Hip-Hop

Hip-hop has an address and a date: 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the Bronx, 11 August 1973, when the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc played a back-to-school party and stretched the drum breaks of funk records — the moments when everything drops out but rhythm — into a continuous loop for the dancers. The South Bronx was then a national symbol of urban abandonment, burning and redlined; the culture its teenagers built from turntables, spray paint and cardboard dance floors is one of the great creative acts of the century (Chang 2005).

The first decade built the toolkit. Grandmaster Flash turned the turntable into an instrument — cutting between two copies of a record on time, scratching, backspinning. Afrika Bambaataa, a former gang warlord turned organizer, framed the four elements (DJing, MCing, breaking, graffiti) as a culture and a peace movement. MCs evolved from party hype-men into storytellers; “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) put rap on record, and Flash’s “The Message” (1982) proved it could carry hard journalism.

What followed is the largest story this site will ever trace forward: Run-DMC and the golden age; sampling as composition (the Funky Drummer break alone underpins hundreds of records); gangsta rap’s reportage and controversies; the South’s rise; and by the 2000s, hip-hop as the world’s default pop language, remaking R&B, dance music and global genres — including, through electro and Miami bass, Brazil’s funk carioca, a future node of this web.