History Of Hip Hop

History of Hip Hop

Believe it or not, rap has been around for over 23 years. In fact the first ever rap tune to be pressed on vinyl was "Rapper's Delight", by the Sugarhill Gang in the late 70s. Since then rap has evolved from a fad to a street party. Rap music is an element of a larger culture that encompasses rap, baggy clothing, break-dancing, graffiti, vocabulary and a general lifestyle. This popular culture is generally referred to as hip-hop. Rap made its way to our shores in the early 1980s, as early as 1983. DJ Blaze, one of the best-known hip-hop DJs in South Africa, first got into it in 1983 when a movie called Beat Street was showing in his neighborhood. "I began DJing in 1990," he states. "I liked the scratching and the mixing you know, the sound that DJs made when they were playing."

It all started in the summer of 1973 in New York City... A young man named Kool Herc, having come from Jamaica three years earlier, began spinning in the parks in the South Bronx... What made Herc different than most DJs was his "looping" of certain parts of records... What he would do is take the phattest part of a song (called a "break") and replay it back and forth using two turntables and a mixer... A new song of sorts was created -- a repeating groove -- that kids in the parks would dance to...

It spread, and along with Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash began pumping this new sound... They primarily spun in parks concentrated in the Bronx, but began to expand into the other boroughs (i.e. Queens, Brooklyn, etc...), DJing at public schools or fire halls as well...