DJ Kool Herc

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Kool Herc

Background information
Birth name Clive Campbell
Born April 16, 1955 (1955-04-16) (age 53)
Kingston, Jamaica
Origin The Bronx, New York City, New York, USA
Genre(s) Hip hop
Years active 1967–present

Clive Campbell (born April 16, 1955), AKA Kool Herc, DJ Kool Herc and Kool DJ Herc, is a Jamaican-born DJ who is credited as originating hip hop music, in the Bronx, New York City. His playing of hard funk records of the sort typified by James Brown was an alternative both to the violent gang culture of the Bronx and to the nascent popularity of disco in the 1970s. In response to the reactions of his dancers, Campbell in 1972 began to isolate the instrumental portion of the record which emphasized the drum beat—the break—and switch from one break to another to yet another.

Using the two turntable set-up of the disco DJs, Campbell's style led to the use of two copies of the same record to elongate the break. This breakbeat DJing, using hard funk, rock, and records with Latin percussion, formed the basis of hip hop music. Campbell's announcements and exhortations to dancers would lead to the syncopated, rhymed spoken accompaniment we now know as rapping. He dubbed his dancers break-boys and break-girls, or simply b-boys and b-girls. Campbell's DJ style was quickly taken up by figures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. Unlike them, he never made the move into commercially recorded hip hop in its earliest years.

Contents

[edit] Biography

While growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, Campbell saw and heard the sound systems of neighborhood parties called dancehalls, and the accompanying speech of their DJs, known as toasting.[1] He moved to the Bronx, New York at the age of 13. The creation of the Cross Bronx Expressway by Robert Moses (completed 1963, with further construction continuing through to 1972) had uprooted thousands in the Bronx, displaced communities, and led to "white flight" due to lowered property values in its wake.[2] Parts of the Bronx that Campbell's family moved into were in the process of becoming in effect run by various street gangs. Campbell attended the Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx, where his height, frame, and demeanor on the basketball court prompted the other kids to dub him Hercules. He began running with a graffiti crew called the Ex-Vandals, taking the name Kool Herc.[3] Herc recalls persuading his father to buy him a copy of "Sex Machine" by James Brown (King, 1970), a record that not a lot of people had, and one which they would come to him to hear.[4] He and his sister, Cindy, began hosting back-to-school parties in the recreation room of their building, 1520 Sedgwick Ave.[5] Herc's first soundsystem consisted of two turntables and a guitar amp, on which he would play records like James Brown's "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose", The Jimmy Castor Bunch's "It's Just Begun" and Booker T & the MG's's "Melting Pot".[3] With Bronx clubs afflicted with the menacing presence of street gangs, uptown DJs catering for an older disco crowd with different aspirations, and commercial radio also catering to a demographic distinct from kids in the Bronx, Herc's parties had a ready-made audience.[3][6][7]

It was at these neighborhood parties that DJ Kool Herc developed the style that was the blueprint for hip hop music. Herc would get two copies of the same record and focus on a small part of each record, called the break. Since this part of the record was the one the dancers liked best, Herc isolated and prolonged it. As one record reached the end of the break, he would cue the other record back to the beginning of the break, thereby extending a relatively small part of a record into a long "five-minute loop of fury".[8] This innovation had its roots in what he called "The Merry-Go-Round"—a switching from break to break done at the height of the party. Herc told the New York Times he first introduced the Merry-Go-Round into his sets in 1972.[9] The earliest known Merry-Go-Round involved playing the break from James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit A Loose" (with its refrain, "Now clap your hands! Stomp your feet!"), then switching to the break from "Bongo Rock" by The Incredible Bongo Band, and from "Bongo Rock"'s break into that of "The Mexican" by the English rock band Babe Ruth.[10] Kool Herc also contributed to developing the rhyming style of hip hop by punctuating the music with slang phrases from the DJ's microphone: "Rock on, my mellow!" "B-boys, b-girls, are you ready?" "This is the joint!" "To the beat, y'all!" "You don't stop!"[11][12]

The b-boys and b-girls were the dancers to Herc's breakbeats, who were said by him to be "breaking". The obvious connection is to the breakbeat, but Herc has said that "breaking" was also street slang of the time for "getting excited", "acting energetically".[13] Herc's terms b-boy, b-girl and breaking became part of the lexicon of hip hop culture even before that culture itself had a name. Early Kool Herc b-boy and later DJ innovator Grandmixer D.ST describes the early evolution thus: " ... [E]verybody would form a circle and the B-boys would go into the center. At first the dance was simple: touch your toes, hop, kick out your leg. Then some guy went down, spun around on all fours. Everybody said wow and went home to try to come up with something better."[11] This was the form the media would in the early eighties dub "breakdance"; the same form the dance critic of the New York Times would in 1991 declare "an art as demanding and inventive as mainstream dance forms like ballet and jazz."[14]

With the mystique of his graffiti name, his physical stature, and the reputation of his small parties, Herc had become somewhat of a folk hero in the Bronx. Herc branched out from the recreation room of his building in Sedgwick Avenue to the nearby Twilight Zone club,[5] the Havelo club, the Executive Playhouse club, the PAL on 183rd Street,[3] and high schools such as Dodge High School and Taft High School.[15] Rapping duties were delegated to Coke La Rock, and Herc's posse, known as The Herculords, was further augmented by Clark Kent and dancers The Nigger Twins.[3] Herc also took his soundsystem—now upgraded to one of legendary volume[16]—to the streets and parks of the Bronx. Nelson George recalls a schoolyard party: "The sun hadn't gone down yet, and kids were just hanging out, waiting for something to happen. Van pulls up, a bunch of guys come out with a table, crates of records. They unscrew the base of the light pole, take their equipment, attach it to that, get the electricity – Boom! We got a concert right here in the schoolyard and it's this guy Kool Herc. And he's just standing with the turntable, and the guys were studying his hands. There are people dancing, but there's as many people standing, just watching what he's doing. That was my first introduction to in-the-street, hip hop DJing."[17]

A young Grandmaster Flash, to whom Kool Herc was, in his words, "a hero", began DJing in Herc's style in 1975. By 1976, with his MCs The Furious Five, Flash could play to a packed Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, and was already associated with a famous break known as "The Bells", a cut up of the intro to smooth jazz artist Bob James's 1975 cover of Paul Simon's "Take Me to the Mardi Gras".Nervous venue owners, however, would soon send hip hop back to the clubs, community centers and high school gymnasiums of the Bronx.[18] Afrika Bambaataa first heard Kool Herc in 1973. Bambaataa, at that time a general in the notorious Black Spades gang of the Bronx, obtained his own soundsystem in 1975 and began to DJ in Herc's style, converting his followers to the non-violent Zulu Nation in the process. Kool Herc began using The Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache" as a break in 1975. It became a firm b-boy favorite—"the Bronx national anthem"[11]—and is still in use in hip hop today. Steven Hager wrote of this period

For over five years the Bronx had lived in constant terror of street gangs. Suddenly, in 1975, they disappeared almost as quickly as they had arrived. This happened because something better came along to replace the gangs. That something was eventually called hip-hop.[11]

It is unclear why Kool Herc did not follow so many of the figures he inspired into commercially recorded hip hop, following Sylvia Robinson's assembling of the Sugarhill Gang and their release of "Rapper's Delight" in 1979. For one thing, early record labels were uncertain of how to integrate the DJ into a recording set-up, preferring to use a live band to back their rappers. Additionally, Grandmaster Flash suggests that Herc may not have kept pace with developments in techniques of cueing (lining up a record to play at a certain place on it).[19] There were also developments in cutting (switching from one record to another) and scratching (moving the record by hand to and fro under the stylus for percussive effect) in the late seventies. Herc himself puts it down to two events: an incident at the Executive Playhouse where he was stabbed while attempting to intercede in a fight, which took him out of action, and which he suggests would make people wary of attending events hosted by him subsequent to it, and the burning down of one of the venues at which he used to DJ. In 1980, Herc had stopped DJing, and was working in a record shop in South Bronx.[11]

Kool Herc appeared in Hollywood's take on hip hop, Beat Street (Orion, 1984), as himself. In 1994 he appeared on Terminator X & the Godfathers of Threatt's album, Super Bad.[3] In 2005, he wrote the foreword to Jeff Chang's book on hip hop, Can't Stop, Won't Stop.

[edit] Legacy

In a way, of course, Kool Herc's legacy is all of hip hop music. In Summer 2007, New York state officials declared 1520 Sedgwick Ave. as the "birthplace of hip-hop" making it eligible for national and state registers.[5] DJ Kool Herc is mentioned in numerous hip hop songs, among them "It Doesn't Matter" by Wyclef Jean in the lyrics: "Foundation like Kool Herc / or DJ Red Alert goes berserk / The needle ain't skip the record jerked / 'Cause y'all jumpin' too hard"; the Nas song "Who Killed It?"; and The Roots' song "Web", which states "Kool Herc ain't never get a royalty check". Herc is featured in Jin's Top 5 (Dead or Alive) music video, where he explains the history of hip hop.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Chang, Jeff. Can't Stop, Won't Stop. St. Martin's Press, New York: 2005
  2. ^ Shapiro, Peter. Rough Guide to Hip Hop, 2nd. ed., London: Rough Guides, 2005, p. iv. ISBN 978-1843532637
  3. ^ a b c d e f Shapiro, Peter. Rough Guide to Hip Hop, 2nd. ed., London: Rough Guides, 2005, pp. 212–213
  4. ^ Ogg, Alex, with Upshall, David. The Hip Hop Years, London: Macmillan, 1999. p. 13. ISBN 978-0752217802
  5. ^ a b c Louise Roug, Hip-hop may save Bronx homes, Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2008.
  6. ^ Ogg, Alex, with Upshall, David. The Hip Hop Years, London: Macmillan, 1999. p. 14, p. 18.
  7. ^ Toop, David. Rap Attack, 3rd. ed., London: Serpent's Tail, 2000, p. 65. ISBN 978-1852426279
  8. ^ Chang, Jeff. Can't Stop, Won't Stop, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005.
  9. ^ Hermes, Will. "All Rise For Hip Hop's National Anthem", New York Times, October 29 2006.
  10. ^ Ogg, Alex, with Upshall, David. The Hip Hop Years, London: Macmillan, 1999, pp. 14–15.
  11. ^ a b c d e Steven Hager, Afrika Bambaataa's Hip-Hop, Village Voice, September 21 1982.
  12. ^ Toop, David. Rap Attack, 3rd. ed., London: Serpent's Tail, 2000, p. 69.
  13. ^ Kool Herc, in Israel (director), The Freshest Kids, QD3, 2002.
  14. ^ Jennifer Dunning, "Nurturing Onstage the Moves Born on the Ghettos' Streets", New York Times, November 26, 1991.
  15. ^ Ogg, Alex, with Upshall, David. The Hip Hop Years, London: Macmillan, 1999, p. 14, p. 17.
  16. ^ Toop, David. Rap Attack, 3rd. ed., London: Serpent's Tail, 2000, p. 18–19. et al
  17. ^ Ogg, Alex, with Upshall, David. The Hip Hop Years, London: Macmillan, 1999, p. 17.
  18. ^ Toop, David. Rap Attack, 3rd. ed., London: Serpent's Tail, 2000, pp. 74–76.
  19. ^ Toop, David. Rap Attack, 3rd. ed., London: Serpent's Tail, 2000, p. 62.

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