Hip-hop

• 1. Introduction

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  Hip-hop began at a back-to-school party in the recreation room of a building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue on the southwest side of the Bronx. The date, the 11th of August 1973, has been aggressively marketed as the birth of the genre. The host was a young man whose family had emigrated from Jamaica when he was twelve. His sister Cindy Campbell had organized the rent party, and he ran the music. What he did with two turntables that night would ripple out from one borough to nearly every country on the planet. By 2017, hip-hop had become the bestselling genre of popular music in the United States, the first time it topped the rankings in U.S. history. How does a sound made on stolen breaks and looted equipment become a worldwide language? Who decided that rapping, not the DJ, would become the genre's defining feature? And why do artists from Havana to Tampere still trace their debt back to the Black and Latino people of New York?

• 2. A Name From The 17th Century

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  The phrase "hip hop" has been in use since the 17th century, where it meant a succession of hops. In George Villiers's 1671 play The Rehearsal, Prince Volscius leaves a scene awkwardly with one boot on and the other off. The director exclaims that to go off "hip hop, hip hop" is a thousand times better than any conclusion in the world. A variation, "hippity hop", spread widely by the 19th century. A poem from 1882 has four children singing, "Hippity hop to the candy Shop!" It was a common refrain in skipping games. The Dovells planted an early musical seed in their 1963 dance song "You Can't Sit Down", with the line "you gotta slop, bop, flip flop, hip hop, never stop". The version that stuck came from the DJ booth. Lovebug Starsky recalls fumbling a change between records and grabbing the mic, saying "a hip hop, hip hop, de hibbyhibbyhibbyhibby hop". He claimed credit for inventing the name by 1979. Another account places him alongside Keef Cowboy of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, teasing a friend headed into the Army. Kidd Creole remembers Cowboy mimicking an Army cadence: Hip, Hop, Hip, Hop. The disco crowd called them "Hip Hoppers" as an insult. By the time The Sugarhill Gang recorded "Rapper's Delight" in 1979, the phrase was everywhere, opening with "I said a hip-hop, the hippie, the hippie".

• 3. Jive On The Airwaves

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  On the Caribbean island of Jamaica in the late 1950s, AM radio signals from Miami, Florida, carried music far livelier than the staid BBC programming syndicated by the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation. American DJs like Jocko Henderson and Jockey Jack introduced rhythm and blues and jive talking to listeners there. Local DJs answered by building sound systems for outdoor parties, and the jive of American radio transmuted into toasts in Jamaican Patois. Jive talk had powered black-appeal stations across the post-war United States. Its double entendres re-invigorated ratings at flagging outlets, drawing on call and response, signifyin', the dozens, capping, and jazz poetry. WDIA disc jockeys like Nat D. and Rufus Thomas honed their on-air patter while hosting Amateur Night at the Palace Theatre on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. DJs like Chicago's Al Benson, Austin's Doctor Hep Cat, and Atlanta's Jockey Jack spoke the same rhyming, cadence-laden style. One introduction ran, "Here is a guy that will move you in from the outskirts of town because he breathes natural gas." These jive-talking rappers inspired comedians like Rudy Ray Moore, Pigmeat Markham, and Blowfly, along with soul singer James Brown. They have been called the godfathers of hip-hop music.

• 4. Older Than Records

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  Rhythmic speech is an ancient practice, first codified by the Greeks, and it runs through 20th-century Western music from sprechstimme to the talking blues. In African-American music, the roots of rapping trace easily to the griots of West African culture. The gospel group The Jubalaires recorded "Noah" in 1946, a song frequently seen as a forerunner of rap. Muhammad Ali's I Am the Greatest arrived in 1963, and Pigmeat Markham's "Here Comes the Judge" in 1968. Ali's patter was an enormous influence on hip-hop. Known as a rhyming trickster for the funky delivery of his boasts and trash talk, he often improvised his monologues as freestyle, a skill that would prove vital for old-school rappers. In New York City, spoken-word poetry shaped the post-civil rights era. The Last Poets, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, and Gil Scott-Heron helped establish the cultural environment in which hip-hop was created. Jamaican music ran a parallel track with talking records like U-Roy and Peter Tosh's "Righteous Ruler" and King Stitt's "Fire Corner" in 1969. Jamaican engineers were also remixing recordings into new sounds. Duke Reid tweaked knobs over his sound system until a record became unrecognizable, and King Tubby stripped vocals to make new versions. The public appetite grew so strong that singles shipped with the original on one side and the version on the other. This stew of techniques became dub, the strongest artistic precedent for hip-hop.

• 5. Two Turntables And A Break

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  By the 1970s, the Cross Bronx Expressway had cut The Bronx in half, accelerating white flight and concentrating lower-income African American, Latin American, and Caribbean residents in the southern half of the borough. This multi-ethnic working class community is where the genre was born. Disco dominated the era, even on black radio stations chasing suburban audiences, and George Clinton lampooned the streamlined sound as "The Placebo Syndrome" in his P-Funk mythology. Dancers began using the instrumental break in a song to show off their best moves, sometimes waiting through a whole record for it. The practice became breakdancing, and its practitioners became B-boys and B-girls, the B standing for break, beat, battle, or Bronx depending on who used it. At the Plaza Tunnel in the basement of the Concourse Plaza Hotel, DJ John Brown kept crowds moving with records like Jimmy Castor Bunch's "It's Just Begun" and Rare Earth's "Get Ready". DJ Kool Herc found a way to prolong the breaks by crossfading between two copies of the same record. His sound system, built on a McIntosh Laboratory amplifier and two columns of Shure speakers, earned a massive following under the name "The Herculords". His method was crude, often forcing him to talk over a mismatched transition. Grand Wizzard Theodore, Jazzy Jay, and Grandmaster Flash perfected it with needle dropping, cuing breaks precisely in headphones to stretch a breakbeat indefinitely. Reversing a record distorted the sound, and that effect evolved into scratching.

• 6. Parties That Saved Lives

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  Outside the clubs, the block party was the biggest incubator of the genre, with DJs hooking their sound systems up to the street lights. Disco King Mario hosted prominent parties in the early 1970s, relying on the Black Spades, the gang he led from the Bronxdale Houses, to protect his events. A typical hip-hop event was a triple bill of DJ, MC, and breakdancers, with graffiti artists decorating the stage and designing the flyers. Much of the rapping, graffiti, and b-boying drew on the one-upmanship of street gangs. Sensing that violent urges could become creative ones, Afrika Bambaataa founded the Zulu Nation, a loose confederation of street-dance crews, graffiti artists, and rap musicians. Tony Tone of the Cold Crush Brothers said plainly that "hip hop saved a lot of lives". MC Kid Lucky put it another way, noting that people used to break-dance against each other instead of fighting. Women were central from the start. The Funky 4 + 1 featured MC Sha-Rock, and Mercedes Ladies, formed in the Bronx in 1976, were the first all-female group with a DJ. The Sequence, signed by Sugar Hill Records and including Angie Stone, scored the first hip-hop hit by an all-female group with "Funk You Up". During the New York City blackout of 1977, DJ equipment was heavily looted. Kool Herc recalled, "The next day there were a thousand new D.J.'s."

• 7. From The Bronx To The Charts

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  The first commercially released rap song was a B-side. In March 1979, Fatback Band put out "You're My Candy Sweet", and its flip side, "King Tim III (Personality Jock)", is generally considered that milestone. Months later, Sylvia Robinson, singer and owner of Sugar Hill Records, hired a band to recreate Chic's "Good Times" in the studio and assembled The Sugarhill Gang to rap over it. The result, "Rapper's Delight", became a Top 40 single, and what had grown passe in the Bronx exploded across the country. Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, who wrote "Good Times", sued Sugar Hill Records for copyright infringement and won songwriting credit. Mercury Records became the first major label to sign a rapper, releasing Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'" in 1979, which sold 400,000 copies. Blow's "The Breaks" became the first hip-hop single certified gold in 1980. Affordable machines reshaped the sound. The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer launched in 1980 as a commercial failure, then attracted a cult following for its booming bass drum and ended up on more hit records than any other drum machine. Grandmaster Flash's "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" in 1981 was built entirely from sampled tracks. Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force's "Planet Rock" in 1982 fused hip-hop with electronic dance music, drawing on Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express". Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" in 1982 turned the lyrics toward the misery of housing projects, pioneering politically conscious rap.

• 8. Golden Age And The Coastal Feud

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  The new school arrived around 1983 with New York artists like Run-DMC and LL Cool J trading old school's funk breaks for drum machine minimalism and shorter, radio-friendly songs. Run-DMC's Raising Hell became the genre's first platinum album on the 15th of July 1986, carried by the Aerosmith collaboration "Walk This Way". The same year, Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill gave rap its first No. 1 album. The years from 1986 to the mid-1990s became the golden age, an era Rolling Stone described as one where every new single seemed to reinvent the genre. The year 1987 alone produced Boogie Down Productions' Criminal Minded, Public Enemy's Yo! Bum Rush the Show, and Eric B. & Rakim's Paid in Full. Gangsta rap grew alongside it. Schoolly D's "P.S.K. What Does It Mean?" in 1985 is often called the first, and N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton in 1989 established Los Angeles as a rival to New York. Its song "Fuck tha Police" drew a letter from FBI Assistant Director Milt Ahlerich. MC Hammer's Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em became the first hip-hop album certified diamond, selling 18 million units by 1996. Then a lazy media narrative of a coastal feud took hold. Tupac Shakur was shot five times in New York City on the 30th of November 1994, and blamed a cohort including Sean Combs and the Notorious B.I.G. Shakur was killed in Las Vegas on the 7th of September 1996, and the Notorious B.I.G. in Los Angeles on the 9th of March 1997. Their deaths mark the end of the golden age.

  Hip-hop spread from the Bronx to the world, and it is constantly reinvented in nearly every country. In New Orleans, Master P built No Limit Records into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, while Cash Money Records signed a 1998 distribution deal with Universal and a roster including Birdman, Lil Wayne, B.G., and Juvenile. The bling era took its name from B.G.'s 1999 song "Bling Bling". Atlanta came to dominate the 2010s charts with trap music, built on double or triple-time hi-hats, heavy Roland TR-808 kicks, and a dark atmosphere. Many trap artists relied on SoundCloud to release music without a label, including Post Malone, Lil Uzi Vert, and XXXTentacion, whose 2018 album ? became the most streamed rap album of all time on Spotify. The international story runs just as deep. Cuban hip-hop grew during the Special Period after the fall of the Soviet Union. Haitian hip-hop developed in the early 1980s, with Master Dji's songs "Vakans" and "Politik Pa m" popularizing the style before "Rap Kreyol" rose in the late 1990s. The annual Blockfest in Tampere, Finland, is the largest hip-hop event in the Nordic countries. In Toronto, after Drake's success, producers T-Minus and Boi-1da helped launch the Toronto sound. The one thing nearly all these artists share is that they acknowledge their debt to the Black and Latino people in New York who launched the movement.