DJ Kool Herc and the Birth of Hip-Hop

The address is One Five Two Zero Sedgwick Avenue, a twelve-story apartment building in the West Bronx, ten minutes north of Yankee Stadium. The date was August eleventh, nineteen seventy-three. The occasion was a back-to-school party in the recreation room on the ground floor.

The party was thrown by Clive Campbell and his sister. Clive Campbell was eighteen years old, a Jamaican immigrant who had arrived in the Bronx six years earlier and had grown up watching the neighborhood transform catastrophically around him. Robert Moses' Cross Bronx Expressway, completed in nineteen sixty-three, had cut through the heart of the South Bronx, displacing sixty thousand residents, the majority of them Black and Latino, accelerating white flight and disinvestment. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty, the South Bronx lost forty percent of its housing stock. Buildings burned; some were torched by landlords collecting insurance on properties that had become worth more destroyed than occupied. President Carter toured the rubble in nineteen seventy-seven and was photographed in front of burned-out buildings on Charlotte Street. The South Bronx became, for a generation, the international symbol of urban collapse.

In the recreation room of One Five Two Zero Sedgwick Avenue, Clive Campbell set up two turntables. He went by the name DJ Kool Herc. He had brought two copies of the same record. The technique he used that night had roots in Jamaican sound-system culture: he extended the drum break of a funk record by switching between the two copies at the precise moment the break ended on one and began on the other, creating a continuous loop of the percussive section that dancers could work with. He called the technique the Merry-Go-Round. The audience for this technique grew to call it hip-hop.

The specific date of August eleventh, nineteen seventy-three, is widely cited in hip-hop history, though Herc himself and early participants gave varying accounts over the years. What is documented without dispute is that the genre took shape in the South Bronx in the early nineteen seventies, born from the resources people had at hand: records already pressed, turntables already owned, a public-address system, and an audience that needed something to move to in the ruins of a neighborhood that America had decided was expendable.