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Celebrating 50 Years of Hip-Hop: From The Bronx Streets to Worldwide Impact [1]

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Date: 2023-08-11

Let’s keep it underground. Nobody outside the Bronx would like this stuff anyway. — Grandmaster Flash

Let's make the 50th Anniversary of Hip-Hop a time to engage. Look to the future, support, effect change!—Ice-T

August 11, 2023 is widely considered the day hip-hop was born. “In the rec room of an apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue, [in The Bronx] an eighteen-year-old Clive Campbell throws a back-to-school party with his younger sister Cindy. Friends and neighbors dance to the familiar sounds of artists like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and The Meters — only something has changed…” from The 50thAnniversary Of Hip Hop website (https://the50thanniversaryofhip-hop.com/).

“Behind two turntables, Clive, better known as DJ Kool Herc, plays two copies of the same record, a technique known as the merry-go-round where one moves back and forth, from one record to the next, looping the percussion portions of each track to keep the beat alive. And amongst this community of dancers, artists, musicians and poets…”

The Washington Post’s Timothy Bella further explained (https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/08/10/hip-hop-50-kool-herc-cindy-campbell-bronx-party/):

Cindy, hoping to raise money for new school clothes “turned to her 18-year-old brother, Clive, whom the community knew as DJ Kool Herc. [He had a] booming sound system in his room and [he was] the cheapest music option available for a party on Aug. 11, 1973, that was charging admission of 25 cents for girls and 50 cents for boys. ‘I’m thinking, ‘How can I cut my costs?’ … When you have your party, you got to have the music. So I said, ‘It’ll be free because I don’t have to pay for it.’ Campbell, now 65, recalled in a 2021 interview with the Breakdown FM podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SMVGLEr6nA). ‘I was cutting costs!’”

In the Netflix series Hip-Hop Evolution (https://www.netflix.com/title/80141782) Kool Herc pointed out that “At the time, the gangs were terrorizing the house parties and stuff, so we asked, ‘Could we give a party?’ They liked what I was playing and the rest is history.’”

“Herc saw how the scene was hopping during any song’s break — usually the drumbeat or rhythm interludes of soul and funk records — and the DJ went from one record’s break to another, much to the delight of the crowd. It’s a legacy that paved the way for hip-hop over the next half-century, Dan Charnas, a historian and author of the 2010 book The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (https://www.amazon.com/Big-Payback-History-Business-Hip-Hop/dp/0451234782), toldthe Post’s Bella.

“When we commemorate Aug. 11, 1973, what we’re saying is that the break is the most important or fundamental genius of hip-hop,” Charnas said. “Hip-hop arises out of that particular moment of inspiration.”

From its inception, hip-hop unleashed a horde of haters, deniers, skeptics, and naysayers, all arguing that hip-hop would never become a lasting music genre. Big Daddy Kane, a legendary Brooklyn rapper, recently told the San Francisco Chronicle that “When you listened to people talk about it and describe it, saying it’s not going to last, it’s just a fad, it’s not real music, it was the same terms they used about rock ‘n’ roll.” Kane added: “Hip-hop was new and rebellious, and I could see it was going to last.”

“Having no Kool Herc or Cindy Campbell in the history of hip-hop is like not having Chuck Berry and Little Richard in rock-and-roll, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday in jazz, not having the Beatles in the British invasion,” Kevin Powell, a poet who is writing a biography about Tupac Shakur, told The Washington Post. “People need to understand that.”

After emigrating from Jamaica, the Campbells’ found themselves in a borough facing a world of hurt; poverty, urban decay, arson fires, and abandonment by the government. According to a November 1972 New York Times article, the Bronx had experienced “the smallest slice of prosperity and the largest proportion of poor families among the 19 counties of the tri-state metropolitan region and among all 62 counties of New York State.”

Britannica defines hip-hop (https://www.britannica.com/art/hip-hop):

“Although widely considered a synonym for rap music, the term hip-hop refers to a complex culture comprising four elements: deejaying, or “turntabling”; rapping, also known as “MCing” or “rhyming”; graffiti painting, also known as “graf” or “writing”; and “B-boying,” which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language that philosopher Cornel West described as “postural semantics.” (A fifth element, “knowledge of self/consciousness,” is sometimes added to the list of hip-hop elements, particularly by socially conscious hip-hop artists and scholars.)”

Artists and fans from around the world are celebrating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary with shows, exhibits, playlists and re-listening to albums and artists who helped shape a culture through samples, shout-outs and collaborations.

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