Birth of Hip Hop: How NYC Block Parties Built the 80s
If you grew up flipping cassettes and watching Yo! MTV Raps after school, you probably take it for granted that hip hop was always here. It wasn’t. Forty-something years ago, hip hop didn’t exist as a genre, a culture, or a word anyone said out loud. It was just a Jamaican kid named Clive Campbell plugging two turntables into the rec room of a Bronx apartment building and accidentally inventing the soundtrack of the future.
This is the story of how hip hop crawled out of NYC’s burning boroughs, conquered the 80s, and turned a generation of kids into b-boys, taggers, and rap fans for life. Pull up a milk crate.
August 11, 1973: The Block Party That Started It All
Most music genres don’t have a birthday. Hip hop kind of does. On August 11, 1973, in the rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx, a teenager named Cindy Campbell threw a back-to-school party and put her older brother in charge of the music. That brother went by DJ Kool Herc.
Herc had been watching how Bronx dancers reacted to records. They didn’t lose their minds during the verses — they lost their minds during the break, that little instrumental section where the drums and bass took over. So Herc grabbed two copies of the same record, two turntables, and a mixer, and started cutting back and forth between the breaks. Suddenly the 10-second drum break became three minutes long. Dancers went off. The kids who killed it during these stretched-out breaks got a name: b-boys and b-girls.
