Kool Herc on The Combat Jack Show

[TripleAgent]

Yes!

 

[DaveyDave]

Can't wait to listen to this one! @CombatJack for getting super legends in the house. Meanwhile JE are kicking bevel and squaresace and rambling on about "Carhartt girl" and doing piss weak interviews with "part 2 coming soon"

 

[King Sun]

Herc has never claimed HipHop came from dancehall/jamaica



Because they're cousins through an older lineage...

I remember there was a huge thread where we was all discussing it. I thought it was interesting he said that

 

[DaveyDave]

I remember there was a huge thread where we was all discussing it. I thought it was interesting he said that

Combat might have peeped the thread and decided to ask directly

 

[SirBiatch]

That's because rap was popping in NYC, so some probably took it back to Jamaica. Or they were emulating sugar hill gangs "rappers delight". That came out in 1979, dancehall came out in 1981.

Super Cat was saying specifically that Rappers Delight was HUGE in Jamaica.

@2:23



shouts to @The Ruler 09 for posting that.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I remember there was a huge thread where we was all discussing it. I thought it was interesting he said that

what part (time) does he bring it up in the audio in the op?

 

[IllmaticDelta]

That's because rap was popping in NYC, so some probably took it back to Jamaica. Or they were emulating sugar hill gangs "rappers delight". That came out in 1979, dancehall came out in 1981.

I do notice in modern dancehall (1981 on) they started flowing with on beat syncopation whereas the original toasting they had (Uroy) was just random fragments with no real steady syncopation.

 

[fukkyalifestyle]

they dont call him herc for nothin, I met him once dude is a fukking monster.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

To me he has a southern accent mixed with Jamaican. Its weird how a lot of people from the 70's who lived in nyc have southern accents mixed in with their carribean accents or american blacks had southern accents mixed with NY accents.

Yes, that's what it sounds like to me too.

 

[boskey]

Great interview. I'm not sure how ya'll heard Herc saying hip hop doesn't have Caribbean roots cuz I heard the opposite. Didnt he say that he got put on to music through his father and he was putting his own spin on the Jamaican sound system culture?

Afrika Bambaataa:

Where are your parents from. Are they from the Caribbean.
My parents are from New York, but my roots is from the Caribbean. From Jamaica and Barbados.

So were there elements of Jamaican culture in your family?
Always. Jamaican and Barbados. My family and Herc’s family and Grandmaster Flash’s family.

How much were you aware of Jamaican sound system culture.
Oh, all the time. I’m one of the first. In fact I am the one in hip hop who started playing all the Jamaican music in the hip hop parties. More than Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. Even though Herc is from the Islands he was focussed more on America, on funky stuff.

http://www.djhistory.com/interviews/afrika-bambaataa

 

[scorpino]

Can't wait to listen to this one! @CombatJack for getting super legends in the house. Meanwhile JE are kicking bevel and squaresace and rambling on about "Carhartt girl" and doing piss weak interviews with "part 2 coming soon"

That Carhartt girl shytt is kind of corny

 

[boskey]

That Carhartt girl shytt is kind of corny

Wanted to throw my iphone out the window listening to the first 10 minutes of the Lord Finesse episode. Their jokes are awful...

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Great interview. I'm not sure how ya'll heard Herc saying hip hop doesn't have Caribbean roots cuz I heard the opposite. Didnt he say that he got put on to music through his father and he was putting his own spin on the Jamaican sound system culture?

From Herc's own mouth:

Herc’s quote in the book “Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti” by Steven Hager (1984) suggests that there is no connection…

Kool Herc: “Jamaican toasting? Naw, naw. No connection there. I couldn’t play reggae in the Bronx. People wouldn’t accept it. The inspiration for rap is James Brown and the album Hustler’s Convention.”

(alot of misinformation in the article below but the herc quote is there)

Founding Fathers Documentary: Hip Hop Did Not Start in the Bronx

These were thr mobile soundsystems that FIRST MADE AN impression on west indian selectors like Herc..Bam and Flash...

Read below

To be sure, there were all kinds of mobile jocks in New York in the early 70′s. Hands down, no questions. I’ve always asked the Bronx cats that I’ve interviewed this one important question, “Yo, what impact did the Jamaican sound systems have on ya’ll?”

Everybody from Toney Tone to Kool Herc to Bambaataa said: “None, none at all. They weren’t a part of our thing. They did their own thing.”

The one time I interviewed Kool Herc I asked him about the Jamaican sound systems in the Bronx and he acknowledged knowing a few of them, but said that they had no influence or impact whatsoever.

http://hiphopandpolitics.com/2014/02/05/founding-fathers-documentary-hip-hop-start-bronx/

 

[boskey]

From Herc's own mouth:

Herc’s quote in the book “Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti” by Steven Hager (1984) suggests that there is no connection…



(alot of misinformation in the article below but the herc quote is there)

Founding Fathers Documentary: Hip Hop Did Not Start in the Bronx



Read below





http://hiphopandpolitics.com/2014/02/05/founding-fathers-documentary-hip-hop-start-bronx/

Interesting. Sounds like there were so many influences and pieces that eventually formed in to hip hop that its hard to find a definitive root.

But I'm still not convinced by Herc saying it had zero impact. Sounds like he's drawing a line based on semantics and his own logic. If he is indeed the father/creator of hip hop I don't think its possible for there to be "zero" influence when he himself (and many other early hip hop pioneers) grew up in West Indian culture. Even if he isn't the sole "father" you can't really separate New York from Caribbean culture...

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Interesting. Sounds like there were so many influences and pieces that eventually formed in to hip hop that its hard to find a definitive root.

But I'm still not convinced by Herc saying it had zero impact. Sounds like he's drawing a line based on semantics and his own logic. If he is indeed the father/creator of hip hop I don't think its possible for there to be "zero" influence when he himself (and many other early hip hop pioneers) grew up in West Indian culture. Even if he isn't the sole "father" you can't really separate New York from Caribbean culture...

because he along with the other HipHop dj's was actually adapting American Funk/Disco music along with Disco dj'ing techniques. Disco djing is totally different from theJamaican sound system style. For example

As far as djing, I never heard of any Jamaican DJ doing backspins, cutting, blends, scratches, chops,etc. All they do is slam records, and literally start the record over. I'm not dissing them because they do those things well but that is nothing like turntablism that we do in the states. These things should be mentioned when people say Jamaica was the home of the creation of hip hop.

I don't how anyone could look at the sound system turntable operators and think HipHop djing came from that considering they didn't even use 2 turntables and a mixer for continuous mixing. That came straight from Disco.

Although Herc was known for letting records play before and beyond their breaks (sometimes, to the consternation of some observers, including the “wack” or undesirable parts, or all the way to the end of a track), perhaps his most lasting legacy is the practice of isolating and extending these breakbeats, transforming the fleeting, funky moments into loops that could last for many minutes. Eventually, by employing two turntables and two copies of a record, Herc developed what he called the “Merry-Go-Round” technique. Dropping the needle back to the beginning of the break on one record just as the other was about to end, and repeating the process ad infinitum, Herc could keep a break — and a crowd of b-boys — breaking for as long as that particular section would work. Though the hip-hop story has enshrined Herc as the first to isolate and repeat breakbeats in this way, it should be noted that Herc’s technical proficiency was never exactly heralded, and so his focus on and liberation of the break should perhaps be understood more as an aesthetic than a technical achievement. Later DJs, such as Grandmaster Flash, influenced by Herc’s model but more virtuosic in their control over the turntables and mixer, would improve on the formula, moving beyond drop-the-needle imprecision by backspinning, scratching, and cutting the records while cueing them via monitoring headphones, thus allowing one to mix breaks more seamlessly into one another and to isolate shorter and shorter sections for repetition.

As an element of style, Herc’s less-than-seamless, stop-and-start approach to selection draws yet another connection to reggae performance practice. Whereas hip-hop DJing — partly related to its roots in disco and the club scene — has since developed in a manner that privileges smooth, beat-matched transitions between tracks, reggae selecting has remained a style more defined by stark cuts and mixes. This is often the case even when a selector is “juggling,” or mixing sequentially, several songs on the same underlying riddim: when a popular song receives requests for a “pull up,” the selector rewinds it, usually suddenly and audibly, and lets it play again. Reggae-style selecting arises partly out of the constraints of using a single turntable

Herc tried to the Disco Djing style but he never caught on. Disco djing is where Herc got the idea to use 2 copies of the same record with 2 turntables. They never did that in Jamaican sound system culture. For example

This video is a good example of the transition from pure Disco Djing to HipHop djing before the scratching and other tricks came in. This is like playing the break parts but with smooth disco djing skills.




This is a great example when it fully came into it's own and added new ideas such as back spinning and scratching






You will not find anything like this in the Jamaican Sound system operators because it relates more to Disco