.
Herc’s reputation and technique inspired future DJ’s across the Bronx including Joseph Saddler aka Grandmaster Flash.
Grandmaster Flash developed increasingly sophisticated techniques for manipulating records and breaks. Using direct drive turntables with a solid platter and calculating the spinback rotations, Flash refined Herc’s Merry-Go-Round into something closer to a technical performance. This he called the quick mix theory.
Then came Grand Wizzard Theodore with the scratch.
Afrika Bambaataa approached the records differently. He was a musical archaeologist before the term existed, earning him the title ‘Master of Records’.
His sets could move between Funk, Soul, Rock, Latin, Kraftwerk and obscure records that the other DJs missed. This would lead us to Electro with artists like Hashim, Cybotron, Captain Rock and The Egyptian Lover. But that's another story for another time.
With the DJ's came the crews.
The DJs became local celebrities, their names known throughout the neighbourhood.
Their sound systems became legendary and the rivalry between DJs encouraged increasingly inventive techniques.
Hip-Hop was evolving long before the record industry understood what was happening.
05 — THE MC TAKES THE MICROPHONE
The early MC was not the star. The DJ was.
The MC was the hype man, there to keep the party moving.
MC’s told stories, injected humour, bragged about their DJ’s and got the crowds engaged with call-and-response.
But as the MC began developing the hype into slick rhymes with longer, more sophisticated verses, the microphone became more important.and MCs became artists in their own right.
DJ’s were now looking to team up with whoever was the best MC
06 — 1979: HIP-HOP LEAVES THE BLOCK
For years Hip-Hop existed primarily as a live culture bringing the community together.
Then the record industry noticed and in 1979 The Fatback Band produced ‘King Tim III’ followed by The Sugarhill Gang with ‘Rapper's Delight’ which became the first international Hip-Hop hit.
The track was built on the groove of Chic's ‘Good Times’, although the Sugar Hill house band recreated the instrumental rather than simply sampling the original recording.
This was when the record industry discoveredHip-Hop. "Rapper's Delight" represented the commercial birth of rap music and the music industry's attempt to package Hip-Hop.
Until now Hip-Hop had been primarily focused on the dancefloor and the Good Times. But a few years later in 1982 Sugar Hill would take Hip-Hop in another direction when they released The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, telling a story that described the darker side of their environment.
Ed Fletcher aka Duke Bootee explained that he came up with the lyrics while looking out his at the decay of Jefferson Park,
Suddenly Hip-Hop could describe the harsh realities of growing up in the Bronx, the poverty, unemployment, drugs, broken neighbourhoods and social frustration.
"Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge."
This record changed expectations.
Rap didn't need to be only about Good Times. It could document reality and tell stories. It could criticise society and call out social injustice, and it could provide a microphone to say out loud what the community had been saying for years as they witnessed the growing decay of Jefferson Park and similar neighbourhoods.
The irony is that one of Hip-Hop's earliest mainstream breakthroughs wasn't gangsta rap. It was a social commentary about a community in decline, and the gangsters, thugs and smugglers were the useful idiots destroying it from within.
