History Of Hip Hop Term paper

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Rap started in the South Bronx of New York, which had been a mainly black and Hispanic ghetto for decades. By 1930 nearly a quarter of the people who lived there were West Indian immigrants. And most of the Spanish speakers living in the Bronx now either came originally from Caribbean islands like Puerto Rico and Cuba or are the children of Caribbean immigrants. The Cubans began arriving in the Bronx in the 1930s and 1940s and the Puerto Rican community goes back even further. There are now three million Puerto Ricans living in New York - as many as live in Puerto Rico itself. The Bronx had never been prosperous. But in the 1960s it went into a sudden decline and by the end of the decade it had become the poorest, toughest neighborhood in the whole of New York City.

In 1967 a DJ called Kool Herc immigrated to the States from Jamaica and came to live in the West Bronx. Herc knew the Jamaican sound system scene, and had heard the early talk overs of the new DJs like U Roy. By 1973 Herc owned his own system. This was much louder and more powerful than other neighborhood disco set-ups, and it had a much fuller and crisper sound. But when he began DJing at house parties he found that the New York black crowd would not dance to reggae. So he began talking over the Latin-tinged funk that he knew would appeal.

To start with he merely dropped in snatches of street slang. He would shout phrases like "Rock on my mellow! This is the joint!". The talk was meant to keep the people dancing and to add the excitement that comes from live performance. Gradually he developed a style that was so popular that he began buying records for the instrumental breaks rather than for the whole track. The lead guitar or bass riff or sequence of drumming that he wanted might only last fifteen seconds. Rather than play the whole record straight through he would play this same part several times over, cutting from one record deck to the other as he talked through the microphone. This meant buying several copies of the same record. And it also meant that Her had to have a very precise sense of timing. He used the headphones that DJs use to cue up their records so that he could cut from one copy of a record to another at exactly the right point.

Kool Herc found that the drumming on a record called Apache by The Incredible Bongo Band was particularly suited to his needs. The Incredible Bongo Band were a Jamaican disco group and their version of Apache was released in 1974. But it had been written for the Shadows, Cliff Richard's backing group, in 1960. The Incredible Bongo Band used conga drums instead of the standard pop music drum kit. And they laid more stress on the percussion. Thanks to Kool Herc, Apache could be heard all over the Bronx in 1975.

The style Herc had invented became known as the "beats" or the "break-beats". And he can be credited with another first. As the switching between record decks got faster and more complicated it required a lot of concentration. Herc couldn't rap and operate the records at the same time. So he employed two MCs, Coke-la-Rock and Clark Kent, to do the rapping for him. The MCs would put on a show for the crowd, dancing in front of the decks and bouncing lines off each other. The first MC dance team had arrived. Soon other DJs began copying Herc's style and adding their own refinements. A DJ called Theodor invented a technique called scratching. This involves spinning a record backwards and forwards very fast while the needle is in the groove. When handled in this way, a record can be turned into a percussive instrument.

Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Saddler) was another Bronx DJ who helped to create the hip-hop style. His parents came from Barbados and his father had a big collection of Caribbean and black American records. Flash was fascinated not just by the music but by the records themselves. For him they were things to be looked at, touched and handled, not just played:

"My father was a very heavy record collector. He still thinks that he has the

stronger collection. I used to open his closets and just watch all the records

he had. I used to get into trouble for touching his records, but I'd go right back

and bother them"

After graduating in electronics, Flash began combining his two main interests; sound technology and hard funk. He made his own system and would play...

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