On Aug. 11, 1973, high school student Cindy Campbell threw a party in the recreation room of her family’s Bronx apartment building to earn money for new back-to-school clothes. Cindy hand wrote invitations on index cards and charged a modest admission fee (25 cents for ladies, 50 cents for "fellas"); she asked her 18-year-old brother Clive to play the music.
Clive, better known as DJ Kool Herc, set up his turntables, mixer, amplifiers and towering speaker boxes, which blared a mix of funk and soul records. Herc’s pal, Bronx native Coke La Rock, intermittently shouted out friends and quick rhymes over the records’ instrumental breaks to hype up the crowd. While the large turnout of their peers ensured Cindy would start the school year donning the latest fashions, the siblings had done something infinitely more important, Cindy and Herc sparked a movement.
The precise origin of any musical genre is rarely traceable to a single event. But Cindy and Herc’s party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, held 50 years ago, is widely recognized as laying the foundation upon which hip-hop was built.
"From my back-to-school party where my brother Herc played, his influence with the music, the songs, the beats that he chose, he knew he had something special there. He dominated the 1970s and created this thing that we call hip-hop," Cindy Campbell told GRAMMY.com in a recent phone interview, with Herc later joining the conversation.
But the term hip-hop, which encompasses the movement’s four elements — emceeing or rapping, breakdancing, graffiti and turntabling — wouldn’t come into usage until several years after the back-to-school party took place.
Cindy says one of the most meaningful events in elevating hip-hop’s profile early on was the 1984 film Beat Street, which Harry Belafonte executive produced. "At one point, people didn’t know where hip-hop was going, it flew below the radar, but Harry did the movie because he knew something special was going on; it took hip-hop to another level and the music went international," she reflects.
Decades later, hip-hop is celebrating multiple milestones and Herc will get his flowers.
On Nov. 3, DJ Kool Herc will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony held at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.
"I’d say it’s about damn time, but I ain’t mad at them because Willie Nelson is being inducted this year and he’s 90!" quips Herc. The Rock Hall identifies Herc, 67, as one of the founders of hip-hop, but Herc offers a clarification: "I am the founding father of hip-hop," he asserts, "because no one else was doing this when I started."
A former graffiti artist whose tag was CLYDE (from his friends’ mispronunciation of Clive) AS KOOL (taken from a cigarette ad), Clive Campbell earned the nickname Hercules in high school for his imposing, brawny stature and excellence in sports. But it was Herc’s background as a dancer that led to his groundbreaking technique as a DJ.
Behind the turntables, Herc paid close attention to the dancers at his parties and their responses to his musical selections; he noticed they were most excited by the song’s instrumental breaks. Building upon that observation, Herc utilized dual copies of the same record on two turntables, switching between them with a mixer and prolonging a song’s short percussive interval into an extended, hypnotic rhythmic loop. He called his distinctive approach the merry-go-round and it would influence other pioneering Bronx hip-hop DJs including Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa.
"I had two copies of the same record and I went for the yolk, the butter. I found the beats, the break and I played that on all of the records," Herc recalls. "I didn’t have headphones at the time, but I could see the breaks on the record’s grooves and just went back and forth. Once the dancers heard that, all they wanted to hear were the breaks. "Other DJs had records," offers Herc, "but I had a style that they didn’t have, Herc’s style, the merry-go-round."
Hip-Hop: Born From A Eclectic Soundscape
Like his father who was an avid record collector, Herc listened to an eclectic range of music: Prince Buster and the Skatalites’ classic Jamaican ska singles, Jim Reeves’ iconic country laments, soul nuggets and Top 40 hits. "Back in the day I listened to WWRL AM and [New York City radio legends] Frankie Crocker on WBLS FM and Cousin Brucie on WABC AM; I listened to Boz Scaggs, Three Dog Night, the Rolling Stones’ 'Sympathy for the Devil,'" Herc shared.
Herc chose records according to their breaks, irrespective of genre, which he wove into an exhilarating soundscape that became hip-hop’s aural underpinning. "I came up on all of that music, no racism," explains Herc. "If you’re Chinese, Black, white, you are alright, we all bleed red, because Jamaica’s motto is 'Out Of Many One People.'"
Clive and Cindy Campbell were born and raised in Jamaica’s capital city, Kingston; from an early age, they were exposed to the island’s sound system culture — a significant entertainment platform in Jamaica’s economically depressed communities. Sound systems (mobile discos) first appeared in Kingston in the late 1940s and proliferated throughout the 1950s and 1960s, initially playing American R&B records. However, the sound systems’ need for exclusive music accelerated Jamaica’s nascent recording industry, which led to the subsequent birth of ska, rocksteady, reggae and dancehall.
Each sound employed a selector, who played the records, and an emcee or "deejay" in Jamaican parlance, who would rhyme or "toast" over the records’ instrumental segments. Early toasters such as Count Matchuki followed by King Stitt melded their Jamaican dialect with mimicking the radio jocks they heard on stations based in the southern U.S. that were beamed into the island.
Clive and Cindy observed the most popular sound men of the era including Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd (Downbeat the Ruler), Duke Reid (Trojan) and most influential to Herc, George Edwards a.k.a. King George of King Edwards sound, as they set up their respective equipment in the afternoon ahead of the evenings’ dances. "King George, that’s how my ear developed, from listening to him," says Herc.
The dances attracted huge crowds and generated income not just for the sound systems and the sessions’ promoters but for food and drink vendors, even tailors and dressmakers because many patrons purchased new clothes to look their best.
"My father was very musically inclined, he had the latest music, went to parties and one of his good friends, Mr. Jim, was Coxsone Dodd’s brother," Cindy says. "We were too young to participate but our parents and family members talked about the experience. The dances were held outside so we saw how Jamaican people put on and promoted their dances, and what needed to be done to have a successful party. Those things had a tremendous influence on how we did our parties in the Bronx."
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The Campbells migrated to the Bronx NY during the 1960s, their relocation led by Clive and Cindy’s mother, Nettie, as she pursued a nursing degree. Clive arrived in the Bronx in 1967. With the help of his father, Herc set up his own sound system, The Herculoids, its powerful, rumbling sonic replicating what he heard in his Kingston youth with one significant difference. "A lot of Jamaicans emphasize the bass to shake your waist. I like bass, but I like to break down the system because you have highs, you have mid-range and the bass, so I broke it down."
Herc spun primarily funk and soul, as well as the occasional rock record. "I played music, some for the old, some for the young. I call it grown folks’ style," Herc explains. "If I can dance to it, I am going to play it."
His merry-go-round technique transformed the breaks on an assortment of singles from the the Incredible Bongo Band’s "Apache" to Dennis Coffee’s "Scorpio," James Brown’s "Give It Up Turn It Loose," to Dr. John’s "Right Place, Wrong Time" into extended, hypnotic percussive jams. Herc’s father told him to soak the labels off of his records to protect their identity from rival DJs, a practice utilized by Kingston’s sound system selectors to trump their opponents at sound clashes.
By the end of 1973, the recreation room couldn’t accommodate the size of the crowds attending Herc’s parties, so he and Coke La Rock moved their sessions to parks and clubs throughout the Bronx. Coke La Rock’s quick shout outs grew into rhymes that morphed into lyrics, including "hotel, motel, you don’t tell, we won’t tell," which was interpolated by the Sugar Hill Gang’s Big Bank Hank in rap’s first hit record, "Rapper’s Delight." The influential template La Rock established is a mid-1970s American transplantation of Jamaican deejays’ practice of talking over records.
Respect For The Culture's Jamaican Roots
Some longstanding hip-hop fans, bloggers and even historians have minimized the Jamaican sound system as the bedrock for the culture’s development. Even in Jamaica, where hip-hop is widely listened to, many are unaware of the movement’s ancestry. "We realize that Jamaicans have never really grasped what hip-hop has done, as related to us coming from the island of Jamaica," says Cindy.
Possibly the only hip-hop 50 event exploring the complexities of the sound system/hip-hop connection is Faawud: Jamaican Sound System Culture’s Official Hip-Hop 50th Celebration, to be held at a later date. Faawud will include a turntablist competition, a friendly battle between a rap emcee and a Jamaican toaster and an exhibition of audio components and paraphernalia from early days of hip-hop and reggae, with DJs King Addies, Revolution Sound and DJ Myte playing classic tracks, representing both genres.
A panel exploring hip-hop’s sound system roots will include Herc, Grandmaster Kaz (emcee/leader of the pioneering hip-hop group Cold Crush Brothers) who attended Cindy and Herc’s fabled back to school jam, and Danny Dread, the venerable, tenured selector with King Addies, who are celebrating their 40th anniversary. Danny and Herc will each play 15-minute sets and at midnight on Aug. 11, Herc will usher in hip-hop’s official birthday.
Cindy Campbell, Kool Herc and Coke LaRock will receive awards, as will their Jamaican counterparts Danny Dread and veteran toaster Big Youth, one of the first deejays to have hit records, beginning in the early 1970s.
"Jamaican and Caribbean artists have had an incredible impact on the birth and growth of hip-hop and their influence has been overlooked for too long," comments James Cuthbert, President of Rock The Bells, one of Faawud’s presenting partners. "In this 50th year of hip-hop, if we are going to honor the culture and the icons that created it, we have to do it right."
In 2021, a Congressional Resolution officially declared 1520 Sedgwick Avenue the birthplace of hip-hop, which followed a battle against landlords who wanted to shutter the historic dwelling. Endeavoring to save the building, Herc and Cindy worked with New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who marveled at their accomplishments as immigrants to New York City.
"Senator Schumer said, 'my God, this is an immigrant story,'" Cindy says. "Hip-hop was born in America, but it’s a fantastic immigrant story. People don’t realize that two immigrants from Jamaica did this. Why? Because we flew below the radar. We didn’t sue anybody or jump on a bandwagon saying we did this or that. We didn’t have to; the 50 years speak for themselves."
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