Origin of Hip-Hop
Hip-hop music, also called hip hop or rap music, is a music genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that is commonly accompanied with rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted. It developed as part of hip-hop culture defined by six sub-cultural key elements: Mcing/rapping, DJing/scratching, break dancing, graffiti writing, synthesis and beat boxing. Hip hop was music and culture that formed during the 1970's when block parties became increasingly popular in New York City, particularly among African American youth residing in the Bronx. Clive Campbell, born April 16, 1955, also known as DJ Kool Herc is a Jamaican-born American DJ who is credited with originating hip hop music in the early 1970s in The Bronx, New York City. His playing of hard funk-records of the sort modeled by James Brown was an alternative both to the violent gang culture of the Bronx and to the beginning popularity of disco in the 1970s. DJ Kool Herc played only the instrumental portion of the record, which emphasized the drum beat—the "break"—and switch would from one break to another multiple times.
Using the same two turntable set-up of disco DJs, Kool Herc used two copies of the same record to elongate the break. This breakbeat DJing, using hard funk, rock, and records with Latin percussion, formed the basis of hip hop music. Campbell's announcements and exhortations to dancers helped lead to the dense, rhymed spoken enhancement now known as rapping. He called his dancers "break-boys" and "break-girls", or simply b-boys and b-girls. Kool Herc’s DJ style was quickly taken up by figures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. Unlike them, he never made the move into commercially recorded hip hop in its earliest years.
Using the same two turntable set-up of disco DJs, Kool Herc used two copies of the same record to elongate the break. This breakbeat DJing, using hard funk, rock, and records with Latin percussion, formed the basis of hip hop music. Campbell's announcements and exhortations to dancers helped lead to the dense, rhymed spoken enhancement now known as rapping. He called his dancers "break-boys" and "break-girls", or simply b-boys and b-girls. Kool Herc’s DJ style was quickly taken up by figures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. Unlike them, he never made the move into commercially recorded hip hop in its earliest years.