Tag Archives: clive campbell

What Is Hip Hop? And What Environmental Factors Helped To Propel This Phenomenal Music Into Existence?

5 Nov

In the late 1970’s, a new and distinctive sound arose from the streets of New York. The sound was hip hop, and nearly 20 years later, it has transcended the street parties and music clubs of New York to become a worldwide cultural phenomenon.

Simply put, hip hop music consists of a DJ mixing rhythmic passages of albums on a turntable while a rapper raps over the beats. But hip hop is a culture unto itself, equipped with its own language, lyrical style, visual arts (graffiti), dance moves and look. And although hip hop is the musical outgrowth of urban African-American culture, its popularity is not bound by geography or culture.

So what was happening during the 1960’s and 70’s in the Bronx, specifically the south Bronx, that made such unlikely characters, people, and events to come together and create this amazing music?  What environmental factors played a huge role in the birth of hip hop? A number of things took place inside The South Bronx that most people outside of it are totally unaware of.

The following video describes the mood and environment of the Bronx during the 1970’s and how certain factors, occurring specifically in The South Bronx, influenced the birth of hip hop. Let’s go back in time and see what was going on.

So stay tuned. Watch and read because you are about to find out what happened and how.

Where It All Started

For many years, The South Bronx was a pre-dominantly middle-class manufacturing center, the home of over 63 piano factories, employing thousands of people.  But from 1950-1979, the quality of life for Bronx residents sharply declined. Historians and sociologists have attributed many factors to this decline. One factor, they believe, is that the Robert Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway destroyed existing residential neighborhoods. Another factor may have been the development of high-rise housing projects. Third, there was a reduction in real-estate listings and property-related financial services (such as mortgages or insurance policies) offered in some areas of the Bronx.  This illegal discriminatory process is known as red-lining.

As a result, it became less profitable for landlords to maintain existing buildings with their existing tenants than to abandon or destroy those buildings.  Shortly thereafter, the Bronx became plagued by a wave of arson. The burning of buildings was mostly in The South Bronx and in West Farms. The most common explanation of what occurred was that landlords decided to burn their low property-value buildings and take the insurance money as profit. After the fiery destruction of many buildings in The South Bronx, the arsons slowed by the beginning of the 1980’s, but the after-effects were still felt into the 1990s.

Because of poverty, crime, drugs, gang violence, and a lack of basic services like law enforcement, firefighters, sanitation and health to name a few, lawlessness abounded. This was the environment in which many of the key players that created hip hop lived. The people didn’t have much. But the one thing they did have was their music.Their love of music led them to discover and create some great things with records. And because they had a lot of records, these pioneers invented an idea called sampling, which is the act of isolating a particular sound from one song and reusing it in another. They invented sampling along with the other key elements of hip hop through trial and error, mostly by fooling around with records at home.

The Pioneers of Hip Hop

Clive Campbell, a.k.a. DJ Kool Herc, laid down the first building block of hip hop in 1973. That was when he reportedly hosted a party in his building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue with a sound system, or sound equipment used to DJ a party. The sound system was a guitar amp and two turntables.  Kool Herc also invented the now commonplace deejaying technique of breaks, or breakbeats. He would, for example, play James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turn It Loose” on two turntables, and would spin one of the records back to the break repeatedly. His innovation brought the breakbeat to the sound of this new movement, which later became known as hip hop.  Kool Herc’s technique was to drop a needle on a record, and then go back and forth from one turntable to the other.

DJ Afrika Bambaattaa, who formed the famous non-violent hip hop crew Universal Zulu Nation in the Bronx, used DJ Kool Herc’s breakbeats in his own deejaying. Bambaataa and other key players of this emerging new music, would take global sounds from West Indian music, salsa music, and great beats from rock records and other types of music.  Afrika Bambaattaa is best known for his 1982 song “Planet Rock,” which samples an electronic piano sound from the German group Kraftwerk.

Grand Wizzard Theodore, a.k.a. Theodore Livingston, also incorporated breakbeats into his music in the Bronx. He added another technique to the hip hop toolbox called scratching. Grand Wizzard Theodore reportedly invented the technique in his bedroom.  Scratching involves DJs moving records back and forth while they are playing.  He discovered it by accident, when while talking to his mother one day, he started moving a playing record back and forth.  Grand Wizzard says he thought it would be a great percussive sound to add to this newly emerging music.

Then, there was Grandmaster Flash, or Joseph Sadler, who may be best known for his song “The Message,” which was made with The Furious Five. Grandmaster Flash began experimenting with turntables and records at home, and the results were astounding. He invented cutting, which is achieved by playing the same record at two turntables at the same time and cutting back and forth between the two turntables (and records) to repeat a phrase or sound. Another Grandmaster Flash innovation, was a technique called back spinning or pulling the record back, so you could make it repeat.

Not only did these DJ techniques invented in The South Bronx form the basis for the hip hop we know today, they also brought about the rise of a new kind of aggressive dancing called b-boying–known to most people by its more generic term, break dancing.

A new movement of street art and graffiti also came out of the beginnings of hip hop and gang culture in the Bronx in the late 1970’s. Once considered a nuisance, some graffiti art now hang on the walls of major art museums. And although the Bronx was much more violent in the 70’s and 80’s, many of the pioneers of hip hop consider the music that DJs put out back then was less violent than the music of hip hop today.  So the bustling energy that laid the groundwork for today’s hip hop culture came out of the gang culture in the 1970’s. Back then, gangs sprouted up all over the Bronx due to widespread urban decay, from heavy arson activity from slumlords seeking insurance money to the lack of basic services like law enforcement, firefighters, sanitation and health.

With the horrific environmental conditions of extreme poverty, drugs, and gang violence–these social factors combined, contributed to the birth of what became the hip hop culture. All of these ingredients combined led to the creation of what we now know as Hip Hop music.

Although they lived through such adverse environmental and economic conditions, many of the pioneers of Hip Hop music were compelled to bring this new music to the forefront of mainstream society because it allowed the voice of the poor and working class to be heard.

DJ Kool Herc – The Father of Hip Hop: How It All Started

29 Jul

Kool Herc – The Father of Hip Hop

Clive Campbell, AKA “Kool Herc”, is considered to be the Father of Hip Hop.  Clive Campbell, was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1955.  In 1967, when Kool Herc was 12 years, he and his family emigrated to the Bronx, New York.  While attending Alfred E. Smith High School, he spent a lot of time in the weight room.  That fact, coupled with his height , coined him the nickname “Hercules” by his schoolmates.

Kool Herc’s first deejay job was his sister’s birthday.  1520 Sedgwick Avenue.  This was the address  where he and his family lived, and the recreation room in the building was where he would throw many of his first parties as a DJ.  Unbeknownst to him at the time, this would be the start of the hip hop music industry.

The Birthplace of Hip Hop

Kool Herc would deejay many parties in the recreation room of this building where he lived.

Throwing parties at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue lasted for a while until his parents started to come in early, and find a house full of kids, tearing up the new furniture that his mother had just put some money down on. The kids were still looking for a place to release this energy.’ Herc’s sister asked him to help out by playing music in the recreation room of his family’s housing block, 1520 Sedgewick Towers.  ”OK, I throw my hand at it, and she rented the recreation room, I think for twenty-five dollars at the time. We could charge it at twenty-five cents for girls, fifty cents for fellas. It was like, “Kool Herc, man. He’s giving a party, westside man. Just be cool, that’s what I’m saying, come and have a good time. Just don’t ditch the programme.”

Becoming skilled at deejaying, Kool Herc became aware that although he knew which records would keep the crowd moving, he was more interested in the break section of the song.  At this point in a song, the vocals would stop and the beat would just ride for a short period.  His desire to capture this moment for a longer period of time would be a very important one for Hip Hop.

To extend the break section of a song, Herc would purchase two copies of the same record and play them on separate turntables next to each other.  He would play the break beat on one record then throw it over to the other turntable and play the same part.  Doing this over and over, he could rock any house in New York–not to mention it being an early form of looping that would later be made easier through electronic sampling.  Herc would dig in crates and look everywhere to find the perfect break beat for his parties.  He didn’t care what type of music it was because he only needed a small section of a song for his purposes.

By 1969, Herc was deejaying regularly at local clubs, but noticed that the crowds he joined frequently objected to New York’s  cocky DJs. ‘I used to hear the gripes from the audience on the dancefloor. Even myself, ’cause I used to be a breaker (breakdancer). Why didn’t the guy let the record play out? Or why cut it off there? So with that, me gathering all this information around me, I say: “I think I could do that”. So I started playing from a dance floor perspective. I always kept up the attitude that I’m not playing it for myself, I’m playing for the people out there.’

DJs needed to establish an identity or niche in this highly competitive market. So Herc was determined to find records that no one else owned, to distinguish himself from the pack. For example, he talked his father into buying him James Brown’s Sex Machine LP in 1969. ‘A lot of people wanted that record and couldn’t really find it. So a lot of people used to come to the party to hear that.’ Herc did his research, checking out what was being played on local jukeboxes to test a song’s popularity and picking up rarities at Downstairs Records on 42nd Street and the Rhythm Den. ‘This is where your recognition, your rep comes from. You have a record nobody else got, or you’re the first one to have it. You’ve got to be the first, can’t be the second.’

While violence has become rap’s defining characteristic in the 90s, hip hop actually started out as a means of ending black-on-black crime two decades earlier.  People living in the Bronx during the early 70s had much to live in fear of. ‘The gangs came and terrorized the whole neighborhood, the boroughs. Everybody just ran back into their house. There was no more clubs. If you did do a house party, it had to be: “I have to know you. Don’t bring nobody who I don’t know to my house.”

In the following video, Kool Herc describes how he invented the idea of playing two breakbeats together, what he calls the merry-go-round.   The merry-go-round involved him mixing sections of James Brown’s ‘Give It Up Or Turn It Loose’ into Michael Viner’s ‘Bongo Rock’ and back out into Babe Ruth’s ‘The Mexican’. His audiences loved it.

The merry-go-round became the blueprint for hip hop… The first to react to the innovations, naturally enough, were Herc’s party-goers. Breakdancers, or B-Boys, began to interpret Herc’s idiosyncratic style with routines of their own. Some historians trace the development of Breakdancing to the African martial arts form, capoeta, brought to America by slaves a century before.




Eventually, spinning records became an an all-intensive thing and Herc

Kool Herc and Coke La Rock


Although he is not part of the hip hop vocabulary of most of those who listen to it today, Kool Herc is the father of this underground sound from New York that has found its way in becoming a worldwide phenomenon.