A Tale of Two Bronxes: The Earliest Days of Hip Hop

The year 1969 is not usually thought of for its association with hip hop music. However, this was the year that Pete DJ Jones, a club DJ playing in downtown Bronx, first played two copies of the same record together and began a revolution. This new technique allowed Jones to isolate the break beat, the short instrumental part of a song with lots of energy, and repeat it. One song could be stretched out for long periods of time. This gave dancers a chance to find grooves and stay there.

The technique caught on quickly. In the South Bronx, Clive Campbell, a very young Jamaican immigrant who went by Kool DJ Herc, was throwing house parties. He began playing two copies of the same funk or reggae album and looping the break to keep the dance floor packed for hours. He termed the technique "merry-go-rounding." These parties were small (in lieu of a strobe light, they had a guy named Mike flip the lights on and off), but Herc began attracting a larger crowd around late 1973.

Herc's side of town is where hip hop culture truly began. Pete Jones played downtown disco clubs with an age limit and a high entry fee. Herc, on the other hand, was playing shows in the park and the aforementioned house parties. Anybody could attend these events, and everybody did. Herc quickly built a reputation as the best DJ in the area, and soon found himself playing to large crowds.

It was at these large parties that break dancing emerged. During these long instrumental breaks, dancers would clear an area and start doing intense dances, writhing around and moving with a new kind of furious athleticism. Herc dubbed these the "break boys," or "B Boys."

Herc's Jamaican childhood gave rise to another popular element of hip hop music - rapping. Herc would go to parties in his home town of Kingston and notice DJs "toasting," or calling out names and making chatter over the music to get the crowd excited. He brought this with him to New York, where it evolved to include the element of rhyming. As Herc's popularity grew, toasting and DJing at the same time grew to be too much, and he brought on Coke la Rock to rap for him, effectively making Coke the first hip hop MC.

Success such as Herc's is likely to bring competitors. In this case some of the notable opponents included founder of the Zulu Nation and ex-gang leader Afrikaa Bambaataa and a young underfunded electronics wizard by the name of Grandmaster Flash. Competition was fierce, and it was common practice to remove record labels and put decoy wires around your speaker setup so nobody else could steal your breaks or get their speakers quite as loud as yours.

Herc was still on top, and would often humiliate the other DJs by calling them out during his set or making fun of their stereo setups. If another DJ would refuse to stop playing when it was Herc's turn, he would simply drown them out with his incredibly loud system, which could be heard from blocks away. Whenever Herc saw Flash on the dance floor, he would turn off his system's highs and lows, leaving just the mids, to make fun of Flash's built-from scratch stereo setup which had no bass.

While Grandmaster Flash found little acceptance or success with his lackluster system against the competitive DJs of the South Bronx, he was able to work with Pete Jones and learn tricks of the trade which were otherwise closely guarded secrets. It was during this time that Flash developed the DJ technique which would thrust hip hop music into its second generation - the backspin, which would soon evolve into cutting and scratching.

The hip hop movement was in full swing by 1975, and a rift was growing. South Bronx partygoers were not fond of the different crowd Pete Jones catered to, nor the fact that he would sometimes play disco music, which was the popular radio music of the day. Herc described Jones' audience as “The bourgeoisie, the ones that graduated from the little house parties, you grown now you out your momma’s house. You puttin’ on Pierre Cardin now, you wearing Halston, you getting’ into the Jordache and Sassoon era.”

The rift came to a head one night in 1977. Pete Jones and Kool Herc were to have a DJ battle at the Executive Playhouse, a club where Herc would play often. Two of Herc's regulars, known as The Nigger Twins, had recently had a fallout with the DJ. They found his playlist for that night's battle and took it to Jones and Flash. Jones, who was set up to play first, played the exact same records which Herc was about to play. Dismayed, Herc was able to think fast and pulled out incredibly rare records and kept his edge.

The battle was going poorly for Jones, until some time during the night Jones stepped aside and let Grandmaster Flash play on his system. Flash used his backspin method in front of a large audience for the first time, and was able to display his magician-like showmanship. The crowd went wild, and Herc wasn't able to keep their attention any more. That night, Grandmaster Flash's name blew up, and he became known as one of the great DJs of the Bronx.

Herc's reputation was badly damaged, and his crowds shrank. Several months later he was stabbed after a fight in the same nightclub where the battle took place, and his career never fully recovered. Pete Jones retired in 1980 to manage his clubs. These two men had been the basis for one of the most important and quickly evolving musical genres of the last forty years. They developed the techniques, they developed the culture, and they got the next generation of DJs and MCs started in the right direction. Nobody since has had as much of an influence on hip hop music as the two original greats from two sides of the same city.

HOW TO BE A FUCKING MAN-DOG

WOOF WOOF SUCKAS it's me comin' at you with the ways you gotta be if you wanna get them bitches on Valentine's Day- male or female let's not be discriminatory here - into your fuckin' SACK for some CRAZY POUNDING.

You basically gotta be a guy with giant muscles all over your body and face goin WOOF WOOF at the ladies on the screen in a movie theater. People see that, they're all like "hell damn that's a guy I want to do some CRAZY POUNDING on my face. Excuse me my friends I'm going to go get some of that, someone hold my shirt and pants for me" MORE ASS THAN YOU CAN HANDLE.

Another way to be a man-dog is to go on the street and be all WOOF WOOF DAMN FINE at the buildings. People go all "yeah I like a guy who can appreciate some fine architecture, think I'll just go over to that guy for some CRAZY POUNDING." Then we all havin' sex on the side of the building. People look--people look and they give me that look and I'm like WOOF WOOF sucka you just jealous of all this I got right here. Yeah, I'm pretty hung, since you asked. Hung like flourescent lightbulbs: long, thin, white, and when it's goin' good there's a humming sound. CHECK IT.

The best way to be a god damn hot shit man-DOG MAN DOG SUCKA is to get on some sorta boat and go out and hang over the side and go WOOF WOOF LOVIN THE OCEAN then you dip your MAN DOG MAN DONG in that ocean and get some CRAZY POUNDING going on sayin' WOOF WOOF. Ocean be all waves and shit, that's me. I made those fuckin' waves. One time thing. Ocean calls me I don't call back.

So there you go, little suckas. Go be a little fuckin' man-dog and get you some shit on Valentine's Day but don't you ever step to me because I am the ORIGINAL and I fuckin' fucked that Valentine piece of shit and he don't come back round here no more. DON'T STEP.

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