A straight­for­ward his­tory of the ear­ly days of Hip Hop, focus­ing more on the pro­duc­ers, record labels and peo­ple who ran the busi­ness end than on the per­form­ers. Hip Hop seems to have coa­lesced into exis­tence simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in sev­er­al U.S. cities in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, but a con­ven­tion­al “birth­day” is the August 11, 1973 par­ty in a base­ment apart­ment in the Bronx. Soon, people DJs like Afri­ka Bam­baataa and Kool Herc were throw­ing block par­ties fea­tur­ing break­beats and scratch­ing. Emcees, began spon­ta­neous­ly rap­ping to the beats.Through the sev­en­ties, it was a spon­ta­neous, infor­mal and bare­ly noticed seen…it was six years before the first Hip Hop album was record­ed and released. As the musi­cal fash­ion sat­u­rat­ed the world, mon­ey start­ed pil­ing up, and the inevitable strug­gle between art, social con­science, and busi­ness inter­ests. This is the part that inter­ests the author. His analy­sis is com­mon sense: mon­ey soon over­whelms art and social causes. 

An inter­est­ing quo­ta­tion: “Who would pay mon­ey for some­thing they can hear for free at par­ties? Let’s keep it under­ground. Nobody out­side of the Bronx would like this stuff any­way.” —- Joseph Sad­dler, aka Grand­mas­ter Flash, 1979, when approached with the idea of putting rap music on records.

I have two ver­sions of this well known medieval piece, which is impor­tant both from a lit­er­ary and a musi­cal point of view. Euro­pean dra­ma evolved, in the Mid­dle Ages, from the litur­gy of the Church. What began as the mod­est elab­o­ra­tions on the cer­e­mony of the mass even­tu­ally led, by slow incre­ments of change, to Ham­let. Sim­i­larly, the sim­ple mono­phonic chant of the mass was the acorn from which opera, sym­phony and con­certo grew. In both aspects, it was the neces­sity to enter­tain the audi­ence, rather than God, that pushed the process. Read more »