Weekend self-care open thread: Yeah, and you don't stop!

Posted by Liberal Librarian August 12, 2023

Weekend self-care open thread: Yeah, and you don't stop!

On August 11, 1973, Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, began a revolution, except he didn't know it. It all began at a party in the West Bronx.

"Everybody that talks about Herc's parties back then talks about two things," says Jeff Chang, author of the definitive hip-hop history Can't Stop Won't Stop. "They talk about the intensity, the pure sound of the sound system — but they also talk about the music that Herc played."

Herc, who emigrated from Jamaica when he was 12, had seen and internalized the often competitive culture of traveling Jamaican sound systems. ("I was into sound," he told us.) He'd also absorbed much of the record collection of his father, an avid music collector. As a DJ, he prided himself on his variety and programming, including rare and unreleased records he acquired. ("I play a little bit of everything, you know what I'm saying?")

But it wasn't just the music that he played — it was also how he played it.

"He would just focus in on the percussive breakdowns, where the crowds went wild," Chang says.

Herc noted that dancers were especially energized during the brief drum-beat or rhythm section interludes of funk and soul records — often called "breaks." He developed a technique where he'd play the break from one record, then immediately play just the break from another record on his other turntable, then cue up another break on his first turntable ... and on and on.

He also figured out how to use his two turntables to loop a single break with two copies of the same record. He's referred to these techniques as the "merry-go-round."

This was the creation myth of a music which, fifty years later, dominates the world in the same way rock and roll music did on that day in 1973. The way hip-hop spread across the globe is parallel to the way American rock found its way to Britain and then exploded. And what both musical forms share is that they are grounded in the Black American experience. Chuck D of the seminal group Public Enemy famously called hip-hop the CNN of the ghetto. As a kid growing up in Washington Heights, I saw hip-hop emerge as the dominant musical form in my neighborhood, and neighborhoods like mine.

Hip-hop was, at first, party music, like rock was. And then like rock musicians, hip-hop artists realized they could express more than just how hard they rocked the mic. Artists like Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy turned their pens to documenting life in Black urban America. Now, like rock, hip-hop is a fully formed musical genre, encapsulating all sorts of strains, and voicing all sorts of concerns.

Hip-hop is one more contribution which Black America has made to the world of art. All races, all creeds, all colors embrace it and use it to get out their message. From the streets of Compton to the banlieues of Paris, the music which began forming in the early 1970s is a phenomenon even more potent than rock and roll. And for this weekend we're going to kick it old school and celebrate it.