A comprehensive guide to the origin/roots of HipHop's elements (all verified facts w/ OG interviews)

[Neuromancer]

here's a little something to get you started

I can't rep right now but I will.

 

[SupaDupaFresh]

dude has no logic rooted in reality to his claims.....he just wants to believe that old origin story from the mid 1980s that's been repeated over and over

Youre own fukking book clips confirm that prototypical rapping and DJing originated with Herc. Seems like you just post a bunch of shyt, selectively pick and choose who and what you want based on your own insecure "aDoS pRiDe" agenda of undermining Caribbean influence to modern music, and then hope no one realizes.

Herc was the original Hip Hop DJ. Get over it. Everyone knows it was an accumulation of New York DJing culture before and at the time. All this extra shyt looks sad.

Im happy to read these anecodtes, which I am, they are great nuggest of knowledge, but I do see how any of it debunks what everyone already knows. You can acknowledge and celebrate the pioneers of the genre without all this hashtag ados, fba, h1, diaspora rivalry, "everyone jackin on us!!!11!" nonsense.

 

[Neuromancer]

Youre own fukking book clips confirm that prototypical rapping and DJing originated with Herc. Seems like you just post a bunch of shyt, selectively pick and choose who and what you want based on your own insecure "aDoS pRiDe" agenda of undermining Caribbean influence to modern music, and then hope no one realizes.

Herc was the original Hip Hop DJ. Get over it. Everyone knows it was an accumulation of New York DJing culture before and at the time. All this extra shyt looks sad.

Im happy to read these anecodtes, which I am, they are great nuggest of knowledge, but I do see how any of it debunks what everyone already knows. You can acknowledge and celebrate the pioneers of the genre without all this hashtag ados, fba, h1, diaspora rivalry, "everyone jackin on us!!!11!" nonsense.

This isn't the first time I've heard DJ Hollywood created the Blue print for Herc. So there is something there. None of the info he posted is anecdotal since Hip-hop as an extension of black culture is an oral tradition like all other diasporia history and tradition. So the words of the people who were there are the only truth we have.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Youre own fukking book clips confirm that prototypical rapping and DJing originated with Herc.

No it didn't. Straight from herc's own mouth on when he first heard/saw rapping

Quote From Kool Herc on how rapping started (remember, Herc and Melle Mel are both from the West Bronx)

Spoiler

With that in mind I wondered something: If Coke La Rock (Kool Herc’s MC) was just spittin’ little phrases on the mike, not full all out rhymes as we know it today, then who was the first real MC spittin’ lyric for lyric on beat with a continuous flow?

“Mr. Herc,” I asked him as I scratched my head and searched for the right words. “I’m curious about something.” I said, “Who was the first person that you saw rap as we know it today?”

Just then at that moment a warm smile enveloped Kool Herc’s street hardened face. He looked out the window across the street at Lake Merritt, almost as if he was looking back at that day, in a quiet voice he said, “It was Mele Mel… Mele Mel and Kid Creole. They were at a boxing gym on 169th St, in the Fort Apache area, as a matter of fact, it was the last place that I seen Big Pun alive at.”

In a quiet and almost somber voice he recalled the events while sometimes taking a pause to look down at his battle scarred hands. “They was in the middle of a boxing ring with these big Afro’s… Kid Creole, as little as he is, had one too. Flash was behind them cuttin’. When I saw them I just smiled cause I knew where they got it from…they got it from me. And they knew that they got it from me. I wasn’t mad. Mele Mel saw me in the crowd and just nodded at me. I laughed to myself.”

It must’ve been one helluva moment.

Hanging above the dimly lit gym was a thick cloud of smoke; it was a pungent mixture of cigarettes and reefer laced with angel dust. Stoned out dust heads tripped out as the dazzling display of flashing lights played psychedelic tricks on their minds. In the red light haze surrounded by stick up kids, gangsters and hyperactive b-boys Kool Herc got to see the first steps of his creation taking on a new dimension, as brothers Mele Mel and Creole were laying down the foundation for rap, as we know it today..

Hip Hop 101A: Once Upon A Time In The Bronx: The Rise of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

Seems like you just post a bunch of shyt, selectively pick and choose who and what you want based on your own insecure "aDoS pRiDe" agenda of undermining Caribbean influence to modern music, and then hope no one realizes.

stop it

Another thing Herc said/admitted to:

herc says Dj John Brown was playing funk breaks in 1970 at Plaza disco

and at the same club, cats were going off doing breakdancing while Dj John was mc'ing!!!!!! This is also confirmed by the grafitti artist, Phase 2 who Herc ran with (Ex Vandals)

Herc was the original Hip Hop DJ. Get over it.

sorry but it's not correct; too many people have pointed this out to be a myth. What is more correct is that Herc was following in an established culture and made his mark in the WEST BRONX with his only rival on that side being Dj Smokey.

Everyone knows it was an accumulation of New York DJing culture before and at the time. All this extra shyt looks sad.

Im happy to read these anecodtes, which I am, they are great nuggest of knowledge, but I do see how any of it debunks what everyone already knows. You can acknowledge and celebrate the pioneers of the genre without all this hashtag ados, fba, h1, diaspora rivalry, "everyone jackin on us!!!11!" nonsense.

 

[K.O.N.Y]

No it didn't. Straight from herc's own mouth on when he first heard/saw rapping

Quote From Kool Herc on how rapping started (remember, Herc and Melle Mel are both from the West Bronx)

Spoiler

I really don’t see how the conversation extends beyond this

lol undermining one’s culture just to persue some pan African fiction, is laughable

I really don’t see how the conversation extends beyond this

lol undermining one’s culture just to persue some pan African fiction, is laughable[

 

[Wear My Dawg's Hat]

I tend to agree with Caz, DXT and Nelson George that the 1977 NYC Blackout was the jump off point for the spreading of the b boy/deejay scene throughout the city.

The tv stations were down for about two days. When they came back on air, it was 24/7 coverage of looting everywhere.

We couldn't leave the house to go outside to play that week. And it was hot as hell.


The 1977 NYC blackout and the hip-hop spark that ignited soon after | amNewYork

The 1977 NYC blackout and the hip-hop spark that ignited soon after
By Robert Spuhler
July 12, 2017


Grandmaster Caz thought he had fried the Bronx’s grid.


He was all set up, along with his crewmate Disco Wiz, for a DJ battle against the Master Plan Bunch at the Slattery Playground Basketball Courts in the Bronx. But when he put on his second record, 40 years ago Thursday, something went wrong.

“The turntable stopped spinning, the amps went off, the equipment went off,” he says. “We thought we blew out the power! And it didn’t just get dark, it was like poof! Poof! Poof! Poof! One light after another, down the street, until the whole street was dark.”

What he didn’t know was that, at that exact moment, lights were going “poof” all across New York City. It was the beginning of what is now known as the 1977 blackout and a moment that helped evolve an art movement in the Bronx: hip-hop.

In assessing the effect that the city’s blackout had on the culture, it’s important to understand just how small hip-hop was in 1977. It’s said that one could possibly count the number of crews, usually made up of DJs alone, on two hands.

“I pretty much was familiar with everybody who had a name,” Caz says. “There’s levels to everything … but as far as everybody who was established, doing it, taking equipment out, playing in parks, it was a pretty small community and everybody knew who everybody was.”

On the night of July 13, 1977, an act of nature started to change that. Lightning struck multiple power generators, causing the backups and diversion plants to overload. A financially-stricken city, already on edge during the Summer of Sam, reached a breaking point. By about 9:30, the majority of NYC went dark and parts turned chaotic. Around 16,000 stores were looted, and more than 1,000 fires were set, according to contemporaneous reports. The total cost of the damage was estimated to be more than $300 million.


Caz himself got in on the action, stealing a mixer. And, Caz recalls, he wasn’t alone.

“There was a large amount of DJs after that because equipment became more accessible,” he says. “That’s not to say that they went on to become superstars or anything like that. A lot of that equipment got sold or stolen. But it did increase the number of people who had access to DJ equipment.”

An altruistic “sharing economy” also existed at the time, author and hip-hop scholar Joe Schloss says, that got turntables, mixers and speakers into the hands of those who would use them.

And with DJs working in crews, very often they’d be able to cobble together a full sound system among themselves.


“People already had this kind of infrastructure in place to maximize the resources,” he says. “Even if not that many people got equipment from the blackout, whatever they did get could have been that much more of a tipping point than it might seem.”

It is, of course, impossible to quantify the exact effect of the blackout on hip-hop music. While legends like Caz and Clark Kent (who said in a podcast interview with Juan Epstein that he stole his first turntable during the looting) may have gotten in on the action, most DJs who got their start thanks to events of that night have been lost to time.

“It’s just such an amazing, fertile spark of a moment for so many different movements in a way,” says T Cooper who, along with his wife Allison Glock-Cooper, wrote the episode of Netflix’s “The Get Down” that dealt with the blackout. “I love the idea of a lightning bolt creating too much energy, and then out of it, all these people tap a little bit into that energy.”

And even if the impact can’t be quantified, the story itself reflects a certain emotional truth about hip-hop.

“So much of hip-hop is about not playing by the rules of the rest of society,” Schloss says. “And part of justifying that is saying, ‘If we’re not going to be treated fairly under those rules, what do we owe them? Why shouldn’t we come up with our own system?’”

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I tend to agree with Caz, DXT and Nelson George that the 1977 NYC Blackout was the jump off point for the spreading of the b boy/deejay scene throughout the city.

The tv stations were down for about two days. When they came back on air, it was 24/7 coverage of looting everywhere.

We couldn't leave the house to go outside to play that week. And it was hot as hell.


The 1977 NYC blackout and the hip-hop spark that ignited soon after | amNewYork

The 1977 NYC blackout and the hip-hop spark that ignited soon after
By Robert Spuhler
July 12, 2017


Grandmaster Caz thought he had fried the Bronx’s grid.

Spoiler

He was all set up, along with his crewmate Disco Wiz, for a DJ battle against the Master Plan Bunch at the Slattery Playground Basketball Courts in the Bronx. But when he put on his second record, 40 years ago Thursday, something went wrong.

“The turntable stopped spinning, the amps went off, the equipment went off,” he says. “We thought we blew out the power! And it didn’t just get dark, it was like poof! Poof! Poof! Poof! One light after another, down the street, until the whole street was dark.”

What he didn’t know was that, at that exact moment, lights were going “poof” all across New York City. It was the beginning of what is now known as the 1977 blackout and a moment that helped evolve an art movement in the Bronx: hip-hop.

Spoiler

In assessing the effect that the city’s blackout had on the culture, it’s important to understand just how small hip-hop was in 1977. It’s said that one could possibly count the number of crews, usually made up of DJs alone, on two hands.

“I pretty much was familiar with everybody who had a name,” Caz says. “There’s levels to everything … but as far as everybody who was established, doing it, taking equipment out, playing in parks, it was a pretty small community and everybody knew who everybody was.”

On the night of July 13, 1977, an act of nature started to change that. Lightning struck multiple power generators, causing the backups and diversion plants to overload. A financially-stricken city, already on edge during the Summer of Sam, reached a breaking point. By about 9:30, the majority of NYC went dark and parts turned chaotic. Around 16,000 stores were looted, and more than 1,000 fires were set, according to contemporaneous reports. The total cost of the damage was estimated to be more than $300 million.


Caz himself got in on the action, stealing a mixer. And, Caz recalls, he wasn’t alone.

“There was a large amount of DJs after that because equipment became more accessible,” he says. “That’s not to say that they went on to become superstars or anything like that. A lot of that equipment got sold or stolen. But it did increase the number of people who had access to DJ equipment.”

An altruistic “sharing economy” also existed at the time, author and hip-hop scholar Joe Schloss says, that got turntables, mixers and speakers into the hands of those who would use them.

And with DJs working in crews, very often they’d be able to cobble together a full sound system among themselves.


“People already had this kind of infrastructure in place to maximize the resources,” he says. “Even if not that many people got equipment from the blackout, whatever they did get could have been that much more of a tipping point than it might seem.”

It is, of course, impossible to quantify the exact effect of the blackout on hip-hop music. While legends like Caz and Clark Kent (who said in a podcast interview with Juan Epstein that he stole his first turntable during the looting) may have gotten in on the action, most DJs who got their start thanks to events of that night have been lost to time.

“It’s just such an amazing, fertile spark of a moment for so many different movements in a way,” says T Cooper who, along with his wife Allison Glock-Cooper, wrote the episode of Netflix’s “The Get Down” that dealt with the blackout. “I love the idea of a lightning bolt creating too much energy, and then out of it, all these people tap a little bit into that energy.”

And even if the impact can’t be quantified, the story itself reflects a certain emotional truth about hip-hop.

“So much of hip-hop is about not playing by the rules of the rest of society,” Schloss says. “And part of justifying that is saying, ‘If we’re not going to be treated fairly under those rules, what do we owe them? Why shouldn’t we come up with our own system?’”

this part of docu touches on that day within the frame of hiphop

 

[K.O.N.Y]

I’m not sure if you already covered it in the op

but a section on just Sound SYSTEMs would be dope

@IllmaticDelta

 

[Asicz]

@IllmaticDelta Can you sum up your idea of the orgin and originator of Hip Hop music in one post?

 

[Asicz]

No "anecdotal ramblings" when the sources are from the OG's who were actually there in the 1970s when the culture was born. You can only blame yourself for taking those hiphop false origin stories from the mid-1980s as fact because people purposely went out of their way to not mention certain pioneers so they could hog all the glory and maintain a certain narrative. How much more facts do you need from the OG's to realize we've been getting fed BS?

Flash himself said no one at Herc's parties was rapping; they just did freelance talking (Coke La Roc)

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Grandmaster Caz flat out said Dj Hollwood laid the blueprint for rapping

Caz:

"Dj Hollywood was the blueprint for the syncopated (rapping) style"

Breh can you please provide the name of the source of the scanned page document you posted here?

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I’m not sure if you already covered it in the op

but a section on just Sound SYSTEMs would be dope

@IllmaticDelta

I haven't see any real in depth descriptions of what the Bronx "hiphop" dj's had. You usually get general descriptions based on power of the system. From what I've seen, the top Bronx sound systems belonged to Herc (West Bronx), Disco King Mario (south east bronx), Kool Dee (South east Bronx) and Dj Breakout & Baron (North Bronx). Most descriptions of Baambattas, Caz and Flash describe their sh1t as subpar and pieced together. Here are some quotes:

Raheim from the Furious Five

The little bros were on when I walked into the party , Angel Dust permeated the air ; the walls were sweating because the place was jammed packed. The Little Bros set up was Peavey columns , and it seemed like they were rocking the joint....everybody was enjoying the music that they were playing . Sha Rock & KK were on the stage standing around , and Breakout got on the tables. His sound system was massive. I had never seen a sound system like this before , and the only ones equal at the time were Infinity Machine from Queens , Disco Twins also from Queens , Kool Herc and Disco King Mario. I remember Breakouts tweeters were on two ropes spanning the width of the room, held up by 2 horns on tripods on either side of the room . Breakout was listening to the headphones cueing up a record...he picked up the mic and said "Little Bros - the highs in your eyes" he turned up the music and all you heard were the tweeters . The volume of those alone interfered with the Little Bros system. Then Breakout said "feel the horns" and it sounded like a 30 piece marching band was in the spot. After that he said "feel the bass" and then it was over ...then when Baron got on he handed me a mic and I said some stuff , and they didn't want me to put the mic down. From that night on I was down.

RAHIEM INTERVIEW With JayQuan

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Sha Rock

Q - At one point it was about the crews sound system also right?



A - To be honest the Funky 4 and Brothers Disco had the best system. It was the loudest and clearest. At first Mario had a good system , and we learned from him. We invested our money in a good system. We had the clearest most crisp system , that we called Sasquash. We had the tin barrel garbage cans , and made speakers out of them , and we had tweeters and all that. You didn’t hear static or muffling – none of that. We had the best system – no ifs ands or buts about it. Did someone else say that they had the best?



(interviewer) No. everyone that I ever talked to said that you had the best. That’s undisputed.

Luminary Icon Sha Rock By JayQuan

Baam getting power from Mario

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Herc drowning out Smokey in the West Bronx

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according to some Herc just copied what he saw in Bronxdale and ended up gettiing a similar set up as Kool D

Spoiler

Dj Kool D was a professional club DJ in brooklyn and traveled around with Pete Dj Jones (brooklynite who traveled to the bronx) and Grandmaster Flowers (also a brooklynite) before he moved to the Bronx

Spoiler

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From what I gathered mobile jocks, soundsystems and disco clubs weren't really a thing in the Bronx like they were in Queens, Brooklyn and Harlem.

Spoiler

talking about the bronx right here:

" they had to piece together sh1t...they didn't even have real sound systems compared to Queens"

Spoiler

and

the bronx guys openly admit to the queens guys having the soundsystem game on smash lol

 

[Budda]

Best thread on the Coli

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Breh can you please provide the name of the source of the scanned page document you posted here?

Groove Music
The Art and Culture of the Hip-hop DJ
By Mark Katz

 

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Also, if you have any new info to add that you never posted in the other threads, drop it in here

This is a beautiful thread op, please back up and save this information

 

[IllmaticDelta]

@IllmaticDelta Can you sum up your idea of the orgin and originator of Hip Hop music in one post?

HipHop music is based/founded on two elements:

1) Funk






+ any/all music based on the groove/drumming/breakdown-vamp aspect of Funk




which includes Disco, Funk-Rock, Funk-Jazz etc...

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2) Syncopated rhyming over these same beats aka Rapping. If rapping hadn't come along, there would be no such thing as rap/hiphop music being a sound unto itself because there would have been nothing to distinguish it from its root.

Read below:

and

Spoiler

Touches on the relation of HipHop to Disco and how Disco was IN FACT embraced by the crowd that would later become HipHop

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Now, the question is, who caused the "rhyming over disco/funk songs" that would give birth to rap music? The answer is Dj Hollywood!!





As I've already pointed out, the Herc scene had NO RAPPERS!!














even Sal Alabatello noticed this when he hired Herc to play at the Fever

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......his scene was focused on playing music for the bboys but in the so-called "Disco dj" world of the black overground mobile jocks (not the gays world of Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles) of Pete Dj Jones, Dj Hollywood, Grandmaster Flowers and Eddie Cheeba, they had dudes rapping on the mic as early as 1970 with Hollywood perfecting/creating the modern style by 1972.

Herc little circle of bboys was already dying by 1975/1976 because cats was already turning to the mic/listening to rhyming lyrics (something Herc's crowd didn't specialize in) after seeing Hollywood. Dj Jazzy Jay of Zulu Nation talks about it here:

^^(the part about harlemites adopting bronx rap style is wrong; it's actually the reverse: see --> "DJ Hollywood and his crowd were the first rapping to the beat, not Herc's crowd" - Melle Mel


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Flash also talks about the influence of Hollywood:

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Hollywood, Chheba and Luv Bug sum it all up in this clip

"hiphop would have died in the 70s if it wasn't for the rapper"