The myth
The story of hip hop’s genesis is a legend as much shrouded in mythology as that of punk and the Sex Pistols’ gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester three years later. That gig has become legendary as the birth of post-punk, indie and the entire Manchester scene. Thousands have since claimed they were there – although the actual number that attended is better estimated at between 40 and 100. What makes these tales so important?
“Every culture needs a creation myth”. “These stories tell us about the kinds of values we want to transmit. I think the story of Herc and Cindy's party, in ways we perhaps don't realise, speaks to the need for joy amidst turmoil, the power of creativity against destruction, the ‘started from the bottom’ ethic that youth will always find a way to express itself.”
Remembering and preserving the legacy of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, DJ Kool Herc and the night of 11 August 1973 is a way to keep these positive values alive. “The Bronx won the rights to the DJ history through constant repetition of the first time DJ Kool Herc connected his sound system and mixed records” and hip hop’s pioneers transformed “the land of the ghetto into the land of myth and the future.”
Looking back to hip hop’s early days is also a way of looking forward.
“I believe in the values that have sustained hip hop from the beginning: inclusion, recognition, creativity, and transformation. In the end, hip hop is about teenagers, it's about youth. And as long as they are taking those values forward, hip hop won't die.”
The party
Considering the event is thought to be the birth of a globe-spanning, music-based culture almost half a century old, the ambitions that lay behind it were endearingly modest. Cindy Campbell just wanted to raise a bit of money before the new school term began to buy some clothes from boutiques on Delancey Street, 10 miles south on Manhattan's Lower East Side, rather than wear the same clothes as her classmates who'd be shopping nearer home. So she hired the first-floor recreation room of the 100-unit apartment building they lived in, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, and threw a party. The main attraction? Her 16-year-old brother, Clive – his height and muscles earned him the nickname Hercules – and his record collection.
The flyer was hand-drawn, on lined index file cards. "A DJ Kool Herc Party," it read, in a quick pencil approximation of the elaborate spraycan slogans then appearing all over the Bronx: "Back to school jam." The 9pm-4am party wasn't going to break anyone's bank: admission charges were 50c for "fellas", 25c for ladies. Clive and Cindy's dad got the drinks from a local cash-and-carry; their mum made some food.
Clive's friend, Coke La Rock, decided to shout out names of other friends over the drum-heavy introductions and instrumental breakdowns Clive had decided to play. The room held 300 people; they all had a great time. No one had heard of DJ Kool Herc before that night: the next day, he was famous across the Bronx. Soon, he'd be hailed as the architect of an entirely new music.
Herc's playlist was eclectic, and paid little heed to the trends of the day. A recent not-quite-hit such as It's Just Begun by the Jimmy Castor Bunch became an anthem for what was soon a large and growing audience. He'd play James Brown, but not the singles – rather, raw cuts from live albums. And when he came across a record with the right ingredients, it didn't matter what genre it came from - English prog rockers Babe Ruth and the Edgar Winter Group's Frankenstein got spun in Herc's sets, too.
The story of hip hop’s genesis is a legend as much shrouded in mythology as that of punk and the Sex Pistols’ gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester three years later. That gig has become legendary as the birth of post-punk, indie and the entire Manchester scene. Thousands have since claimed they were there – although the actual number that attended is better estimated at between 40 and 100. What makes these tales so important?
“Every culture needs a creation myth”. “These stories tell us about the kinds of values we want to transmit. I think the story of Herc and Cindy's party, in ways we perhaps don't realise, speaks to the need for joy amidst turmoil, the power of creativity against destruction, the ‘started from the bottom’ ethic that youth will always find a way to express itself.”
Remembering and preserving the legacy of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, DJ Kool Herc and the night of 11 August 1973 is a way to keep these positive values alive. “The Bronx won the rights to the DJ history through constant repetition of the first time DJ Kool Herc connected his sound system and mixed records” and hip hop’s pioneers transformed “the land of the ghetto into the land of myth and the future.”
Looking back to hip hop’s early days is also a way of looking forward.
“I believe in the values that have sustained hip hop from the beginning: inclusion, recognition, creativity, and transformation. In the end, hip hop is about teenagers, it's about youth. And as long as they are taking those values forward, hip hop won't die.”
The party
Considering the event is thought to be the birth of a globe-spanning, music-based culture almost half a century old, the ambitions that lay behind it were endearingly modest. Cindy Campbell just wanted to raise a bit of money before the new school term began to buy some clothes from boutiques on Delancey Street, 10 miles south on Manhattan's Lower East Side, rather than wear the same clothes as her classmates who'd be shopping nearer home. So she hired the first-floor recreation room of the 100-unit apartment building they lived in, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, and threw a party. The main attraction? Her 16-year-old brother, Clive – his height and muscles earned him the nickname Hercules – and his record collection.
The flyer was hand-drawn, on lined index file cards. "A DJ Kool Herc Party," it read, in a quick pencil approximation of the elaborate spraycan slogans then appearing all over the Bronx: "Back to school jam." The 9pm-4am party wasn't going to break anyone's bank: admission charges were 50c for "fellas", 25c for ladies. Clive and Cindy's dad got the drinks from a local cash-and-carry; their mum made some food.
Clive's friend, Coke La Rock, decided to shout out names of other friends over the drum-heavy introductions and instrumental breakdowns Clive had decided to play. The room held 300 people; they all had a great time. No one had heard of DJ Kool Herc before that night: the next day, he was famous across the Bronx. Soon, he'd be hailed as the architect of an entirely new music.
Herc's playlist was eclectic, and paid little heed to the trends of the day. A recent not-quite-hit such as It's Just Begun by the Jimmy Castor Bunch became an anthem for what was soon a large and growing audience. He'd play James Brown, but not the singles – rather, raw cuts from live albums. And when he came across a record with the right ingredients, it didn't matter what genre it came from - English prog rockers Babe Ruth and the Edgar Winter Group's Frankenstein got spun in Herc's sets, too.
The man
Born 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. 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. Kool Herc's contribution to hip hop was even more fundamental.
DJ 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 [to] 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. 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. He called his trick the Merry Go-Round. Today, it is known as the "break beat."
Never a showman on the decks, never a rapper or producer, Herc missed out on the money. His innovations created an art form that brought fame and fortune to the thousands who followed him, yet in January 2011 he was forced to seek donations from friends, fans and well-wishers to pay his medical bills. In 2007 he campaigned, successfully, for 1520 Sedgwick Ave to be officially recognised as hip-hop's birthplace; today he campaigns for universal healthcare.
The movement
Hip hop signaled a profound shift at the beginning of the 1970s, following the FBI’s suppression of late ‘60s radical black groups and the waning of gang wars. Rather than taking political action, a new generation expressed itself through DJing, MCing, b-boying/b-girling (breakdancing), and graffiti, the ‘four elements’ of hip hop. Artist Fab 5 Freddy, who coined this term, argued that the looping interactivity of the ‘four elements’ proved hip hop went beyond a purely musical or artistic movement – it was an entire culture.
“Hip hoppers literally mapped onto the consciousness of the world a place and an identity for themselves as the originators of an exciting new art form” . “They created value out of races and places that had seemed to offer only devastation.”
Kool Herc, along with Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, is one of the ‘three kings’, the ‘holy trinity’ of hip hop’s early days. But Herc’s story, insists Chang, is where it all started: “Without DJ Kool Herc, we wouldn't be talking about [hip hop] now, 40 years later, all around the world”.
Born 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. 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. Kool Herc's contribution to hip hop was even more fundamental.
DJ 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 [to] 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. 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. He called his trick the Merry Go-Round. Today, it is known as the "break beat."
Never a showman on the decks, never a rapper or producer, Herc missed out on the money. His innovations created an art form that brought fame and fortune to the thousands who followed him, yet in January 2011 he was forced to seek donations from friends, fans and well-wishers to pay his medical bills. In 2007 he campaigned, successfully, for 1520 Sedgwick Ave to be officially recognised as hip-hop's birthplace; today he campaigns for universal healthcare.
The movement
Hip hop signaled a profound shift at the beginning of the 1970s, following the FBI’s suppression of late ‘60s radical black groups and the waning of gang wars. Rather than taking political action, a new generation expressed itself through DJing, MCing, b-boying/b-girling (breakdancing), and graffiti, the ‘four elements’ of hip hop. Artist Fab 5 Freddy, who coined this term, argued that the looping interactivity of the ‘four elements’ proved hip hop went beyond a purely musical or artistic movement – it was an entire culture.
“Hip hoppers literally mapped onto the consciousness of the world a place and an identity for themselves as the originators of an exciting new art form” . “They created value out of races and places that had seemed to offer only devastation.”
Kool Herc, along with Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, is one of the ‘three kings’, the ‘holy trinity’ of hip hop’s early days. But Herc’s story, insists Chang, is where it all started: “Without DJ Kool Herc, we wouldn't be talking about [hip hop] now, 40 years later, all around the world”.