In their own words, 50 influential voices chronicle its evolution. 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. Over five decades, hip-hop has grown from a new art form to a culture-defining superpower. 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. Today, it is known as the “break beat.”īy the summer of 1973, DJ Kool Herc had been using and refining his break-beat style for the better part of a year. 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. Not only is he one of the originators of the musical genre called Hip-Hop and a worldwide musical cultural phenomenon, but his pioneering use of the turntables make him the first DJ to play the turntables as a musical instrument thus helping to elevate the status of the DJ to a masterful. Kool Herc’s contribution to hip-hop was even more fundamental.ĭJ 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 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. Few names have become as well known to music lovers across the globe as that of Grandmaster Flash.

Knowing which records would fill the dance floor and which techniques wowed the most were critical the success of a party. DJs (disc jockeys) like Clive Campbell loved to please their audiences. 11, 1973, inside a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave., a 102-unit. As rap evolved in the 1970s, so did Djing (or deejaying). Herc often emulated the style of Jamaican “selectors” (DJs) by “toasting” (i.e., talking) over the records he spun, but his historical significance has nothing to do with rapping. The musical and cultural movement that would become known to the world as hip-hop began on Aug. The obvious connection of the term breaking is to the word breakbeat, but DJ Kool Herc has commented that the term breaking was slang at the time for getting excited, acting energetically or.

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.īorn and raised to the age of 10 in Kingston, Jamaica, DJ Kool Herc began spinning records at parties and between sets his father’s band played while he was a teenager in the Bronx in the early 1970s. DJ Kool Herc is a Jamaican-American DJ who is responsible for developing the foundational aspects of hip-hop music. Like any style of music, hip hop has roots in other forms, and its evolution was shaped by many different artists, but there’s a case to be made that it came to life precisely on August 11, 1973, at a birthday party in the recreation room of an apartment building in the west Bronx, New York City. The DJ most commonly cited as a pioneer of mixing two records together was Francis Grasso, who worked at downtown disco clubs, such as The Sanctuary and The Haven.

Djing hip hop history