DJ Kool Herc

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  DJ Kool Herc threw a party on the 11th of August, 1973, and the music that came out of it would change the world. The address was 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. The occasion was modest: his younger sister Cindy wanted to earn extra cash for back-to-school clothes. She promoted the event with flyers, organized the room, and even styled her older brother's clothes for the night. He was eighteen years old. What happened at that party was not planned as a cultural turning point. But the way Clive Campbell played records that evening introduced a technique that had never been heard before. He called it the Merry-Go-Round. And it became the engine at the heart of hip hop. How did a teenager from Kingston, Jamaica arrive at a technique that launched an entirely new art form? And why, when hip hop became a commercial force, did its inventor get left behind?

• 2. From Kingston to the Bronx

  ›

  Clive Campbell was the first of six children born to Keith and Nettie Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica. Growing up, he heard the sound systems of neighborhood parties called dance halls, and the distinctive speech style of their DJs, known as toasting. Those early sounds lodged somewhere deep. In November 1967, when Campbell was thirteen, his family emigrated to the Bronx and settled at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. The new neighborhood was nothing like Kingston, and school was harder still. At Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School, his height and demeanor on the basketball court earned him the nickname Hercules. After a fight with bullies, a group called the Five Percenters came to his aid. As Herc later put it, they helped him get an education in New York City street culture. He joined a graffiti crew called the Ex-Vandals and took the name Kool Herc. He also persuaded his father to buy him a copy of "Sex Machine" by James Brown, a record that, as he recalled, not a lot of his friends had, and which they would come to him to hear. That record pointed toward everything that came next.

• 3. The Merry-Go-Round

  ›

  Herc's first sound system was built from two turntables connected to two amplifiers and a Shure Vocal Master PA system with two speaker columns. He played records like James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", Jimmy Castor's "It's Just Begun", and Booker T. and the M.G.'s' "Melting Pot". What he discovered was that dancers went wild for one specific part of a record: a short, heavily percussive section with the vocal stripped away. He called it the "break". By keeping a second copy of the same record ready on a second turntable, he could cue it back to the start of the break the moment the first copy reached the end, stretching what might have been a few seconds into what he described as a five-minute loop of fury. He first introduced this approach into his sets in 1973. The earliest known version of the technique involved playing the break from "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", then cutting to the break from "Bongo Rock" by the Incredible Bongo Band, then switching again to "The Mexican" by the English rock band Babe Ruth. Herc called it the Merry-Go-Round because, in his words, it takes one back and forth with no slack. Music journalist Steven Ivory later wrote that in playing two copies of Brown's 1970 Sex Machine album and running an extended cut 'n' mix of the percussion breakdown, Herc had signaled the birth of hip hop.

• 4. B-Boys and B-Girls

  ›

  The dancers who gathered in front of Herc's turntables developed their own vocabulary of movement to match his breaks. Herc named them break-boys and break-girls, shortened to b-boys and b-girls, terms that remain in use today as official terminology in the sport of breaking. Herc noted that the word breaking carried street meaning beyond the dance floor: it was slang for getting excited, acting energetically, or causing a disturbance. Early b-boy and later DJ innovator Grandmixer DXT described the earliest sessions this way: everybody would form a circle and the B-boys would go into the center. At first the dance was simple, he said, touch your toes, hop, kick out your leg. Then some guy went down, spun around on all fours. Everybody said wow and went home to try to come up with something better. That culture of one-upmanship drove the form forward rapidly. By the early 1980s, the press had labeled the style breakdance, and in 1991 The New York Times described it as an art as demanding and inventive as mainstream dance forms like ballet and jazz. Since the emerging culture still had no agreed name, participants identified simply as b-boys, a usage that stretched beyond dancing to encompass a whole way of being in the world.

• 5. Taking It to the Streets

  ›

  Bronx clubs in this period were dealing with the presence of street gangs, while DJs uptown catered to an older disco crowd with different tastes, and commercial radio addressed a demographic distinct from teenagers in the Bronx. Herc's parties, which his sister Cindy organized and promoted, had a ready-made audience that no one else was serving. As his reputation grew, he moved from the recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue to nearby clubs including the Hevalo, the Twilight Zone, the Executive Playhouse, and the PAL on 183rd Street, as well as high schools like Dodge and Taft. Rapping duties were shared with Coke La Rock and Theodore Puccio. His collective, known as The Herculoids, was augmented by a dancer named Clark Kent and dancers called The Nigga Twins. Herc's sound system became legendary for sheer volume. Writer Nelson George recalled one outdoor schoolyard show where a van pulled up, a group of men set up a table and crates of records, unscrewed the base of a light pole, attached their equipment, drew electricity, and suddenly there was a concert in the schoolyard. George remembered standing watching Herc's hands on the turntables, as many people watching as dancing. Herc also punctuated the music with his own exhortations: Rock on, my mellow; B-boys, b-girls, are you ready, keep on rock steady; You don't stop. These announcements helped set the pattern for what would become rapping.

• 6. The Artists He Inspired

  ›

  Afrika Bambaataa first heard Kool Herc in 1973. At that point Bambaataa was a general in the Black Spades, one of the notorious Bronx gangs. By 1975 he had obtained his own sound system and begun DJing in Herc's style, in the process converting his gang followers to the non-violent Zulu Nation. Writer Steven Hager documented how, for more than five years, the Bronx had lived under the constant threat of street gangs, and then, in 1975, they disappeared almost as quickly as they had arrived, replaced by something that would eventually be called hip hop. Grandmaster Flash, who described Herc as a hero to him, also began DJing in Herc's style in 1975. By 1976 Flash and his MCs The Furious Five were playing to a packed Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Herc began using the Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache" as a break in 1975; it became so central to the culture that it was called the Bronx national anthem, and it remains in circulation in hip hop today. When Sylvia Robinson assembled The Sugarhill Gang in 1979 and recorded "Rapper's Delight", the commercially released era of hip hop arrived. By that year's end, Grandmaster Flash was recording for Enjoy Records, and in 1980, Afrika Bambaataa began recording for Winley. Herc himself made none of those moves.

• 7. The Founder Left Behind

  ›

  Grandmaster Flash suggested that Herc may not have kept pace with refinements in cueing, cutting, and scratching that emerged in the late 1970s. Herc offered a different account. He said he retreated from the scene after being stabbed at the Executive Playhouse while trying to stop a fight, and after one of his venues burned down. By 1980, he had stopped DJing and was working in a record shop in South Bronx. He appeared in the 1984 Orion film Beat Street, playing himself. In the mid-1980s, his father died, and he became addicted to crack cocaine. As he later said of that period: I couldn't cope, so I started medicating. In 1994 he performed on Terminator X and the Godfathers of Threatt's album Super Bad. In 2005 he wrote the foreword to Jeff Chang's book Can't Stop Won't Stop. In early 2011, he fell gravely ill and lacked health insurance. He had surgery for kidney stones at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, but a follow-up surgery was complicated by his having missed several appointments; the hospital requested a deposit before proceeding. He and his family set up an official website describing his medical situation and establishing a larger goal: the DJ Kool Herc Fund, aimed at pioneering long-term health care solutions. In April 2013 he recovered from surgery and moved into post-medical care. In May 2019 he released his first vinyl record, a collaboration with Mr. Green. On the 3rd of November, 2023, Campbell was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Musical Influence Award category, the institution's formal acknowledgment of the art form he started in a Bronx apartment building fifty years before.

• 8. 1520 Sedgwick Avenue

  ›

  Since 2007, Herc has worked on a campaign to preserve 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as affordable housing. The building was at risk of being sold to private developers and removed from its status as a Mitchell-Lama affordable housing property. In the summer of 2007, New York state officials declared 1520 Sedgwick Avenue the birthplace of hip hop and nominated it to national and state historic registers. In February 2008, the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development ruled against the proposed sale, citing that the proposed purchase price was inconsistent with the use of property as a Mitchell-Lama affordable housing development. It was the first time the department had so ruled in such a case. The same year that Herc began his preservation campaign, he also became involved in efforts to have hip hop commemorated at the Smithsonian Institution museums. Time magazine, which had nicknamed him the Founding Father of Hip Hop and called him a nascent cultural hero, placed him at the center of a story that began in that building's recreation room, with two turntables, a Shure PA system, and a teenager who had figured out how to make a break last forever.