A back-to-school party in the Bronx
On 11 August 1973, a teenager called Cindy Campbell held a back-to-school party in the recreation room of a block of flats on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Tickets were 25 cents for girls and 50 for boys, and her brother Clive — known as Kool Herc — played the records.
He had noticed that the dancers went wildest during the 'break', the few seconds when the singing stops and the drums take over. So he bought two copies of the same record, put one on each TURNTABLE, and switched between them to LOOP that break for as long as he liked. Everything else was built on top of that trick, and the building is now marked as the birthplace of hip-hop.
The scratch was an accident
Grand Wizzard Theodore was around twelve, practising with his records far too loudly, when his mother shouted at him to turn it down. He slapped his hand on the record to stop it while the needle was still in the groove, heard the noise it made, and kept working at it until he could do it in time with the music. The SCRATCH became an instrument of its own, and DJs now compete in world championships judged on it.
Grandmaster Flash was solving a different problem at the same time, working out how to spot the exact start of a break so he could jump between two copies without dropping a beat.
Getting rap onto a record
For years this was live music only. Then in 1979 a small label assembled a group called the Sugarhill Gang and released 'Rapper's Delight'. One member was recruited while rapping in the pizza shop where he worked, and some of the rhymes he used came from another MC's notebook — borrowed, and never paid for. The record ran about fifteen minutes, sold millions, and proved that rap could be sold in shops.
The craft has its own vocabulary. A RAPPER's FLOW is the way the words ride the BEAT; BARS are the lines; a FREESTYLE is invented on the spot; and a CIPHER is the circle of people taking turns, each picking up where the last one left off.
Six seconds that built a thousand songs
A SAMPLE is a piece of an old recording lifted and reused in a new one, and producers hunt for them in forgotten records. The most reused of all is a six-second drum break from 'Amen, Brother', a B-side released by a soul group called the Winstons in 1969. Chopped up and sped up, it turns up in thousands of hip-hop and dance tracks.
The drummer who played it, Gregory Coleman, never received royalties for it, and copyright law took years to catch up with the technique. Sampling now usually means paying for permission first — which is why some producers prefer to play a new BASSLINE or program a SNARE themselves.
Four elements, and an Olympic sport
Hip-hop is usually described as having four elements: DJing, rapping, BREAKDANCE and GRAFFITI. All four came out of the same streets and the same parties, and all four travelled worldwide.
Two numbers show how far. In 2017 hip-hop and R&B became the most-listened-to music in the United States, overtaking rock for the first time. And in 2024 breaking — the dance invented in those Bronx break sections fifty years earlier — was competed at the Olympic Games in Paris.