Hip-Hop

A Collector’s guide by Dudley Jaynes. Part 4: Old School Hip Hop

This month we find ourselves at hip hop’s event horizon, where the Black Spades became the Zulu Nation and the disillusioned found a voice – the moment where hyping a crowd mutated into rap and Grand Wizard Theodore invented the scratch.

The hip hop movement began in the Bronx in the 1970s and can be traced to the block parties and dances of that time. In contrast to the disco scene, DJs in the Bronx were focusing on the breaks. These were small sections of records ranging from funk to rock (eg James Brown and The Rolling Stones), where the music was stripped down to leave just the drums.

DJs would use two copies of a record so that they could move back and forth on two turntables, playing the break over and over again (this was effectively the birth of the loop as used in modern music production). These parties brought together rival gangs and in some cases gang warfare was replaced by B Boying (later known as breakdancing) where crews would battle each other on the dance floor. A whole culture, which came to be known as hip hop, quickly emerged.

Initially, it was only the tags and pieces of Graffiti artists that would have been noticeable to the outside world. It wouldn’t be until 1979 that hip hop was thrown into the spotlight via the first rap records. Rap itself had developed over a period of time, beginning …

by Dudley Jaynes
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