How did hip-hop begin in the Bronx in the 1970s?

Hip-hop emerged in the Bronx in the early and mid 1970s as a youth movement built around parties. Most scholars point to a back-to-school party on August 11, 1973, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, hosted by Cindy Campbell and her brother Clive, known as DJ Kool Herc. There, Herc extended the instrumental breaks of records so people could dance longer, and MCs began speaking over the music. The movement grew into four linked elements: DJing, MCing or rapping, breaking, and graffiti. [1] [2] [3]

Cindy Campbell rented the recreation room in her apartment building to raise money for a new back-to-school wardrobe. Admission was 25 cents for women and 50 cents for men, and the night reportedly grossed $300. The room held only a few hundred people and was packed with high school students, who heard soul and funk played through Herc's Jamaican-style sound system. The dancing later spilled into the neighboring Cedar Playground, and Herc went on to hold free outdoor parties. [2]

Herc's key innovation was technical. Using two turntables and a mixer, he joined the short percussive sections of popular records, which he called break beats, into roughly ten minutes of continuous percussion. Dancers responded enthusiastically. He later moved his system to a public park, running power from a lamp post, and other Bronx DJs followed his example. [1]

Other DJs, including Afrika Bambaataa, a former gang leader from the Bronx River Houses, and Grandmaster Flash, who trained in electronics at a vocational high school, joined in. By 1976 DJs were competing at parties in parks, community centers and abandoned buildings. Dance crews borrowed steps from martial arts films, Latin dancing and James Brown. DJs then recruited street poets to rhyme over their beats, and by the late 1970s the rappers drew as much attention as the DJs and dancers. The parties then moved into clubs and halls such as Disco Fever and the Stardust Ballroom. [1]

Emmett G. Price III of Berklee College of Music describes graffiti and streetwear as part of the same scene, so that some accounts count five elements rather than four. He also stresses that the culture was created by teenagers, mostly marginalized Black youth, and that it drew on funk, soul, jazz, blues and spirituals.

Rodrigo Venegas of the duo Rebel Diaz describes the four elements as a cultural response to a community that was institutionally abandoned. Another factor was a 1971 gang truce at the Hoe Avenue Boys Club, brokered by Benjy Melendez of the Ghetto Brothers with leaders of groups such as the Black Spades and Savage Skulls. One account says it followed the killing of Ghetto Brothers peacekeeper Cornell, called Black Benjie in another. The Fordham lecture argues that the truce let young people travel safely between neighborhoods, which made gatherings like Herc's possible. The sources differ slightly on details of the truce, but agree it helped open the way for block parties. [4] [1] [2]