Hip-hop’s 50th anniversary shines a light on its New York City birth
ON AUGUST 11TH 1973 Cindy Campbell, hoping to raise money to buy school clothes, hosted a “jam” in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the apartment building where she and her family lived. Admission for girls was 25 cents. For “fellas” it was 50 cents. Her 18-year-old brother, Clive, better known as Kool Herc, dj’d.
His turntables, mixer, enormous speakers and amplifiers pumped out tunes and beats into the wee hours. He repeated instrumental breaks to lengthen the most danceable part of songs. The “break” dancers became known as b-boys and b-girls. A friend, Coke La Rock, hyped up the crowd. It was not called hip-hop yet, but that “jam” is widely recognised as the start of a culture and society-changing type of music that became more than just a genre.
The Bronx was the centre of the new movement. DJs played on the city’s streets and in its parks, siphoning electricity from lamp-posts to pump up the volume. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five attracted throngs of fans first at block parties, parks and then at clubs. Before he was even a teenager, Grandmaster Wizzard Theodore invented record “scratching”. Most songs were party anthems until Melle Mel’s “the Message”, hip-hop’s first socially conscious song and one of the best hip-hop singles ever. Its scathing lyrics depicted a bleak Bronx and resonated beyond New York’s five boroughs. “Broken glass everywhere. People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care… Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge”.
2023-08-10 07:34:36
Article from www.economist.com
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