As a nation, Jamaica is the most influential music nation outside of the USA

[OnlyInCalifornia]

nikkas is not reading the thread

You really think people have to read an entire thread to respond to it, I don't care what you two are babbling about.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Im not clicking all these links breh, just spit it out.

I am responding to the thread topic, Kool Herc got his influence from Jamaica, thats what I care about.

You need to read all of the links for the full context/history. Simply put, HipHop Djing came from Disco Djing.

Another fact, HipHop style turntablism is an offshoot of Disco djing. Infact, HipHop culture began as a ghetto alternative to the more middle class Disco one


Early HipHop culture was both influenced and a reaction against Disco/disco culture










Turntablism -HipHop style Djing




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First, here are 2 clips. One on Disco Dj's with Fab 5 Freddy and the idea of continuous mixing and extended play





Second, a House music Dj (this is from back in the day in Chicago) showing his Disco based djing style and talking about the manipulation of songs by using 2 copies of the same record

 

[IllmaticDelta]

As far as the origin of knowing about the "break" part of the record

Yes, the Disco Dj's were aware of the break and some of them stuck to the break part. The main difference between what most of the Disco DJ's did and what Herc/later hiphop dj's did was that the HipHop DJ's stuck to the break and looped it over and over whereas the Disco DJ might tease with the break for a bit but still play the rest of the record.

On Herc dj'ing style. At his early jams he attempted to play many things, Reggae included but the crowd didn't like it. At this point, early on, the crowd was basically all black (black american and West Indians) because Puerto Ricans hadn't caught on yet. They wanted to hear Funk music so that's what he played. He was playing the entire song on one turtable at this point. As time went by Herc realized that the crowd would get really hyped during the "break" (basically the part when the music kinda drops out and all you hear in the drummer or the bass) parts of the Funk songs which lead him to only playing the break parts of the songs. He did this in by borrowing the Disco technique of 2 turntables to play 2 records so he could string breaks together. His technique was crude and not up to par with Disco style djing but he called it the "Merry Go Round".

 

[OnlyInCalifornia]

You need to read all of the links for the full context/history. Simply put, HipHop Djing came from Disco Djing.

That's great, Im sure you have plenty of youtube links to back it up. Please explain to me how this discredits Kool Herc.

 

[BigMan]

informative thread

 

[IllmaticDelta]

That's great, Im sure you have plenty of youtube links to back it up.

quotes from he and his peers and articles too

Please explain to me how this discredits Kool Herc.

He was trying imitate Disco DJ's but his style was crude. What he was trying to do didn't come from Jamaica, it came from Disco djs.

Getting back to Herc, his biggest contribution is that he, by observing his crowd getting hyped to the "get down" parts of the Funk records was the first DJ to initiate only going to those parts of the records. As I noted before, he was not the first to play or discover the "break" parts of the records considering we know for a fact that Disco Dj's were already doing this. The difference between the two was the Disco crowd liked the break parts but wanted to hear the entire song while the Herc crowd only wanted to hear the break parts. Read below

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Now to get to when a true HipHop Dj'ing style emerged you have to go back to the Disco connection. One thing about Herc as you can read in the last paragraph in the article above, is that he had no real Djing skills in the Disco/modern sense. He didn't no anything about blending and beat matching. Read below..

 

[Curioser]

@Curioser You are arguing just to do it because you know damn well when he started playing with the snare, kick, and hihats it started to sound like rap and not salsa. That was the point of my post, what we recognize as salsa don't use the drums we may use in most popular music.

He's just "jamming", the only thing he does in th

@Curioser You are arguing just to do it because you know damn well when he started playing with the snare, kick, and hihats it started to sound like rap and not salsa. That was the point of my post, what we recognize as salsa don't use the drums we may use in most popular

@Curioser You are arguing just to do it because you know damn well when he started playing with the snare, kick, and hihats it started to sound like rap and not salsa. That was the point of my post, what we recognize as salsa don't use the drums we may use in most popular music.

What you recognize as Salsa is probably watered down Puerto Rican salsa romantic. It does not have any of the elements of real Cuban music. The drums are played like that in a much more aggressive style in a Cuban bands. The drummer has been playing the standard drum set in this group since like five years old and this the greatest bands of the last 30 years. He was just jamming there so yeah that's not how the band actually sounds but still.

Here's a better vid

 

[IllmaticDelta]

In comes Grandmaster Flash and his connection the Disco Djing style that would lay the foundation for HipHop djing

From, Grandmaster Flash: True Life Adventures

To the beat y'all



In 1973 the 16-year-old Flash was still keen to find a path to greatness. Then suddenly his destiny became clear – he’d become a breakdancer! It was the fresh fly way to impress the girls – do some drops and flips and locks and body-pops like the kids on Soultrain. What could be more obvious? He made a fine start in pursuit of this dream, but then a thorny obstacle emerged – he discovered he had a tragic inability to breakdance. “I was kinda wack,” he admits. “I tried to learn it, I did some moves and landed on my back and hurt it a whole lot.”



Flash was forced to find a new route to stardom. Luckily, for the sake of his bruised bones, fresh career inspiration soon showed up – in the shape of the borough’s conquering musical demigod. “I got the word about a guy on the west side of the Bronx who has this massive sound system. He had this pair of Shure vocal master columns, and these two black bass bottoms.” When Flash tracked down this heroic figure playing in a park on his behemoth system he heard music like never before. Tracks like ‘Shack Up’ by Banbarra, ‘The Mexican’, ‘Funky Drummer’, and ‘Apache’ by Michael Viner’s Incredible Bongo Band. “Some of it my sisters had in their collection, some of it I never heard before. But it had such a great feel to it.”



What’s more, this Herc guy was really playing around with the music, and that made it even more exciting. He’d repeat the bits the crowd loved best, fading from one track to a second copy of the same song, booming “Rock on my mellow” or “To the beat, y’all” through an echo chamber to cover the join and basking in glory as the lads dancing went full crazy. Not only that but he was enthroned above the crowd high on a platform so you couldn’t see what he was playing. Like the star he was. Like the star Flash wanted to be. “I saw people gathered from miles around just for one individual, playing music.” This encounter wiped out any dreams of breakdancing. There was now no doubt in his mind. “When I saw Kool Herc sitting up on his podium, heavily guarded, and all these people in the park enjoying themselves, that was it: I was gonna be a DJ.”



Kool Herc, christened Hercules by his schoolmates but known to his mum as Clive Campbell, is a Jamaican immigrant who stands nearer seven foot than six. Herc ruled the west Bronx as party king throughout the first half of the seventies. His success was founded on a ground-shaking sound system, a record box groaning with earthy funk tunes and an admissions policy which let in the raucous sneaker-wearing teenage element – a combustible crowd which most clubs were eager to keep off the premises. Herc’s trump card musically – something which gave him unrivalled appeal to the B-boying youth – was to play the breaks of records rather than the whole song, calling this part of his set ‘The Merry Go Round’. This, m’lud, was the breakthrough move from which hip hop grew.



Herc influenced a generation. As economics saw the DJ start to replace the local funk bands, kids throughout the Bronx saw how a mere disc jockey could be a star, could draw a crowd wherever he played. Downtown, disco was emerging from its underground origins and getting glittered up for the mainstream. Uptown across the Harlem River, while the grown-ups were dancing the hustle to pretty much the same songs as the folk in the Village, for Bronx kids under 20 it was funk tracks a few years old that were ruling the floor. And it was Kool Herc who was playing them.



Flash’s first reaction to Herc was to build himself a system. For a kid obsessed with electronics, seeing this afroed giant sitting behind a park-quaking set of components was like a glimpse of the holy grail. “With my electronic knowledge, and my ability to take junk and jury-rig it together, I started to put together some sort of makeshift sound system. And it was a piece of shyt, but it was mines.” By 1974 he had just enough equipment and just enough balls to start calling himself a DJ.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Grandmaster Flash was the first person to bring in the Disco djing techniques into HipHop. Kool Herc, who was an influence on Flash because of the records he played never really had real Disco techniques but Flash's other and main influence did and that was Pete Dj Jones. Read below

For Pete's sake



No surprises yet. So far this is much the same tale you”ll have learnt in your ‘Keepin’ it real’ history lessons. The great Herc delivered the notion of playing the breaks from on high, picking out the choicest chunks of your mom and pop’s old records, and his disciples – Flash foremost – followed him into the promised land. But not so fast: there’s another key figure, more or less forgotten today, who played a vital role in the web of inspirations that led Flash to create his new science – Pete DJ Jones.



Like Herc, Pete Jones is a giant among men. He towers in at six foot eight with ham-sized hands that once played professional basketball. “Here is one dude that doesn’t have to wear any flashy clothes to stand out in a crowd,” wrote New York DJ fanzine Melting Pot in 1975. “When he lights a match, he looks like the Towering Inferno”.



“Music For All Occasions” advertises Pete’s business card and he still takes bookings at the age of 62. He’s just back from DJing a weekend at a holiday camp up in the Poconos and there’s a flyer in the lobby of his building advertising an upcoming R&B weekender for middle-aged Bronxsters with his name as a draw. Back in the day Pete Jones was one of the biggest DJs in the city, a name you heard constantly on party ads on WBLS. Today he’s squeezed behind the wheel of his little red hatch-back, with his knees hovering up near his chin. He gives a Deputy Dawg chuckle at his car’s poor fit and offers some melodic Carolina musings about the joys of fishing.



Pete was Flash’s greatest inspiration. Why? Because he kept the beat.



Pete Jones was the leading DJ in a scene which has never been accorded much importance. Plenty has now been written about disco’s gay black underground of the Loft, the Gallery and the Paradise Garage; this was disco’s straight black overground. It was a close-knit scene of mobile DJs who’d set up their rigs in hotel ballrooms (the Sheridan and notably the Diplomat, which Pete saw trashed by the crowd in a cross-state battle when he took on Newark’s finest DJs – Steak and Red) and in otherwise underpopulated restaurants. Places with names like Pub Theatrical, Jimmy’s, Gasky’s, Adrian’s, Hillside Manor, The Loft (no relation), Nell Gwynn’s… right across Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and New Jersey. Besides Pete, the other players were Cameron ‘Grandmaster’ Flowers, the scene’s founding big-shot who sadly ended his days panhandling outside Tower Records (and who was also an early graffiti writer), Maboya, a Panamanian who pioneered outdoor parties at Riis Beach before returning to Central America, and Ron Plummer a chemistry graduate who shot to fame as the scene’s Deejay Of The Year 1975 before heading off to medical school in Boston. The biggest boost to their fortunes, Pete recalls, was the beef crisis of 1971, which left restaurants empty and desperate. As ‘Where’s the beef?’ became the catchphrase of the day, disco came to the rescue with wily promoters turning eateries into niteries. “After they’d finished serving the last meal they’d start throwing the tables to one side and put the chairs on top of each other, put a makeshift bar up and the place would be jam packed until four in the morning.”



Pete, a teacher by career, got his DJing start in 1970, just after he’d moved from Raleigh to New York, by promoting a Bronx party around the first Grambling-Morgan game, a black college football fixture. After hiring a room but unable to book a DJ, he decided to do the job himself. “I went down to Sam Ash and bought the speakers and everything. I put this system together, went out and bought the top 20 and rocked the house. The party was so successful that the guy gave me the back room of the club every Friday and Saturday.” Later the same year he covered for a no-show Grandmaster Flowers in a jam on 57th St and his downtown reputation was launched



Through the seventies Pete played his punters what they wanted to hear: the length and breadth of the Billboard R&B chart sprinkled through with plenty of funky oldies and a smattering of more obscure southern soul. “You know what this is?” he asks as he picks out songs from a stack of dusty sleeveless 45s in his dark and crammed apartment. “It’s gut-bucket music. Yeah… gut-bucket music, poverty music.” An Ann Winley tune gets an airing, then ‘JB’s ‘Monorail’, then Grover Washington’s ‘Mister Magic’, Leon Haywood’s ‘Believe Half Of What You See’, Curtis Mayfield singing ‘Can’t Save Nothing’. “Gut-bucket music is stuff like James Brown, BB King, Johnny Taylor, Tyrone Davis, Dr. John,” he explains. “When I went downtown and played in a club and everybody’s dressed up, I’d play more of the stuff that was on the radio’ – and he draws out a list of commercial hits ranging from Kool & The Gang to the Bee Gees and Donna Summer. But his heart lies with music slowed by the heat of the southern states. ‘I used to hear other DJs saying, “That Pete Jones’ music, it puts me to sleep! Because it’s too slow.” It’s that special beat. It’s that downbeat. It’s the only music they listen to down south.”



While the music they played was hardly ground-breaking, rarely veering too far from the playlists of black radio, Pete and his peers were key in spreading the innovations of the more underground clubs to a wider audience, an audience that included the black population of the Bronx. Beatmatching, cuts and blends (or “running” records, as Pete calls it) were required skills on the gay scene thanks to pioneers like Terry Noel, Francis Grasso, Steve D’Acquisto and Michael Cappello. Grandmaster Flowers, who’d been playing since 1967, as well as Plummer, Maboya and Pete Jones himself, deserve credit for developing the same skills at the same time and – crucial to our story – for showing them off to the wide world of greater New York.



“They would say that Flowers was a mixer and I was a chopper,” says Pete, describing Grandmaster Flowers’ style as being closest to the DJs in the gay clubs. “Flowers was an expert mixer. He didn’t chop too many of the records, he would bleeend. Plummer was a mixer also, but I liked to chop, I liked to get the beat – BANG! BANG! – I loved to chop. Even before I had a cueing system, I liked to chop them records up.” Emphasising his claims, Pete says he had two copies of everything. “I’d play a record over and over again, because you didn’t have many hits in those days, and you had to keep playing until four or five in the morning. So you’d play it over again and you’d shine a light on that groove and play it awhile. Best part of the record is usually that groove part,” he says with a chuckle.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

To complete the process

Setting the equation



Most of the time dance music advances slowly and subtly. DJs on a scene pick out certain records and, by highlighting a particular style, spur producers to turn it into a genre. Flash’s innovations weren’t like that. His revolution wasn’t organic or accidental, it was all about vision and hard work. Flash imagined a future style of DJing and then bust his guts figuring out how to deliver it. He picked out the elements he wanted from two completely different DJs and set himself the challenge of combining them.



As he tells it, it was all about ‘unison and disarray’. Herc was the man because of what he played. But while he searched out obscure funk tracks and piled their breaks together for the B-boys, his technique, by all accounts, was pretty rough round the edges. The fever-pitch excitement of his ‘Merry Go Round’ came from the records he chose and the parts of those records he played – he had no concern for making clean mixes or keeping a steady beat. For Flash, this was a serious downfall.



“I noticed that if the crowd were into a record they would have to wait until he mixed it, because it was never on time,” he recalls. “I could see the audience in unison, then in disarray, then in unison, then in disarray. I said: I like what he’s playing but he’s not playing it right. So I says: I want to do something about that. The thought was to have as little disarray as possible. Didn’t know how I was gonna do it.”



“For Herc timing was not a factor. He would play a record that was maybe 90 beats a minute, and then he would play another one that was 110. But timing was a factor, because a lot of these dancers were really good. They did their moves on time. So I said to myself, I got to be able to go to just the particular section of the record, just the break, and extend that, but on time.
And that’s where Pete comes in.



Flash recalls: “The word gets back to me: there’s this guy who plays in the downtown clubs, playing the disco stuff. I hear he’s coming to the neighbourhood. He’s coming to my territory.” Imagining himself as a mini-Herc, and already armed with some fearsome funk tracks, Flash thought he’d have no problem trouncing a mere disco DJ. “I’m like, – Alll-right! I was sure I was better than him. Me and my boys got a couple of shopping carts and we put the speakers and the records and we walk over seven or eight blocks to 138th and Alexander. Mitchell houses.



“But as I’m walking, the ground is sort of vibrating. Wow, is there a car accident happening… continuously? And as I get closer and closer the ground is shaking to a beat. He was playing this song, and it was like neeeeeeeaarrr-pumm, and then it goes into this disco beat. As I go into the park this system was so powerful it was shaking concrete.”



Undeterred, or at least stubborn enough to carry on, Flash hooked up his meagre equipment opposite Pete’s. “I set up and when he turned off I turned on. I had a bunch of midrange and some tweeters. Of course when he turned it back on he was the complete frequency. And I’m thinking: You fukking a$$hole Flash. You popped all this shyt to your friends, you’re gonna go over there and beat this guy that plays disco.”



Pete recalls their first meeting “I was working for the department of social services at the time and this woman called me and said she had a young DJ and they were really trying to launch him. Trying to get him known, get him out there. So we set up this battle. I used to have a Volkswagen, I had my bus. I had those big horns like they have at Yankee Stadium. I had two of those. Then Flash came down. He was talented. He was fast. I’d say he’s one of the smoothest mixers, other than Grandmaster Flowers. He reminded me of Flowers.”



“Pete could have totally humiliated me,” admits Flash. “But he was very cool. He gave me his card and we became friends after that. He said, “Here’s my number, why don’t you come to a couple of gigs of mines.” I took it with a grain of salt, like – ah, he’s not going to fukking call me. I don’t even play the same shyt he plays. But he called me. I think my first gig with him was with the Stardust Ballroom in the Bronx.”



Aside from befriending one of New York’s biggest DJs, this meeting gave Flash the final inspiration he needed. Pete’s music was not what he wanted to play, but Flash was transfixed by the idea of continuity. What blew him away was hearing records merge into each other without losing the beat. This was the first time he’d heard blends.



“It was incredible that you could hear that other record coming in from the horizon, and then all of a sudden it’s right here, and then it becomes the record. He was playing Donna Summers, Trammps, stuff like that, and he wouldn’t miss a beat. He wasn’t very fast at it, but he would blend from one and I could hear the other one coming in. No horses galloping. Bass drum on top of bass drum and snare on top of snare.



“The music he was playing was not to my liking at all – I was playing the obscure R&B and rock but he was playing just disco – but the way he was playing it – the blend, where there’s no disarray, there’s unison, the crowd was into a frenzy and he was blending it – tight!
For Flash it was a eureka! moment. Lightbulbs popped inside his head as he imagined somehow connecting Pete’s continuity with Herc’s breaks. Even as he conceived this he knew it would be massive. “I watched Herc with unison and disarray and I watched Pete with unison,” he explains. “Herc went straight to the meat of the sandwich – the get-down part of a record – and it would get the people hype. I seen his audience lose their minds. Pete would play his style of a break and the people that came to his party – I seen them lose their minds. I knew that if I could just come up with the formula in between I would have something.” Seamless mixing seemed to work for disco. Could he do the same with the chunks of funk that the B-boys loved so much?



Methodical and obsessed, Flash now set himself this goal of playing breakbeats with precision. “I was like: how can I take the Herc tracks – that kind of sound – and find a way to make it seamless…?



“I had to figure out how to take these records and take these sections and manually edit them so that the person in front of me wouldn’t even know that I had taken a section that was maybe 15 seconds and made it five minutes. So that these people that really danced, they could just dance as long as they wanted. I got to find a way to do this.” This is what the world would one day know as hip hop: music made from breaks of records sampled, edited and repeated in a continuous rhythm, using nothing but two turntables and a mixer. At first, he had no idea whether it was possible, just that it would be amazing – and that if he could get it right, he would make history.

 

[Axum Ezana]

Africa. Jamaica.

dark skin nikkas.....the musical gods.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

After all of that, modern HipHop djing template was set and became an offshoot of the Disco djing style

You can see/hear what backspinning is in this video




and then the defining sound of HipHop djing, the Scratch was originated by Grand Wizard Theodore. Listen to how he describes Herc and Baambatta's, Djing styles @ 3:00 mins

 

[Curioser]

What you recognize as Salsa is probably watered down Puerto Rican salsa romantic. It does not have any of the elements of real Cuban music. The drums are played like that in a much more aggressive style in a Cuban bands. The drummer has been playing the standard drum set in this group since like five years old and this the greatest bands of the last 30 years. He was just jamming there so yeah that's not how the band actually sounds but still.

Here's a better vid

 

[IllmaticDelta]

To sum up the music related side of HipHop which includes Rapping and Djing. By the mid to late 70's the best of the hardcore Bronx side of HipHop combined with the best of the rapping Disco DJ's to create the modern form you would have by the late 70's.

@ 4:29 "Grandmaster Flash was a DJ...Koolherc was a record player"

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:23-->2:58 ( Kool Herc )
2:58--> 3:56 (Flash, Chuck D and DMC talkig about Disco music/clubs and the Disco djing culture on HipHop)

3:56--> 5:55 (Grandmaster Caz and Dj Aj talking about the difference in djing style between Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash
5:55--> 6:45 (Grandwizard Therodore and scratching )

6:45--> 7:47 (Grandmaster Caz, DJ J and IceT, talking about the role of the early MC's in the Bronx before they started doing full blown rhymes)

7:47--> (A look at the Disco Dj/rappers who weren't part of the Herc/Bronx scene like Lovebug Starski (he coined the term "HipHop"), Dj Hollywood and Eddie Cheeba )

 

[IllmaticDelta]

OnlyInCalifornia, where are you?