They Were Just Having a Back-to-School Party in an Apartment Rec Room. Little Did They Know They Were Creating Hip-Hop

Hip-hop is both an American immigrant story and a global story, he later said. It belongs to everybody. NMAAHC, SI When 18-year-old D.J. Clive Campbell decided to provide music for a back-to-school “jam” in the rec room of his Bronx apartment building in August 1973, he introduced his guests to something new. Instead of allowing songs to play linearly as recorded, he used two turntables to isolate and loop the breaks—the instrumental measures, often in the middle of tracks, that allow music to swell—elongating the drumbeats that brought dancers to the floor. Without singers vocalizing over the music, M.C.s took to the microphones, delivering clever rhymes, beatboxing and shouting out call-and--response verses, to keep the party going. Jamaican-born Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, had inadvertently created hip-hop. At that party, the five elements of hip-hop culture all came together, says Emmett G. Price III, dean of Africana studies at Berklee College of Music. Along with the rap, dance (breaking) and the looping, merry-go-round style of spinning records, there was art (graffiti) and fashion (streetwear). Teens representing different neighborhoods often fused the two, explains Price, by spray-painting insignia on their jean jackets.

Adolescents who couldn’t get into 21-and-up nightclubs were drawn to Campbell’s parties. “It’s a substantially younger crowd,” says Chuck D, of the Grammy-nominated 1980s rap group Public Enemy. “He’s playing records for the kids.”

Price says that the youth “took the soundtrack of their ancestors and remixed and remastered it. Listen to hip-hop, and you end up learning about funk, soul, jazz, blues and spirituals.”