The Come Up E-Book

Jonathan Abrams

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 896

Beschreibung

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it's the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of colour from some of America's most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country's youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language. And yet, the stories of many hip-hop pioneers and their individual contributions in the pre-Internet days of mixtapes and word of mouth are rarely heard—and some are at risk of being lost forever. Now, in The Come Up, the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hop's rise, a multi-decade chronicle told in the voices of the people who made it happen. In more than three hundred interviews conducted over three years, Abrams has captured the stories of the DJs, executives, producers, and artists who both witnessed and themselves forged the history of hip-hop. Masterfully combining these voices into a seamless symphonic narrative, Abrams traces how the genre grew out of the resourcefulness of a neglected population in the South Bronx, and from there how it flowed into New York City's other boroughs, and beyond—from electrifying live gatherings, then on to radio and vinyl, below to the Mason-Dixon Line, west to Los Angeles through gangster rap and G-funk, and then across generations. Abrams has on record Grandmaster Caz detailing hip-hop's infancy, Edward "Duke Bootee" Fletcher describing the origins of "The Message," DMC narrating his role in introducing hip-hop to the mainstream, Ice Cube recounting N.W.A's breakthrough and breakup, Kool Moe Dee recalling his Grammys boycott, and countless more key players. Throughout, Abrams conveys with singular vividness the drive, the stakes, and the relentless creativity that ignited one of the greatest revolutions in modern music. The Come Up is an exhilarating behind-the-scenes account of how hip-hop came to rule the world—and an essential contribution to music history.

Leseprobe

‘Jonathan Abrams, for the entirety of his career and regardless of the subject matter, has shown a profound ability to take the words and recollections of others and stitch them together into something big and special. Here, in maybe his most massive undertaking yet, he’s done it with the rise of hip-hop. The Come Up is Abrams at his sharpest, at his most observant, at his most insightful’

Shea Serrano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hip-Hop (And Other Things)

‘Hip-hop is a story machine, and Jonathan Abrams is unsurpassed in capturing the best of them. What Please Kill Me did for punk rock, The Come Up has done for hip-hop –it’s something essential, profane, profound, hilarious, tragic, riveting, and real. These are the tales that made a movement’

Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

‘To say this book is incredible simply doesn’t do it justice. It’s essential –a primary source. It isn’t just the fact that Abrams has collected the voices of the most seminal pioneering rap artists; he has captured their insights with the benefit of time, perspective, and reflection. Read this book. Eat this book. Steal this book’

Cheo Hodari Coker, creator of Marvel’s Luke Cage and author of Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of The Notorious B.I.G.

BY JONATHAN ABRAMS

All the Pieces Matter

Boys Among Men

The Come Up

THE COME UP

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 2022

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

Copyright © Tamar Adler 2011

The right of Tamar Adler to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Book design by Anna Kochman

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800752771

eISBN: 9781800752788

For Aaron and to crafting your own life’s beat

CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

01

LEMONADE FROM LEMONS

Bronx, New York | 1973–1979

02

THE RIGHT MENU

New York City | 1978–1981

03

WHAT IN THE WORLD IS THIS?

Englewood, New Jersey; New York City | 1979–1982

04

A REAL MIX

New York City | 1979–1983

05

NEVER BEEN THE SAME

New York City | 1983–2000

06

COMPLETELY DIFFERENT NATIONS

Los Angeles | 1983–1986

07

ATOMS SMASHING

Long Island, New York | 1985–1992

08

A GUMBO OF MAGNIFICENCE

New York City | 1979–1988

09

REINVENTING THE WHEEL

New York City and New Jersey | 1986–1996

10

LIKE A BLUEBERRY

Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Compton, New York City | 1985–1995

11

LIKE COACHELLA IN THE STUDIO

New York City | 1988–1994

12

PARENTAL ADVISORY

Riverside, California; Miami | 1984–2003

13

CERTAIN POCKETS

Atlanta, Houston, Memphis, New Orleans | 1982–1995

14

OUT HUSTLING

The Bay Area | 1983–2006

15

PULL QUOTE

Beverly Hills | 1992

16

A HIGHER LEVEL OF EXECUTION

Los Angeles | 1992–1993

17

RAISING THE BAR

New York City | 1993–2003

18

THE SOUTH GOT SOMETHING TO SAY

Atlanta, Houston, Memphis, New Orleans, Virginia | 1995–Present

19

THAT STUCK WITH ME

Oakland, Los Angeles, New York | 1991–1997

20

THE CONSCIOUSNESS

The Midwest | 1988–2010

21

TAKE IT AND FLIP IT

22

THE RECOGNITION THAT IT DESERVES

23

THANK GOD BECAUSE OF HIP-HOP

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PLATES SECTION

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Every hip-hop music fan has an origin story—when the music ignited those first sparks, grabbing us, shaking us, initiating a lifelong relationship.

Growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles during the late 1980s, I was too young to appreciate the rebellious explosion of N.W.A, a group that opened millions to the possibilities of the genre. The group’s lyrics did not lend themselves to frequent radio play, and my parents didn’t openly invite that “hoppity hip” into our home. I was plugged in enough to applaud Dr. Dre when The Chronic landed, but could not yet truly appreciate the full evolution of his sonic mastery. Doggystyle, Snoop Doggy Dogg’s debut album, painted the scenes of an elaborate party that my adolescent mind could only partly imagine.

Instead, for me, the artist who truly stoked those early embers was Tupac Amaru Shakur. As he did for so many people my age, Pac ignited in me a full devotion to hip-hop music.

This was back in the days when the music found you. Long before Spotify and iTunes, I would toggle the radio dial between 92.3 The Beat and Power 106 and record Shakur’s songs onto a cassette tape so I could play them back on demand. I got my hands on Me Against the World, Shakur’s third album, when a teenage employee at Circuit City took pity on my pleading eleven-year-old self. My mom unearthed the cassette, took one look at the Parental Advisory sticker, and marched me back to return it. I discreetly purchased another one, vowing to find a better hiding place. Such was the power and pull of Pac on my young mind.

Pac gifted me a song or lyric for every emotion and feeling. He had a way of making it seem as though he was speaking directly to me, crystallizing thoughts and ideas that were only starting to percolate and form. “Brenda’s Got a Baby” illuminated the structural inequities in the world that I sensed people like me faced, but were not being taught in school. “Dear Mama” existed for when I reflected over my mom and witnessed her trudge through setbacks. I reserved “Hit ’Em Up” for those rare and insular moments I wanted to give the world double birds.

Tupac’s killing in late 1996 shattered my world. I mourned the death of an artist and poet who transcended his still-young musical genre. I had come to view hip-hop music as a foundational block in my own life and wondered if it would continue evolving, emerging, and influencing after the loss of one of its brightest stars.

The deaths of Shakur and other talented artists gunned down in their prime, like the Notorious B.I.G., were colossal losses. But hip-hop music, above almost anything else, is resilient. The genre’s original bricklayers in the Bronx of the 1970s heeded their own flickers of imagination to ignite a musical genre out of decay and neglect. The genre persevered, overcoming every obstacle imaginable—from an older generation who rejected it, to radio stations that did not want to play it, to politicians speaking out against it.

I never found another Pac. But, in the genre, I found a constant ally. I turned to hip-hop music when I needed inspiration or motivation, to zone out or home in, during times of celebration and mourning, for education and enlightenment.

Hip-hop music has now existed for almost half a century—and its origins and evolution are finally beginning to be studied and excavated with the rigor they deserve. But the voices of those who created, innovated, and persevered to propel a musical genre that would one day become the most popular in the United States are still seldom heard from—and some of their stories are at risk of being forever lost. That realization, which I had in 2017, became the catalyst for this project. After publishing my oral history of the groundbreaking TV show The Wire, I aimed my next oral history project at a far more ambitious subject: hip-hop’s rise and the creative sparks behind its first transcendent moments.

Lyricism, after all, is a form of oral tradition.

This oral history weaves together the sweeping origin, spread, and impact of hip-hop music across generation after generation as it made its dominant march across the country. It starts with the inventiveness of neglected kids amid the Bronx ruins before stretching to New York’s other boroughs like the veins on a subway map. It encompasses hip-hop’s path from parks onto vinyl, its travels to the West Coast through the rise of gangster rap and G-funk, the Southern surge in cities like Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans, and many places and moments beyond and in between. The chapters focus on the artistry, creativeness, and courage of those who made significant impacts, and seek to illuminate the roots of careers that influenced generations of others.

I began this project in the summer of 2018, and over the next four years I would conduct over three hundred interviews. The stories captured on these pages were provided by DJs, artists, producers, label executives, and journalists who lent their time and memories to deliver firsthand accounts. There are people whom I had hoped to talk to for this book and couldn’t get to; I hope that these pages still manage to capture their contributions to the music. I also know that there are bricklayers whose influence is not documented in this book—but any omissions here are not a judgment on their inroads. Those legacies are eternal. A book dedicated just to listing the names of those who have made positive impacts on hip-hop music could never contain enough space.

People, like hip-hop music, move along on their own schedules, which sometimes didn’t align with my reporting timeline. One individual replied to a direct message for an interview more than two years after I first sent the request. Some people whose thoughts I hoped to include in these pages declined requests, preferring to allow a lifetime of work to speak for itself. But many others, including some who have rarely granted interviews, were willing to sit down with me. These conversations—like the late Edward “Duke Bootee” Fletcher describing the origins of “The Message,” DMC passionately detailing his groundbreaking efforts, Kool Moe Dee elaborating on his Grammys boycott, and executives like Ann Carli and Monica Lynch detailing their pioneering moves—resulted in a manuscript that, in its initial form, was nearly three times longer than the one you are reading.

In the interest of streamlining and including as many essential viewpoints and anecdotes as possible, the reflections here have been occasionally edited for length and clarity. The minor hitches that arise in natural conversation have been removed. The spirit and intent of every conversation remains. Occasionally, anecdotes conflict. Perspectives of the same event can differ, and memories change and morph over time. I regard all of them as personal and valid.

One challenge of compiling an oral history of a complex subject, one with overlapping chronologies and settings, is how to organize the material. I have sought to tell the story roughly in chronological order, beginning in the Bronx in the early 1970s. As you will see, however, some chapters do backtrack to explore certain figures and events relevant to their theme. Another challenge is how to fairly document complex individuals. It’s important to acknowledge that, over the course of decades in the public eye, a few figures have, either in the past or recently, been subject to allegations of wrongdoing, some quite serious. I felt it was nonetheless important to the historical record to include recollections from several such people—Russell Simmons, for example, who made crucial creative and business contributions to the genre—while remaining mindful of and acknowledging their alleged inappropriate conduct.

Each quote is accompanied by that person’s professional identity (artist, DJ, producer, etc.); affiliation with musical groups or significant record labels; and sometimes where they are from. Like the chapter introductions and narrative interstitials, this information is meant to provide readers with context. Occasionally a person’s title changes as the book progresses, in order to reflect the relevant information for that section. For example, Faith Newman was one of Def Jam’s early employees before she later signed Nas to Columbia Records.

Hip-hop music’s rise to permeate every strand of popular culture is a winding, tangled, massive story.

And it’s one that continues to expand and evolve.

Here’s to those next sparks catching fire.

THE COME UP

01 LEMONADE FROM LEMONS

Bronx, New York 1973–1979

Clive Campbell migrated as a child with his family from Jamaica to the United States in the late 1960s, leaving one country roiled by political instability for another. In Kingston, Campbell had become infatuated with the reggae and dub music that blared from giant portable sound systems, and DJs who toasted or talked over instrumental tracks. Campbell arrived in the Bronx during the reign of feel-good disco music, which intersected with the civil rights era and the dire financial straits of a New York City that was facing a declining population and labor unrest. Campbell involved himself in the city’s emerging graffiti scene—which had arrived after originating in Philadelphia—and assumed the tag name Kool Herc.

On August 11, 1973, Campbell hosted a back-to-school fundraising party for his sister, Cindy, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx—and he is widely credited with birthing hip-hop on that day. By then, the teenage Campbell had assembled his own massive sound system, along with an eclectic record collection that included selections from James Brown and the Incredible Bongo Band. At the party, before an appreciative audience of neighborhood teenagers, DJ Kool Herc performed his “Merry-Go-Round” technique of isolating and prolonging the breakbeat sections of songs (the drum patterns used in interludes—breaks—between sections of melody) by switching between two record players.

DJ Kool Herc became a folk hero in the Bronx as his parties attracted larger and larger crowds. He hosted popular block parties and created Kool Herc & the Herculoids with Clark Kent. Acrobatic dancers known as b-boys, b-girls, and breakers (the media eventually labeled them as breakdancers, a term still in wide circulation today) flocked to DJ Kool Herc’s parties to compete in dance circles—no longer having to wait out lengthy songs for a brief moment to get down. DJ Kool Herc enlisted the help of his friend Coke La Rock, regarded as hip-hop’s first MC, as La Rock adapted toasting by shouting out the names of friends and encouraging partygoers to dance.

In time, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash joined DJ Kool Herc as Bronx DJs who forged groundbreaking contributions and laid the foundation for hip-hop to flourish, spread, and evolve.

DJ Charlie Chase (Cold Crush Brothers): The Bronx [in the late 1960s and ’70s] was the epicenter for poverty, the epicenter for kids who were full of energy, who didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t have a lot of activities, didn’t have role models.

MC Debbie D (artist): The backdrop to the South Bronx is poverty-stricken—crime, gangs, slumlords, abandoned buildings everywhere. So they had coined the Bronx “The Bronx Is Burning.” And they wasn’t putting money into safe havens for young people. So, with the music outside, you went to a jam, there’s a thousand kids standing there. We ain’t got nothing else to do.

Easy A.D. (Cold Crush Brothers): We were creating something that took up our time and made us feel good and brought us together. You have to imagine walking out your house every day and seeing abandoned cars burnt up, empty buildings, and you’re going to elementary school.

Michael Holman (journalist): A lot of young people are going downtown to see major live acts like [Patti] LaBelle, James Brown, Funkadelic, as well as going to the famous discos, wearing their best clothes, doing the latest dances, and leaving those young punks and all the troubles in the neighborhood behind. What’s left behind is an audience of younger people, teenagers who can do all the dances—hell, sometimes they’re the originators and are the best dancers.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): A big part of hip-hop is breakdancing, b-boying. The dance was around before hip-hop, the actual dance style was developed from playing soul music and that playlist that [Kool Herc used].

Grandmaster Caz (Cold Crush Brothers): Herc was a mythical figure in the neighborhood. You heard about him before you saw him.

Sadat X (artist, Brand Nubian): I remember Herc being this larger-than-life figure, just muscles, with the glasses on. Herc was the commander, putting people in place.

MC Debbie D (artist): When Kool Herc comes out and he starts playing music and then other notable DJs get involved—[Afrika] Bambaataa, [Grandmaster] Flash, L Brothers—and they start playing their music. We’re all going to the jams.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): He played the music that we wanted to hear. There was a special playlist of b-boy songs, breakdance songs—I can rename right now about ten of them: “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” by James Brown, “Get Into Something” by the Isley Brothers, “Listen to Me” by Baby Huey, “Melting Pot” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s. You got “Scorpio” by Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band. “Shaft in Africa.” “Apache” by Michael Viner’s Incredible Bongo Band. A couple more James Brown songs you can put in there like “Soul Power” and “Sex Machine” and “Escap-ism,” “Make It Funky”—songs like that.

When you playing these songs, this is the time for the b-boys to do their thing, to create circles of people around them. People were competing inside that circle, they were doing acrobatics and flips and twists and all kinds of routines, and going down to the floor doing the splits like James Brown, doing footwork, like the best dancers I’ve ever seen.

So that was a typical Kool Herc party, and the music was incredible. And of course, he was on the microphone with an echo chamber, “Young ladies, don’t hurt nobody-body-body. It’s Kool Herc-Herc-Herc. Herculoids-loids-loids. Going down to the last stop-stop-stop-stop.” It was mystical and magical at the same time. It was disco, but it was ghetto disco.

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five): It was his playlist that all of the other DJs who aspired to reach his level at the time in the Bronx played. That was Kool Herc’s contribution to hip-hop, his playlist.

WHAT WOULD BECOME known as hip-hop sprang from a foundation of DJs with powerful sound systems who operated around the same time as DJ Kool Herc in the early 1970s. Disco King Mario, who lived one floor above Paradise Gray, who would himself go on to help create X Clan, in the Bronxdale Houses projects, threw some of hip-hop’s earliest jams with his Chuck Chuck City crew. Disco King Mario and Afrika Bambaataa were both members of the Black Spades gang, and Mario lent equipment for some of Bambaataa’s earliest sets.

Pete DJ Jones, a transplant from North Carolina, was popular in Manhattan club circles. He was the first DJ who many, including Kurtis Blow, ever witnessed working two turntables and duplicate copies of the same record, which became the foundation for DJing, extending the breaks of funk and soul songs. Pete DJ Jones also served as a mentor to Grandmaster Flash.

Brooklyn’s Grandmaster Flowers is recognized as one of the earliest pioneers of hip-hop for mixing funk and disco records in sequence and throwing massive block parties. Flowers even opened for James Brown at Yankee Stadium in 1969.

They joined others, like Maboya and DJ Plummer, in laying a blueprint for hip-hop to emerge, but never reaping the attention, adulation, or financial windfall that followed.

Daddy-O (artist, producer, Stetsasonic): I think sometimes people think that the first time that equipment came out and people plugged into the streetlamps, it was hip-hop. That’s not true. The first time you’d seen the sound systems, it was people playing disco: Grandmaster Flowers, my boy Pete DJ Jones. And it was the reggae guys that was playing all the Lone Ranger stuff, the Sly & Robbie stuff, Bob Marley and the Wailers. Those were the first sound systems you saw on the street, was disco and reggae sound systems.

Paradise Gray (manager of the Latin Quarter, X Clan): I call my mother the Mother of Hip-Hop, because my first crate of records came from my living room. She was the one that introduced me to George Clinton, James Brown, Maceo [Parker], Bootsy [Collins], Sly and the Family Stone. So, a bunch of the breakbeats. When I finally heard Herc and Flowers and Bam and all of these guys playing the breakbeats, I had a whole bunch of those records already.

DJ Mister Cee (producer): That was the time when a lot of DJs was getting into the craft of DJing and buying them big kick-ass speakers—and I’m saying “kick-ass” because there used to be a sticker on the speaker that said “Kick Ass.” That was around that time that DJs would play outside and break into a lamppost. Nowadays, there’s an outlet in there. Back then, we would break into the lamppost and splice the wires up and connect to an extension cord. That’s how we would power up.

Paradise Gray (manager of the Latin Quarter, X Clan): Everything about hip-hop was illegal. Do you know how many laws were broken just to do an average street jam? We broke into the light poles. That’s breaking and entering. We cut the wires and we stole the electricity. That’s special services. We didn’t have no permits to do our jams outside in the streets. We just brought our equipment out and we did it. And we dared the police to try to fuck with us.

Sadat X (artist, Brand Nubian): The whole anticipation of seeing the DJ come; you’d see he’d have about two, three dudes carrying record crates. And just to watch them unfold the tables and put the turntables down and then people start coming and somebody might be making some food. All of a sudden, the music starts. It was like a carnival atmosphere.

DJ Mister Cee (producer): And that all came from Kool Herc from the Bronx and transferred all the way to us in Brooklyn.

Paradise Gray (manager of the Latin Quarter, X Clan): I think that the Bronx narrative of hip-hop is kind of flawed. And when I say it’s flawed, I’ll say that if the meal is hip-hop, maybe the chef was in the Bronx. But the ingredients existed long before the meal.

For me, [Disco King] Mario was the epitome of swag and style and flavor. He was a living, breathing Super Fly–Shaft that lived in your building. He was the well-dressed dude who had charisma, who knew how to dance. And Pete [DJ Jones] had a bar a block from my house. He was a consummate Black businessman in the community. And that seriousness that he brought to DJing and to just being the example of a Black man, was immeasurable in my life.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): Once [Kool Herc] started playing that playlist, that’s when he became the father of hip-hop. That’s when he became popular, and all the b-boys started flocking to his club because he played the music that we wanted to hear.

Easy A.D. (Cold Crush Brothers): He brought the jams out at the [nightclub] Hevalo and all different clubs. So, he brought the rhythm. That’s why they call him the father of hip-hop.

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five): You went to these jams to get down. And when someone, another opponent, got in the circle with you, if you were a b-boy or b-girl, then it was your intent to burn them. Burning was basically like beating them in a dance battle. And so, b-boy culture was nomadic. Anywhere b-boys and b-girls knew that a DJ was going to be playing the beats, that’s where they went. And that was exclusive to the Bronx from about 1973 ’til about 1978.

Grandmaster Caz (Cold Crush Brothers): By the time I saw Herc, I was about fifteen. Seeing his sound system and seeing his party for the first time just totally blew me away. And when I first saw him in the club, that pretty much was the selling point for me as far as getting involved in hip-hop.

DJ Charlie Chase (Cold Crush Brothers): The first party I had attended with Herc, he was rocking. He had a big set and that’s what intrigued me, the size of his set. And he had Clark Kent [of the Herculoids] playing with him. And they were making announcements on the mic.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): He was the man on the microphone, Coke La Rock. He was more like a street dude, a street hustler. So he had the gift of gab and he used to talk a lot of smack. Herc was from Jamaica. He’s just getting to the Bronx and he meets Coke La Rock and Coke La Rock has all the lingo. So they became friends and partners.

Michael Holman (journalist): So, you’ve got DJs experimenting like Herc, like Bambaataa, like Grandmaster Flash, like Jazzy Jay, who are throwing parties in the park at night. In the Bronx River projects, you’ve got Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, who reign supreme. In other neighborhoods, like near Sedgwick Avenue, you’ve got Kool Herc, and they all decide, “Well, since [Patti] LaBelle is playing downtown tonight and everybody’s going to be going down there, I’m going to have a party at the same time and all the kids who can’t go downtown are going to come to my party in the park.”

And people are partying and dancing to the DJs spinning records, and he’s playing all these disco hits for these middle school kids who can’t go downtown for a myriad of reasons and he has this automatic audience. But he is not being hired by a club downtown and isn’t being told what to play and what not to play. He can play what the fuck he wants to play, because it’s his party. No one’s paying him to do this. It’s for fun. It’s for love.

So, now they’re not tied into only playing disco records, he’s throwing in great dance hits like James Brown from ten years before. Oftentimes they would throw down some Caribbean or Jamaican hits, dub hits. Then crazy, wild people like Bambaataa, who was considered “King of Records,” would even throw in records that had no business being played at a Black and Brown uptown, urban party, but because there was an element in the song that was so funky you couldn’t deny it, he would throw it on, like the TV theme song of I Dream of Jeannie or the Monkees’ “Mary, Mary.”

THE ELEMENTS THAT created hip-hop rose through surrounding blight and institutional neglect in the South Bronx. The costly Cross Bronx Expressway, the vision of urban planner Robert Moses, wrought immense havoc and heartache. Completed in 1963 after fifteen years of construction, the first expressway built through an urban area bifurcated the Bronx, decimating and displacing mostly African American and Puerto Rican communities. Many of the residents who remained in the area relocated to massive public housing projects.

The South Bronx’s economy collapsed. Real estate values plummeted. Fires ravaged the area as arson became prevalent. Burned-out, gutted, and abandoned buildings constituted entire blocks. Drug consumption increased. The exodus in population resulted in the reduction of public programs. In October 1975, President Gerald R. Ford decided against offering federal assistance to New York, prompting the New York Daily News to run the infamous front-page headline: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Throughout the 1960s, gangs like the Black Spades, Ghetto Brothers, Savage Skulls, and Seven Immortals rose to prominence as the decay in the South Bronx surged. They were comprised mostly of young Blacks and Latinos in search of community and protection. In December 1971, several gangs reached a truce at the Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting following the murder of Cornell “Black Benjy” Benjamin, a member of the Ghetto Brothers who had tried defusing a fight between two gangs. The truce is regarded by many as a vital component of hip-hop’s formation. Some leaders of gangs threw block parties as a means to build community and fellowship. While long-standing peace remained elusive, gang members were encouraged to not use violence against one another. Soon, some crews instead engaged in b-boy battles.

Lady B (artist, radio DJ, Philadelphia): It was a terrible time for the Black community. We were gang-stricken, pretty much like it is now, unfortunately. But hip-hop saved lives. We stop fighting with guns and knives and start battling with microphones and turntables.

Paradise Gray (manager of the Latin Quarter, X Clan): When I was a kid and Disco King Mario brought his equipment out and DJ’d in the Bronxdale projects, everybody would come together and cook they food, and drink they beer, listen to the music, dance with the girls. And if you messed up the block party, or you messed up a jam, the gangsters will beat the shit out of you.

The gangs were a part of hip-hop from day one. You had to regulate. If you didn’t have that kind of street credibility and juice, you couldn’t come out with your equipment, because you wouldn’t go home with your equipment.

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five): Most of the crews that represented each block were ex–gang members. And so the gang element was still very, very present even though the gangs started to diminish—all they did was, instead of calling themselves a gang, they called themselves a crew. But most of them still behaved the way that a gang behaves.

Like for example, our security, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s security, was called the Casanovas. And the Casanovas were all ex–Black Spades members. Just like the Zulu Nation that secured Bambaataa. Most of those guys were ex–Black Spades.

BORN LANCE TAYLOR, Afrika Bambaataa was a former member of the Black Spades gang who assembled the components of the brewing culture—DJing, MCing, graffiti, and b-boying—and united them within a singular community.

Bambaataa grew up in Soundview’s Bronx River Houses and gained inspiration from the indivisibility of the Zulu people of South Africa. Under Bambaataa, former gang members became DJs, MCs, b-boys, b-girls, and graffiti artists within his Zulu Nation. Bambaataa performed at the Bronx River Community Center and at block parties throughout the East Bronx in the mid-to-late 1970s. He developed a reputation as the “Master of Records” by compiling a vast and diverse collection, playing everything from hard rock to funk to classical music. Like DJ Kool Herc, he kept the source of his breakbeats hidden by blacking-out the names of records. A number of pioneering DJs and two notable crews of artists—the Jazzy Five (Master Ice, Mr. Freeze, Master Bee, Master Dee, and AJ Les) and the Soulsonic Force (Mr. Biggs, Pow Wow, and G.L.O.B.E.)—surfaced from the early days of the Zulu Nation.

MC Shy D (artist, producer): Those was fun days for me, because I was young, and Bambaataa, he used to get the speaker in the window, in the projects, and everybody gathered round the building and we just had good times out there.

Afrika Islam (DJ, Zulu Nation): The record part came in so heavy. [Grandmaster] Flash or [Grand Wizzard] Theodore, they might have ten crates of records, but if we came in at forty-two or fifty, we never had to repeat a record. We would just continuously come in and bang you in your head.

But because technique was coming from Theodore, technique was coming from Flash, the sound system was coming from Herc, the sound system was coming from Disco King Mario, music and categories and deepness was coming out of Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Kings, that was the formation of what became hip-hop culture.

THE DJS WHO could draw a crowd and, importantly, people who would pay to enter, transitioned from outdoor jams to indoor clubs and advertised their parties through artistic graffiti-inspired flyers. In 1975, DJ Kool Herc began performing at Hevalo, on 180th Street and Jerome Avenue, following an earlier stint at Twilight Zone. The following year, Sal Abbatiello started featuring hip-hop artists at the nearby Disco Fever. Arthur Armstrong, an early hip-hop promoter, ran the Ecstasy Garage Disco on Macombs Road. Ray Chandler operated the Black Door near Boston Road and 170th Street, and the Dixie Club. Afrika Bambaataa routinely performed at Ritchie T’s T-Connection.

These clubs joined early hotspots like Club 371, Harlem’s Charles Gallery, and the Renaissance Ballroom in Queens, where oftentimes former gang members provided the on-premises security.

Aaron Fuchs (president, Tuff City Records): I went to see Bambaataa at the T-Connection, which really was unforgettable.

I’m already thirty-two and the ferocity of the vibe, the electricity at the T-Connection, was turning me into a kid again. To see Bam and his DJs come to work. He had four guys behind him with record crates on their shoulders. It’s like a goddamn caravan, a combination of a caravan and a gang entry.

Afrika Islam (DJ, Zulu Nation): To call yourself a DJ at that time then, you needed vinyl. At that age, thirteen, fourteen, you got to remember this is all new. There were no limits at this stage. So everything we did was creatively new, each and every single time. And you adjusted every single week: that worked, this didn’t work.

Aaron Fuchs (president, Tuff City Records): Bambaataa letting me see his record collection . . . [DJ] Red Alert just told me a couple of months ago that that was very rare. It was like being given the Coca-Cola formula.

What it was, was this unprecedented mix of island music along with American Black music and a range of other more segregated American Black music like go-go, little bits of Haitian music, salsa. I knew right then and there I was privy to something important.

Whipper Whip (Fantastic Five): There’s only two people that make me stand there and be like, Wow, I could watch you guys play forever, and that’s Bambaataa and [DJ] Hollywood. ’Cause you never know what they’re going to play next.

THE UNIVERSAL ZULU Nation, an international hip-hop awareness group, figured prominently in the domestic and global spread of hip-hop. In the 1980s, the Zulu Nation dispatched members to spread hip-hop and messages of peace and unity. Branches opened around the world, from Japan to South Africa.*

Afrika Islam (DJ, Zulu Nation): Members of Zulu Nation are mastering their skill, being pulled out and planting seeds in all parts of the planet. As they flew out to Japan and China and Korea and California, they’re planting the seed because they were the real deal, how they act, walked, dressed. That’s some prophet shit, man. So, if hip-hop is around the world as a music form, then seventy-five percent of it belongs to that Zulu Nation.

Muhammad Islam (Zulu Nation): The greatest impact of Zulu Nation was the spread of hip-hop, not only the rap form, [but] the whole movement [of] the DJing, the graffiti as art, the b-boying, properly known as breakdancing, but also adding that fifth element, which is the thought, intellect, the mind, bringing all this stuff together as a worldwide movement. Certainly the Zulu Nation was paramount in pushing this all over the world, from Brazil to Argentina, to Japan to France and England and Germany. They were pushing the whole idea of hip-hop as a culture and not just a music form.

GRANDMASTER FLASH, BORN Joseph Saddler, evolved the craft that Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa had started by inserting finesse and technique into DJing. He moved to the South Bronx from Barbados with his family in the 1960s. He studied his father’s extensive (and forbidden) record collection, and learned how electronics worked by taking them apart and reassembling them. He studied DJ Kool Herc, trying to figure out his method for maintaining the beat, and in the 1970s Grandmaster Flash became a DJing partner with DJ Mean Gene Livingston, who advanced to form the L Brothers.

Among Grandmaster Flash’s many contributions was his “quick mix” theory, a discovery that served as a backbone for hip-hop music. He found that by using two copies of the same record he could play the breakbeat on one, while searching for the break on the second with his mixer and syncing it to play as soon as the first had finished. He had transformed his turntables into a musical instrument and eventually marked the breaks on the records by hand.

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five): Between 1976 and ’77, a DJ named Grandmaster Flash created this technique on the turntables. It changed everything.

Right before Grandmaster Flash became notable, there was a time period in which aspiring DJs didn’t have two turntables and a mixer, because that was pretty expensive at the time.

Afrika Islam (DJ, Zulu Nation): How many sixteen-year-olds are going to come up with [the money for] a fully made sound system?

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five): So, aspiring DJs made these tapes that we called pause-button tapes. When you first pop a cassette in a tape recorder, there was a blank space in which you would just hear white noise. So, pause-button tape DJs would record whatever song that they’re recording, they would go past the lead bit of the cassette to where the actual recording started, because they would want the beat to start as soon as the tape started.

So they would do that back and forth and it kind of sounded like a DJ was cutting the record back and forth, almost on beat. Some people who were exceptional at it would be able to catch it on beat a few times, but not as consistently as a DJ who was cutting it back and forth on two turntables. And then these tapes started to circulate of their parties with Flash on the turntables. And that’s what actually compelled me to want to go see him, because I needed to see what he was actually doing with my own two eyes on the turntables.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): B-boying was the main thing about a Kool Herc party. A Flash party was more about Flash and you standing out in front of a stage watching Flash on those turntables cut it up.

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five): The contrasting difference between going to a Kool Herc party and going to the Grandmaster Flash party was that [Kool Herc] didn’t cut the records back and forth. He just placed the needle on the record and let the records play, and b-boys and b-girls would go off whenever the breakbeats did play.

Grandmaster Flash would only play what he deemed the dope part of the beat, which was the break. And so, as a result of that, and as a result of his ability to catch the beat back and forth from turntable to turntable, there was never a lull in the activity or the excitement, because he was constantly cutting and scratching records. By that time, b-boys started to be kind of fading out because instead of coming to our parties to dance, they would be more like spectators watching what Flash was doing.

THROUGHOUT THE MID-1970S, a number of innovative, pioneering DJs emerged who would create and increase the popularity of the nascent culture. They included: Grand Wizzard Theodore (credited with discovering scratching), Disco Wiz, Kool DJ AJ, Breakout, Baron, Jazzy Jay, Grand Mixer DXT, and Charlie Chase.

DJ Charlie Chase (Cold Crush Brothers): At the time, everybody was bit by the bug. I was bit early. I became a disco DJ in ’75. At the beginning of ’76 is when I became a hip-hop DJ.

Bill Stephney (Bomb Squad, Def Jam): The way hip-hop happened in that late ’70s period, it was relatively sudden and so distinct from anything else that was going on with the use of the turntables and the extended beats. It relates to the language and the dress and the diversity, too, of the Bronx, especially of having Blacks and Latinos and even a handful of white kids too, all going to parties and not even thinking twice about it, when there were gang wars a year or two before. All of it, in this time, just crystallizes.

DJ Charlie Chase (Cold Crush Brothers): There were a lot of Latino DJs in my neighborhood, and they all started going to jams. We were having battles between us, and we had our own rivalries.

What actually started to introduce Latinos was when I met [DJ] Tony Tone. Tony was already established with Breakout, who was already DJing with Bam and Herc and Islam and everybody in the majors. Tony and I, right off the bat, we hit it off. So he became my crew. He introduced me to Bam. He introduced me to Islam. He introduced me to everybody. That’s how I broke into the scene.

When I met these guys, I was already an established DJ. I was making mixtapes. All these people that I met, already knew of me, but hadn’t met me. The problem they were having was they thought I was Black, because of the way I was cutting.

WITH DISCO’S POPULARITY reaching its apex, some pioneering DJs and MCs played to the older crowd in a scene separate from the hip-hop music being established in the Bronx. DJ Hollywood, born Anthony Holloway, was influenced by the likes of Jocko Henderson, Pigmeat Markham, Gil Scott-Heron, and Rudy Ray Moore. Hollywood is credited with introducing hip-hop-style rapping through his call-and-response set and syncopated rhyming. He worked the turntables and microphone to become a lucrative earner and a regular at Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater throughout the mid to late 1970s.

Russell Simmons, who would advance to help make hip-hop mainstream through the cofounding of Def Jam Recordings, credits Eddie Cheeba—a friend of DJ Hollywood and a popular disco DJ—as being the first person he ever witnessed rapping live. Lovebug Starski, born Kevin Smith, had worked with both Pete DJ Jones and DJ Hollywood, and served as the house DJ at Disco Fever in the Bronx. He merged the styles used by the DJs in the Bronx with the one employed by DJ Hollywood.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): He had the golden voice, DJ Hollywood. He just sounded like quality, professional, top of the line, the class of New York. He was a master of the crowd response. And the third thing was his rhythmic rap—he was the first one I saw do [it]. The MCs before him, Coke La Rock and Eddie Cheeba, KC the Prince of Soul, Jay the Disco King—they would just talk on the mic, like, “You’re listening to the sounds of New York City’s number one DJ, Pete DJ Jones-Jones-Jones,” with the echo chamber.

Russell Simmons (cofounder, Def Jam): Eddie Cheeba, I walked in. I just smoked a bag of zootie, which is red-devil angel dust, and I heard it. It was not only hearing him, it was the performance. It was Easy G cutting the records. It was Eddie Cheeba rapping. He had on a plaid jacket from A. J. Lester’s, which was the slick shit that we wore in the hood. We sold drugs just so we could get that jacket.

We’re talking about a performance. . . . It stuck in my head. “On, and on, and on, and on, like hot butter on what?”

The crowd would say, “Popcorn.”

They were already ahead of me, like, I missed something.

He wasn’t DJing and rapping. He had Easy G cutting and he wasn’t echo-chambering his name. His poetry, his showmanship, it was like nothing I’d seen before. And the crowd participation. It was magical.

I wanted to promote parties, and instantly I wanted to promote him. I used to think that I was safe doing what I was doing, considering it was just weed, and then when it wasn’t weed it was coca leaf incense. I knew people selling heroin. I wasn’t doing that. I was doing what I thought was fairly safe, and here’s freedom—here’s complete safety and here’s something I love.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): You were great if you got two hundred dollars a night. But Hollywood started charging five hundred dollars and that was incredible. And this is another thing he also did—if you hired a DJ, the DJ would bring his equipment and play all night. Hollywood, he would just come with his records—you had to have your equipment, your turntables, your sound system, everything together—and he’d come in and just rock the house for a hour, and then go to the next spot. So pretty soon, he’s going to about four or five clubs a night on a Friday, Saturday night. And he was making five hundred dollars a night doing this. So that mobile DJ, he put that into play.

Russell Simmons (cofounder, Def Jam): Hollywood would go somewhere and five thousand people would show up. He’d go out to Coney Island or City College and open up for Evelyn “Champagne” King. Hollywood played the Apollo. His name stayed on the awning. He was the star. He would bring the big crowd and he would get them to pay five dollars and fifty cents. Five dollars and fifty cents back then, not a dollar to come to your neighborhood, there’s a dramatic difference.

Keith Shocklee (producer, Bomb Squad): Hollywood would be at Broadway International. That’s a nightclub. We got to see Maboya and Flowers, Grandmaster Flowers, and them. You had to go to an event that they were throwing because they had to bring their sound system. And that was different places a lot of time. But Hollywood, when they opened up Broadway International, he was always there. Eddie Cheeba would get down there. That’s how we heard them all the time.

Kool Moe Dee (artist, Treacherous Three): There are two different strands of hip-hop: the Hollywood side with the call-and-response, over disco records; and the Herc side is a similar thing, but is old breakbeats and b-boy records. The merging of those two is what really forms what we’re calling today’s modern hip-hop. Which if you trace further back, you can go until the gospel quartets and see that those styles were around way before we were there, because that’s where you got Pigmeat Markham and Jocko [Henderson] and all the guys that were doing it at a time when it just never caught fire and never created the landscape that we did, where everybody that was a teenager at that time, and I’m talking mid to late ’70s, everybody was caught up in what we now call hip-hop.

DMC (artist, Run-DMC): If you listen to early rap, everybody would use disco. People minds is blown away how connected disco’s presentation was, just a hybrid form or cousin of hip-hop. But people forget the Fat Boys was called the Disco 3 when they first came out. So it was all disco, because it was about the records and the music.

Bill Adler (journalist, Def Jam publicist): It was new, but it wasn’t unprecedented. I listened to the Last Poets and I knew about Gil Scott-Heron and I knew about the oral tradition in African American culture. I heard it in the tradition and having heard that, it was remarkable anyways.

Kool Moe Dee (artist, Treacherous Three): Being eight and nine while it’s happening, you’re aware of it, but you’re not really able to participate in it. So, by the time I’m fourteen, I get to hear Lovebug Starski, not only at a block party, but I heard him at a place they called the Renaissance in New York. He was the first, in my opinion, the first DJ/MC, because the DJ had a mic, that would do a combination of the hip-hop breakbeat stuff and the R&B, Hollywood stuff. So he was a combination, in my opinion, of Herc and Hollywood. And I always felt that the two sides were necessary in order to be very functional.

AS THE PROGRAM director of WBLS-FM, legendary DJ Frankie Crocker maintained a sizable influence over popular music and, perhaps, an unwitting one in hip-hop’s evolution and growth. Crocker was already known in New York City by the time he arrived at WBLS in the early 1970s. He propelled the station’s ratings by introducing the urban contemporary format and playing a wide range of selections, including disco, R&B, and hip-hop music. On air, Crocker defined the charismatic master of ceremonies, delivering imitable rhymes that provided a blueprint for future artists and signing off each night to “Moody’s Mood for Love.”

Though wary of a changing of the guard, Crocker did not deny hip-hop music’s popularity. He broke some of the earliest hip-hop records and hired Mr. Magic, hip-hop’s groundbreaking radio DJ, to WBLS.

DJ Mister Cee (producer): If you wanted to get on the radio and you lived in New York City in the late ’70s and the ’80s, then Frankie Crocker was one of your idols.

Bill Stephney (Bomb Squad, Def Jam): He’s not probably hip-hop as we define it today, but there was a point when the culture itself was sort of like the mafia. La Cosa Nostra, I think that the English translation is “This thing of ours,” and that’s sort of what hip-hop was as it was developing from the Bronx and from Harlem and through the New York area. It was a DJ-driven party culture. And whether you’re DJ Hollywood as an MC or even the other rappers, MCs who came up, they’re all influenced in terms of tone, phrasing, attitude by Frankie Crocker. The literal term MC, master of ceremony, that’s really based on what Frankie Crocker did either on the radio or at parties or at concerts.

DJ Mister Cee (producer): First and foremost, with Frankie Crocker, his voice was very distinctive. At that time, it was just true New York radio. It wasn’t called Black radio; it was just radio. So, you would hear Michael Jackson, then you would hear a Madonna record, and then you would hear Prince, and then you would hear Hall & Oates. It wasn’t pigeonholed. Whatever the Black community liked, whether the artist was white or wherever they came from, Frankie Crocker was playing the record. That was a big, big deal as well, which is why so many white artists from that era got appreciated by Black people, the Madonnas and the Tears for Fears and the Hall & Oates.

Jeff Sledge (A&R, Jive Records): He was the program director, so he played what he felt. He would go out to a club the night before and hear this new girl, Madonna, who’s got this song called “Holiday.” He would play it that next day. Like, “Yo, I heard this record in the club. This shit’s hot.” He was playing test pressings and he was playing records that aren’t even affiliated with just major labels. He’s just playing the hot shit.

Bill Stephney (Bomb Squad, Def Jam): In many respects, I don’t know if hip-hop happens in New York without Frankie Crocker and without the variety of music that Frankie Crocker, as a Black program director, played in devising the most varied music format that any radio station had offered anywhere. Here was a guy who could play “I Got My Mind Made Up” by Instant Funk, into “Stars in Your Eyes” by Herbie Hancock, into “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra, and fifteen-year-old Black kids in Brooklyn would be into it.

And the parties that we attended in the late ’70s, early ’80s, in the area, reflected that variety. Bam and Herc and Flash and Spectrum City, Pete DJ Jones, King Charles, the Disco Twins, and Infinity, all these folks who were DJing, generally reflected the nuanced diverse playlist of what Frankie did. You couldn’t hear that anywhere else.

NEW YORK CITY teetered on the brink in the summer of 1977. Economic stagnation and soaring unemployment crippled the city. The serial killer known as the Son of Sam stalked victims, while a sweltering heat wave pummeled the five boroughs.

On the evening of July 13, successive lightning strikes strained the area’s overburdened power grid and plunged most of the city into pitch-blackness. Confusion and chaos quickly ensued. People took to neighborhood streets and some ransacked stores.

The lights remained off for more than a day. In that time, more than 1,500 businesses had been vandalized. Consolidated Edison, the city’s power provider, labeled the outage as an “an act of God.” A congressional study estimated that the damages and losses totaled more than $300 million.

While most sought food and domestic necessities, some trained their attention on electronics stores, breaking down doors and snatching equipment. For them, the darkness provided an opportunity to finally build their own audio system or reap the profits from secondhand sales. Overnight and under darkness, new DJs started populating the area. Crews formed after mixing and matching newly gained equipment to form a cohesive system.

Some dismiss the notion that the blackout provided a catalyst for hip-hop’s uprising, that the ingredients for the genre were already in circulation and simmering, and the hypothesis of lightning bolts helping to spark the genre is too tidy a narrative. Others who lived in New York City at the time of the blackout insist that the event helped jump-start the early scene.

DJ Charlie Chase (Cold Crush Brothers): The night before [the blackout in] ’77, I was in a band and we had a gig in Brooklyn. The next day, I was so exhausted, I did something that I never did in my life and that was go home early. I was home and I was laying in bed and I remember just nodding out and watching television, and all of a sudden: poof.

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five): I’m in the backyard of the housing complex I grew up in, playing basketball. It was about to get dark outside and the streetlights were just coming on, and I went up for a jump shot, and just as it was going in the basket, one by one, the lights began to go out. We didn’t think anything of it at the time, and then we looked up and no lights in any building for as far as the eye could see were on.

MC Debbie D (artist, South Bronx): All of a sudden it was like click, click, click, click, and everybody’s looking around, like, “What’s going on?” But nobody’s paying it no mind, because we’re all just thinking, There’s some short here, but this is going to come back on. But it doesn’t. And nobody’s really going inside, because it’s still hot outside. I lived on the nineteenth floor. So it’s like, we got to walk upstairs? So people are not really rushing to go upstairs. Everybody’s just hanging out outside.

Easy A.D. (Cold Crush Brothers): You didn’t realize what was happening. The lights went out, but we didn’t understand, like, The lights, they’re not coming back on.

DJ Charlie Chase (Cold Crush Brothers): It was hot as hell. My windows were open and at first, stillness. At first, everybody’s wondering what’s going on. You hear a lot of chatter, people screaming, “Apagar las luces. Apagar las luces.”

Easy A.D. (Cold Crush Brothers): Everybody froze for a second, and they was like, “Blackout.”

MC Debbie D (artist, South Bronx): And then people start opening up the fire hydrant, because it’s hot. The reason for the blackout is because it was an eleven-day heat wave. By the time you get to this eleventh day, the electricity is so overused in New York City, that that’s what caused the blackout.

DJ Mister Cee (producer): Right in front of my building in my projects [in Brooklyn], we cracked open that fire hydrant. All we did that whole day was, we just had water fights. Throwing water on each other that whole day. We had a blast in my projects.

Easy A.D. (Cold Crush Brothers): Immediately, people started pulling gates up and going into the store. I can honestly say to you that I was immensely afraid of my mom, because if you brought something home that wasn’t yours, it was a major problem. So I didn’t go into the store.

Whipper Whip (Fantastic Five): When that jumped off, yo, trust, I ain’t even step outside. Whip ain’t near none of that stuff. I stayed home; I was safe ’cause I was a youngin’. My parents are Puerto Rican. They ain’t play that. “You ain’t going nowhere.” We in the house with candles taking care of the fort.

Grandmaster Caz (Cold Crush Brothers): The blackout was scary as hell. We were DJing with another crew at the park, and all of a sudden the lights started going out and we thought that we had blew out the power, because we were attached to the light pole. But not only did the set go out, the entire block went out, and the whole Bronx went out.

It was pandemonium after that. It was like everybody realized at the same time, “Oh, shit. Blackout. Run for the stores.” And everybody just fanned out, all different directions, toward stores.

MC Debbie D (artist, South Bronx): People would go to supermarkets and get shopping carts and then go to the store and pull out a whole TV. And you know Black folks, they didn’t have nothing. Because for the most part, and particularly in the South Bronx, it’s predominantly Blacks and Puerto Ricans. So we’re all poor.

We think hip-hop, we just think of equipment. But people was taking mattresses, couches—and remember, this is the ’70s, so they had them big old Cadillac cars. If you had a top-down Cadillac, you know all the stuff you could put in there?

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five): We walked to the neighborhood supermarket and looked in the window; we didn’t see any employees and the lights were off. So, we picked up a big steel trash can and threw it through the plate-glass window and we all just went in. And it was about maybe thirty of us. We got a sledgehammer and we beat the safe until we unhinged it from the ground. And we walked with the safe up to this tenement building, and took the safe in the basement, and a few OGs [original gangsters] that was down with one of the gangs called the Peacemakers, broke the safe open and they divided up the money and the food stamps. I was fourteen and they gave me, from what I remember, sixteen hundred dollars in food stamps and about twelve hundred in cash. That was my cut.

And so I took the money, the food stamps home, gave my mom some, stashed the rest in my air-conditioner duct, and then went to this store called Sneaker King because I heard that that store had gotten looted, but that if I hurried up I could get myself some free sneakers. When I got to Sneaker King, I walked in there and came out with two tall kitchen trash bags filled with boxes of sneakers all my size.

MC Debbie D (artist, South Bronx): Kids was wilding out. They was just running into stores and seeing what they could get. The alarms are going off. By the time you see it on TV, it’s just crazy.

Muhammad Islam (security manager, A Tribe Called Quest): We was poverty like crazy in the hood. You seen an opportunity to take some pants, some TVs, whatever the case may be, it happened.

DJ Charlie Chase (Cold Crush Brothers): GLI is a company [that sells] audio equipment. At the time, they were a very popular company. They had a GLI store on the Concourse, right down the block from my house. And they got hit hard. They smashed the glass, and they took everything. They had some crazy, crazy, crazy equipment in the windows, and that store was completely cleaned out. That’s one of the places Caz told me he made a stop at that night.

Grandmaster Caz (Cold Crush Brothers): I didn’t get a whole lot of stuff, because I was there trying to protect my own equipment that was in the street, but I did run around the corner to the place I got my first DJ set from. I ran right around the corner to that place, helped pull the gate down, kicked the glass down and everything, and pulled me a mixer out of there.

DJ Charlie Chase (Cold Crush Brothers): A lot of motherfuckers had GLI speakers now.

DJ Clark Kent*(producer): That’s when I got my first set of turntables. I was this young boy who was deep with learning how to DJ, and I never had my own set. I just wanted to be equipped. I just wanted my own turntables. If I was smart enough back then I would have thought, Yeah, you’re gonna need an amplifier and some speakers, too. But it was just me and my cousin, we couldn’t take all that.

MC Shy D (artist, producer): They was tearing them stores up. Bambaataa had the main equipment in Bronx River, the big stuff, but you had guys fifteen, sixteen, they started coming out with their little mini-sets. Bambaataa influenced everybody, but that blackout, everybody went crazy, man. People got equipment and everything.

DJ Clark Kent (producer): It definitely helped me. I definitely got a turntable and a mixer out of the situation. I’m from an impoverished neighborhood, and we did whatever we could to do whatever we wanted to do. Life in the hood.

MC Debbie D (artist, South Bronx): How else were you going to get it?

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five):