Coke La Rock

• 1. Introduction

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  Coke La Rock rapped at the earliest parties in The Bronx without anyone in the crowd knowing he was there. He performed out of sight from the audience. The voice filling the room had no name attached to it. La Rock later said he was not there to rap at all. He was just playing around.

  Born on the 24th of April, 1955, with family roots going back to North Carolina, La Rock grew up in The Bronx and became an original member of DJ Kool Herc's MC crew, the Herculoids. He was present at Kool Herc's very first party in 1973, a birthday celebration for Herc's sister Cindy. Some historians credit La Rock as the first MC in the history of hip-hop.

  In 2010, he was inducted into the High Times Counterculture Hall of Fame at the annual Cannabis Cup ceremonies in Amsterdam, nearly four decades after he first appeared on the Bronx music scene.

• 2. A Name From a Dream

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  According to Kool Herc, the name "Coke La Rock" passed through several iterations before it settled. It started as "A-1 Coke," then became "Nasty Coke." The final name came not through any conscious decision but through a dream. The name arrived while La Rock was sleeping, and he kept it. He had performed at roughly five or six of Kool Herc's parties before the dream brought the name. Until then, he had no stage identity at all.

  At Kool Herc's early parties, La Rock's rapping consisted mainly of shout-outs to friends in the room. He later described how the approach evolved. "I pretended dudes had double-parked cars," he recalled. "That was to impress the girls." Something more considered emerged from those spontaneous early shows. La Rock's rapping was always purely improvisational, unlike that of the groups who would follow him onto the Bronx scene.

• 3. Nothing Written Down

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  The Furious Five and the Cold Crush Brothers wrote their rhymes down, rehearsed them, and created elaborate routines. That became the model for hip-hop performance in the years that followed. Coke La Rock worked differently. Every word he rapped was improvised on the spot, with nothing prepared in advance.

  La Rock originated "You rock and you don't stop." He also originated "Hotel, motel, you don't tell, we won't tell." That phrase later appeared, without any credit to him, on "Rapper's Delight," the Sugarhill Gang's first single.

  Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas were two New York City narcotics dealers. La Rock invoked their names when describing what he and Kool Herc had built together. "Me and Herc were to hip-hop what Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas were to drugs," he said. His raps from those mid-1970s years served as a basic model for the artists who came to the Bronx scene. By 1977, the popularity of Kool Herc and his crew was already beginning to wane.

• 4. Walking Away

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  When Kool Herc was stabbed at a party, La Rock went looking to kill the perpetrator. The man was part of a crew called the Executive Playhouse. La Rock tracked down the man's associates at a Bronx pool hall. Those friends had already moved the perpetrator south to avoid a confrontation. La Rock arrived to find no one.

  His son, Donte La Rock, had just been born, and La Rock needed to be home. After the pool hall search came to nothing, he made his decision: he would step away from hip-hop and let the younger generation move in. Murder had become part of the game, and he wanted no part of that. He had had several years at the top of the Bronx scene, and he felt no need to continue.

  A live recording from the Bronx River Centre in 1978 captured the Herculoids performing opposite the L Brothers.

• 5. Specters and Records

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  Gary Harris, who worked at Sugar Hill, the first hip-hop record label, described what had happened to the founders by the early 1980s. "People respected Herc and Coke," he said, "but by the early eighties those guys were like specters. They just weren't visible on the scene anymore."

  Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, two other artists from the same founding scene, both built recording careers. La Rock made no recordings at all.

  In late 2008, what was described as the first-ever recording featuring La Rock was released. The song was called "Hello - Merry Christmas Baby!" Sedgwick & Cedar put it out as part of a holiday compilation meant to pay homage to the birthplace of hip-hop.

  In 1986, Boogie Down Productions released "South Bronx," the opening salvo of the so-called Bridge Wars. In the song, KRS-One rapped: "Now way back in the days when hip-hop began / With Coke La Rock, Kool Herc, and then Bam." La Rock had no connection to KRS-One's DJ, Scott La Rock, despite the shared surname. He also had no early relationship with another MC of the era, T La Rock; the name similarity between them was coincidental.

  In 2021, La Rock returned to the microphone with a verse on DJ Kay Slay's posse track "Rolling 110 Deep." In 2023, he appeared again on "Rolling 200 Deep." A live recording from T-Connection in 1981 featured Kool Herc and Whiz Kid performing with the Herculoids. That recording preserves the sound of the scene that La Rock helped create.