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.
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