Nearly all of my earliest memories of hip-hop go through my older brother O. When he was 16, O formed a rap group called 360 degrees and he started going by O. Love. Sometimes I sneak into his room and go through his rhyme books and the lyrics he'd write down on scraps of loose leaf, folded in with letters, lots and lots of letters from girls. I'd read both with deep anticipation and appreciation and when his group dropped their one and only single, in 1989, a record called Definition of a Hyped Up Black Man, I carried that vinyl into my sixth grade dance, proudly shoving it into the DJ's face and he actually played it. My friends went wild. But the very first time I remember hearing rap music, I must have been like six or seven years old and my brother was playing UTFOs Roxanne Roxanne back in 1984. After that, I was hearing rap in passing cars and at my cousin's house and even on the radio. It was everywhere. LL Cool J was rocking the bells and couldn't live without his radio, schooled D, dropped what does it mean, and run DMC were the rising kings of rap. In those early years, my teenage brother and his boys had big boom boxes and would go on these wild missions to find huge pieces of cardboard that they could lay out in the cement to break dance on. Once him and couple friends even walked seven miles each way to a flooring place to buy a gigantic 12 by 12 roll of linoleum to dance on. By the time I was 10, I was starting to understand what rap was or at least what it sounded like with that signature boom back. But it wasn't until I heard Slick Ricks, a children's story, a cautionary tale about young life in the streets that rap really made sense as an art, as a device, as something powerful and uniquely ours. And when public enemy released, fight the power. We raised our fist and our voices up high. I felt strong and black and more than anything. I felt this feeling of falling in love with the boom back. The lyrical craftsmanship, the cangos and deedes and gold chains. Hip hop has been the soundtrack of my life when I was young and trying to understand the world as a black man. It offered a beat to step to the world with. During the crack era, when I was struggling to understand my own stepfather's addiction and how many of my peers were pushing poison, the music reflected that struggle. In my formative years, in the early 90s, when I was coming of age, so with the music. It grew more sophisticated, more complicated, and in so many ways captured the multitudes in our social and cultural contradictions. These were our beats to step two. When we freestyled and made mixed tapes, the way we dress, the slang we use, the knowledge we kicked was all mirrored in the music. The good times, the bad, all of it came with that boom back. And as I grew older as a man and confident in my own pen game as a writer, my sensibilities were notions I carried over from hip hop. There was urgency and finesse, often something raw and palpable, principles of black pride, and a deep skepticism and interrogation of the status quo. As I've been shaped in deep and meaningful ways by hip hop, hip hop has shaped and been shaped by America. Born in the South Bronx, from broken glass and bad policy, ingenuity and creativity, hip hop has defined decades of music, culture, politics, and youth movements. All at the hands of these street disciples making magic with two turntables and a microphone. The music and culture of hip hop was and still is political, and the evolution of the genre can show where we've been as Americans. This year, 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of hip hop. So all through February, in celebration of black history, into America is looking back at the 50 years of hip hop and the political, economic, and social forces that have shaped it along the way. Because hip hop was never just musical rhymes, it was a message, a revolution, and a way for young black people to be heard and to fight back against the powers that tried to break us. This is street disciples, politics, power, and the rise of hip hop. I'm Tremaine Lee, and this is into America. Hip hop is the rose that grew from concrete, and there's no other place this rose could have taken root than the South Bronx. From the neighborhoods, collision of cultures, to the policies that shaped people's lives, to the actual physical landscape, the story of the Bronx is inextricably linked to the story of hip hop. One part one of street disciples, we bring you the concrete jungle. Rap is now America's pop music, but it's not only the most popular music genre in the country, it's a global phenomenon. It informs how we dress, our commercials, everything is touched by hip hop. But half the story of how hip hop came to be has nothing to do with the music. To understand how hip hop got here, how the sound of the hip hop developed, and how it became the music that has defined generations of Americans, we have to go back to its roots. For me, the truth was the Bronx was an amazing place to grow up. It all started in the South Bronx. You know, growing up with a grocery store in the corner where I could get pickle pig feet, and I could get pickle sausage, and that you'd walk into the grocery store, and it'd be all these elders, right, at the time, 67 years old, who just kind of hung out in front of the store, and if you gave them two or three minutes, right, they would impart some knowledge onto you. You know, it's a whole world onto itself, your project with the world, your building with the world, your block with the world. We played scelsies on the streets. When it got too hot, we really didn't have no pools, so we turned on the pumps, so we can stay cool. We played basketball on the streets, shooting the ball inside garbage cans and stuff like that. I felt a sense of belonging. Like, this is my part, this is my tribe, this is my people. This South Bronx, that birth hip hop, didn't just happen. It was made by a series of policies and decisions that impacted the flow of people to and from the city, and altered the built environment, leaving the South Bronx racially divided, economically devastated, and mostly neglected. In 1940, the Bronx was 98 percent white, but that was quickly changing. During the second wave of the Great Migration, beginning in the 40s and stretching well into the 70s, about 4 million Southern African Americans would make their way to northern cities like New York, where just decades earlier, the Harlem Renaissance had sparked a cultural revolution. These new migrants brought with them pieces of the Black South, including their musical traditions of gospel, blues, and jazz, and all the hopes they carried for what was to come. New York City was very expensive even then. I would argue that someone who grew up in the Bronx, Brooklyn was always too far away, so the Bronx represented a kind of proximity to Manhattan to go to work. So it made sense that you would see a concentration of these new migrants tuning the city to settle in the Barrow of the Bronx. Mark Anthony Neal is an African-American studies professor at Duke University, where he specializes in hip-hop culture. Dr. Neal grew up in the South Bronx, the portion of the borough situated just north of Harlem. His family was part of this wave of the Great Migration that came from Georgia and Maryland in the 1950s. And just like in cities all across the country, as black families moved in, white families moved out. The demographics of the Bronx changed dramatically. You know, all these white folks leaving New York City and going out to the suburbs in Westchester, you know, like Ricky Riccardo and Lucy Riccardo, right? They'd leave their apartment in 68th Street and move up to Connecticut. Oh, Ethel is nothing like living in the country. Clean, fresh air, homegrown food. That's what all the white people were doing in New York at that time. These white people were moving to New Jersey and Long Island, out to suburban developments that largely excluded black people. And then the biggest thing for thinking about the infrastructure of the Bronx at point in time is the creation of the cross-Bronsk Expressway. As white people moved to these suburbs, they still needed a way to get into the city for work. So in came the cross-Bronsk Expressway. The city started construction in 1948, and it's a freeway that cuts through the Bronx, joining New Jersey, Connecticut and Long Island. You can literally see communities that emerge on one side of the cross-Bronsk Expressway and communities that exist on the other side of it. To build the seven mile expressway, the city destroyed more than 1,500 homes, calling it slum clearance, and tried to put a positive spin on the whole thing. In New York's expressways, in its bridges, beaches, and parks, in its steady elimination of slums, lie the principles of one of the world's great physical planners, Robert Moses. Here's Robert Moses, the controversial, powerful city planner, talking to NBC News back in 1959. You have to move a lot of people out of the way of a big housing project or out of the way of an approach to a bridge. They're not a lot of them, they're not quite alike it. Many of them are missing form. Many of them in the end come around to feel that they've done them a great service. But Moses wasn't just any bureaucrat. He was a city's master planner, targeting predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods in order to build infrastructure that would benefit the white middle class. Here's Professor Trisha Rose, a sociologist who teaches Africana studies at Brown University. So the Cross Bronx Expressway was a combination of slum clearance and pathway creation for a white middle class. That hides it because they can hide under the hey, this is just a highway for the purposes of getting between New Jersey and Connecticut. And at the same time to make sure that it's routed in such a way that the people they most want to displace are displaced. And the black and brown people who were displaced often end up in public housing. In the late 1930s, New York City had started building massive, high-density housing projects for lower income families. These segregated projects were meant to be temporary homes, spread out all over the city. From Manhattan to places like Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, or Long Island City in Queens, home of Queens Bridge, still the largest public housing development in the country. At first, the projects in the South Bronx were overwhelmingly white, but in the 40s and 50s, black and Puerto Rico families began moving in. And by 1960, public housing in New York was majority people of color. But even after these changes, the Bronx overall was still mostly white. And this measure that we will sign today will really make us true to ourselves both as a country and as a people. Then in 1965, a year after signing the Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a new immigration policy that abolished immigration quotas on countries outside of Northwestern Europe. That opened the door for more immigrants from non-white countries. Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From 100 different places or more, they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide. Dr. Neil told us the Immigration Act of 1965 brought a massive demographic shift to the Bronx. Which changed everything, which really did open up the gates for an influx of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latinos. Into the U.S., they come into New York, obviously, because New York is a port city, and the places they end up primarily someplace like the Bronx. And as white people continued to move out of the housing projects in the Bronx, and out to the suburbs, Afro-Caribbean immigrants took their place, expanding the city's black population. By 1970, the Bronx was almost a quarter black. And as New York was experiencing this one shift, there was an economic shift as well. Unemployment among young people in New York is around 30 percent. In the early 70s, New York was facing a budget deficit, and all but divested from some of the poorest parts of the city. Huge swaths of the South Bronx were left torn a sunder in abandonment and rubble, leaving a landscape littered with the detritus of social isolation and economic abandonment. Adding to that destruction, the city closed several fire companies in the South Bronx, and soon after, the number of fires soared. The official narrative was that these folks who had just come to New York from the South, and the Caribbean, didn't know how to take care of a community. They didn't have the same kind of values that other folks in the city had in their community. But the people who lived in the South Bronx knew this wasn't true. The feeling was always that there was something else going on. Couldn't quite put our hands on it, but these were just not simply accidental fires. It seemed like a real effort to remove people from these communities, whatever what. Although it's hard to quantify, many derelict landlords did get insurance payouts from these fires and often refused to rebuild. This led to the idea that some landlords who operated mostly as slum lords were setting the fires on purpose. I was always aware of the why, but I knew enough folks who had to go live where it can someplace because their building burned out. New York City was reaching a breaking point and places like the South Bronx were the hardest. The New York City of the 1970s and the South Bronx specifically is a place that we might identify as being disinvested in. The kind of labor and resources that were there were disappearing. We talked about white flight, high unemployment rates, the emergence of a game culture, which you might expect in the context of impoverishment. Cities were under tremendous financial distress and the federal government was very anti-city because it was considered a black space at that point. In so doing, they said, "Well, we're not going to fund anything. We're not going to support cities terribly well." And public schools took a huge beating. All the music and arts programs took the biggest beating. I was actually in a music talent class in public school in the Bronx in the seventh grade right around this time when the city went bankrupt and they just collected our instruments. We'd had them. We took them home. I was a clarinetist and they just like it was like horrible. It was like we were crying. They just took our instruments. We were like, "That was it." Like Professor Neil, Dr. Trisha Rose also grew up in the Bronx. And so when you think about that, it's like what happens with the musical memory in a community, when there's no place to go learn the instrument in real time with community. And so hip hop is an incredible response to this voice. For years as the cultural panoply of the Bronx continued to shift and evolve, so did the soundtrack of the people who lived there. Different cultural sensibilities, different language, grew up in the Bronx, so I can remember listening to the soul music that I listened to, but I was also here in Eddie Paul Mary. I was also hearing Sparrow, right, and Ray Ganger making groups in the same building that I was growing up. [Music] And regardless of what politicians were or weren't doing for the neighborhood, people were still going to get together and have a good time. In the early 70s, house parties were popular in the Bronx. If you lived in a housing project, you could actually run out the rec room. Then be a DJ, playing solo disco, but usually just chaining records from one song to the next. But then people at these Bronx parties started really getting down to one particular part of these songs, called The Break. Oh, break, man. A break is like the best part of the record. That's Grand Wizard Theatre. It's when a drummer starts to get, start to get funky. That's what the break part is. There are a bunch of dancers known as break boys and later be boys who use the break at their time to get busy. Sometimes you might see all the be boys on the be boys stand up against the wall, wait for the break to come and then once the break comes, they jump on the floor, they do their little dance and then they go back, they go back to the wall and stand in the be boys dance and wait for the next break to come. One record with a really long extended drum break was called Apache by the incredible Bongo band, a group of studio musicians put together to score a black exploitation movie. Apache was a cover of a 1960 song that was a hit in the UK. This version of Apache had a bridge with a long percussion solo, with a melody that I know you've heard before. When a break from a song like Apache would come on, people would flood the dance floor. At first the be boys at these Bronx parties would have to wait forever until the song's break came on. Until as the legend goes, one man changed all that. Clive Campbell was 12 years old when his family came to the South Bronx from Jamaica. Two years after the Immigration Act lifted those quotas. Clive and his sister Cindy brought their love of Kingston dance hall parties with them and as they grew up, they started to host their own parties for other teenagers in their neighborhood and just like the party from back home, they were loud, crowded, raucous and filled with young people. Clive's job was to spin the records and eventually he went by the name DJ Kool Herk as in Hercules. He literally towered over everyone else, standing a crazy six-feet-nine inches tall. Like other Bronx DJs, Herk knew how much people loved those breaks in the records he spun, so we had an idea. What if I played the same record on two different turntables and moved between them to keep the break going? He called it the "Mary Go Round" and on August 11th 1973, DJ Kool Herk got the chance to unveil his new technique. His sister Cindy wanted to buy a new clothes for school so she rented a record room at the bottom of their apartment building at 1520 Cedric Avenue to throw it back to school party. Cindy made flyers advertising ladies 25 cents fell at 50 cents. About 300 people packed in and the story goes when the break came and kept on going. The crowd lost its mind. And with that extended break beat, before it even had a name, hip-hop was born. Well, Herk would do a hair play for one turntable to the other. I'm hearing that going on. I'm seeing there there's people out there doing some footwork that I never seen before and that was being considered like to get down to break dancing and so forth. Kool DJ Red Alert wasn't at the now famous August 11th Kool Herk party, but he wasn't far behind. Like Herk, Red Alert was born in the West Indies. When he came to New York, he lived with his grandparents in Harlem where they played lots of records, Motown, Soul, Latin Jazz and Calypso. So I would listen to a little bit of everything in the household. He went to school in the Bronx, so he was always hanging out with friends up there. He used to always mention about the guy by the name of Herk, saying, "Herk, Herk, Herk." Red Alert still remembers the first Kool Herk party he pulled up to. I always felt this around the neighborhood where I grew up at and we all went together to the Bronx and we stepped on in and I started hearing something different. Seeing something different, it was a whole crazy vibe that I've never witnessed before. People just as they are, you know, dressed as they are and just drawing together, listening to variations of what this man Kool Herk is playing. And that was like some of the commercial sound, some of the disco sound, but a lot of obscure sounds that I've never heard before. Eventually, the sounds of those Kool Herk parties would inspire Red Alert to become a DJ himself and change the trajectory for whole generations of young black kids just like him. I was skinny, skinny, big red alpha and you know, so when I started DJ first, I was known as DJ Red Alert, but I got along with everybody so well and then I just add Kool to it, but I had to ask for permission from Kool Herk because in street terms, you can't bite somebody else's name. So in respect, I stepped up, I went to Herk one day and I said to him, I said, "You know, I'm DJ and he always saw me around, but you know, he's the top man, you know, so he was in respect." I said, "You know, I'm gonna add Kool to my name. Can I add Kool and say to time, you know what I'm about to do?" "You all right, man?" "Wait, were you nervous going up to me?" "Oh yeah, I was nervous going to him." "No, I mean, just man, it's a giant figure at the time." Kool Herk is the blueprint. A lot of us in our time as we used fans, turned into students, looking up to him, gave us the way to go and do our day. So I had to start for him, but you know, he had a trend set up. When we come back, hip-hop begins to spread across the Bronx and to the rest of New York City. And we speak with the man behind one of hip-hop's most signature sounds. Stick with us. Theodore Livingston was just 10 years old when Kool Herk started throwing his legendary parties, so he wasn't around early on. What he did have were older brothers who were tied with a narrow iconic, but then up and coming Grandmaster Flash, who, like Herk, was laying the groundwork for what hip-hop would become. Now, when I seen the two turntables and a mixer, which was introduced to me through my brother, me, Jean, and Grandmaster Flash, that's when everything became full circle. And that's what I realized that I was born into a culture, born into an art form that we now call hip-hop. Theodore was born and raised in the South Bronx in a house that was filled with music. Every Saturday, we were getting in front of the TV and watch Soul Train. And music, music is medicine, man, you know? I mean, my mom, she played music when she was cooking. She played music when she was happy. She played music when she was sad. She played music when she was about to whip our butts, you know? So you can always tell what kind of mood my mom's was in when we came home. With music in their blood, it made sense that Theodore's brothers plugged into hip-hop right away. Cordy O worked equipment and DJ me and Jean would spin the records. Me and Jean had talent. And he caught the eye of DJ Grandmaster Flash, who was already iconic for improving on Cooherrx technique of extending breakbeats with two turntables. Theodore, who got the tag along to some of these parties, was Mesmerized. Our Grandmaster Flash, man, he started back spinning a record, you know, the clock theory. When the record is spinning at 360, he was spinning back to the original point so that he can get it back to the beginning of the break. So if the break goes from 360 and goes all around the zero, he was spinning back to the regular 360 to begin another break so he can start to extend the break. You know, mixing records together and stuff like that, that's what the blue print came from, man, Grandmaster Flash. That man Flash was able to extend the breaks more seamlessly, keeping the beat smoother for all the party goers. Flash's genius inspired Theodore and even though he was just a kid, he started messing around trying to emulate his idol and teach himself how to DJ. I was in a living room because the equipment that they used was in my mother's house and my brother me jeans room. And I was in a living room playing music on my mom's stereo. My mom's had a stereo look like a coffin. The TV was in the front, you open up the coffin, inside she had the eight track, she had the radio, you know, I was playing her 45s, playing all the breaks on her 45s and stuff like that. Pretty soon Theodore was inventing DJ techniques of his own. It all started when Theodore's principal let it make a mixtape to play during lunchtime in the cafeteria. I'll go home, took my boombox, put it in front of the speaker, press record, started making my cassette tape. The music was so loud in the house to the point where my mom's had to come into the room and tell me to turn the music down or turn the music off. I turned the music down. I did my little baby scratch and mom's left the room. I finished my cassette tape. We winded it back. And when it got to the part where she came in the room, I could hear myself baby scratching. And I was like, wow, I can incorporate that into all the things I'm doing as a DJ. So I practiced another couple of days, another couple of hours, and I saw it became the scratch. 1975, I was 12 years old. Just 12 years old and literally changing the game. Theodore was so ahead of his time with creating these new techniques. Flashness friends called him a wizard, which is how he got his name, DJ Grand Wizard Theodore. Hip hop would never be the same. The introduction of scratching would take this burgeoning art form to the next level. But Theodore wasn't the only one. There was a lot of this innovation going on in hip hop at the time. The style was so new and so fresh, there was just so much room to push the limits. And another thing, this equipment was no joke. It was big, heavy, analog stuff for the wires and capacitors and resistors. And the DJs and artists of the time, they could do incredibly inventive things, like rigging the machines to play the breaks in different ways. Or power stereo or speakers from a lab post. Dr. Trisha Rose, the sociologist from Brown, actually connects this inventiveness to an unlikely source. The cities neglect. Some of them know this kind of electrical talent. Why? Because they were being trained in vocational schools, another abandonment factor, right? They weren't being trained to go off to college. They were being trained to go off and fix turntables and fix TVs that were going to be out of date any minute with, you know, tubes versus the new technology. So they were equipped to technologically sort of figure out how to work the machine from the inside. And at the same time, the musical outlets they might have historically had in school were being cut. The city could take away music in our classes. It could find infinite ways to tell black and poor kids what they thought of them, but no city or public policy could take away the ingenuity of a people. David D, a hip hop journalist and DJ who grew up in the Bronx in the 70s, says in his opinion, the early pioneers of hip hop have never been properly recognized for what they were. Geniuses. It wasn't something that was nurtured compared to if we're talking about that time, what happens in the early 80s? When we move up a few years, you get Steve Wise in the act and Steve Jobs. I like to use them as examples. You know, here they are in college or whatever, and they're figuring out how to wire boxes so people can make free phone calls, right? Technically, that's wire fraud, right? Technically, that makes them a law breaker, but they're framed that geniuses had, you know, ingenuity that we marvel at. But do we have that same sort of outlook for all those kids that were abandoned in the Bronx who were figuring out a way out of no way? These were things that folks had to figure out. Hip hop still doesn't get the credit it deserves and it certainly wasn't getting it back then. Hip hop was black. Beyond that, it was young. You know, our parents and others would like, what the hell is this? This is garbage. This is crap. This is, this is not music. You know, remember the first time I let my parents hear these break beats and they were looking like, what the hell is this? And remember my past is like, man, we spent all this money to get these records and you just play the same part over and over again. It didn't matter that old folks didn't understand. They didn't have to. This wasn't for them. This was music for young people who were trying to make their way in a city that wasn't looking out for them. Plus, this new hip hop generation didn't need older folks to spread the music around. They didn't need the radio. They didn't even need record deals. As cool DJ Brittleler says, all you needed was a cassette player and a blank tape. cassette tapes were always called an internet of our time was keeping everything in motion. When you heard these cassette tapes, some hip hop sounds, you know, for a party or for anything, it grabbed everybody's attention. Almost from the beginning, people were taking tape recorders and recording live DJ sets being played on turntables so they could listen back and pass it on. Cossets was traveling everywhere. You know, all throughout the city, even out of time, people were going way to cars, people going into service, people were having family. You know, these cassettes was traveling everywhere. You know, people was playing them in the cars. You know, the boom boxes. So, you know, that sound was being dominated on the outside before they reached radio. Grand Wizard Theatre remembers family coming to visit and being blown away by what they were hearing in the Bronx. And the cousin come out to me and be like, "Yo, you guys have got all this music and stuff like that. Can you make me a cassette tape?" We make a cassette tape, give it to my cousin, and he'd take it back to Baltimore. And then he might end up making a copy of that tape. For someone. And then that person to make a copy of that tape for someone. And then the tape just, it's like a snowboard effect. Everybody keep making copies of the tape. So it's like, cassette tapes, man, what we're going on and on and on and on. Through the mid-70s, hip hop was taken off. Black parties, late nights hanging out in the parks, and those cassette tapes being passed around meant the music was being heard by more and more people. And for a while there, the star of the show was still a DJ. Rapping wasn't really a thing yet. But as time went on, MCs or masters of ceremonies began to pick up the mic and join DJs on stage. Pulling from Black America's long history of spoken word and poets like Gil Scott Heron and the last poets, MCs started getting up to the microphone to rhyme over the break beats. At first, these MCs were just giving shout-outs to the neighborhood big-timers in the crowd. Then, they started rhyming in short, simple burst. Their rhymes started to get longer, the storytelling more complex and adventurous. Eventually, rapping along with DJing and B-boying would find its place as a key player of hip hop. It would become the dominant representation of the culture. But to make the sound they wrapped over, the core of the music, you needed that expensive equipment. Term tables cost around $300 back then. That's more than $1,600 in today's money. Sometimes you were lucky enough to find old stuff on the street or speakers from abandoned cars. But for the most part, the average Bronx team just couldn't afford it. But then, lightning struck. At 9.34 last night, it all went black. When a sweltering night in July of 1977, New York City lost power. The streets, homes, hotels, theaters, restaurants, plus subways and elevators and the people in them were stuck wherever they happened to be. Lightning struck a power line 50 miles out of town. And then, one after another, the power stations became overloaded because on a hot summer night, the air conditioners were running. And one by one, they shut themselves down. It's one of those moments where everyone who was there from members exactly where they were. It had to be at least 99 degrees, almost 100 degrees that night, because it was like sweat, sweat it all day long. I was playing outside when the lights went off. And I think on the ground, we just simply assumed that there was some minor blackout in the neighborhood. And when I was walking home, there's a flight of steps that you go up. And when you go up the flight of steps and you turn around, you can see all the lights going out on the west side. And all the lights started to go out on the east side. I was like, it's time to get back to the block. And once I got back to the block, it was a blackout. Blackout was a fissure. And as a kid, you know, it was fun, right? Because it's not like you could go up stairs and go to sleep. He can't watch TV. So it was a night that we got to stay up all night outside. But far from move from all of that and other different parts of the city, there was looting, there was criminality. The power didn't come back on until the next night, 25 hours later. With the lights back on, it was clear to see the devastation in several parts of New York City after a night of looting, vandalism, and arson, whole blocks wiped out. A policeman after 16 hours of watching it made the city's most quoted remark. It was the night of the animals. But there was, for some, a silver lining. The seventh month of 1977 was another Christmas for the people. I mean, I heard a lot of people stole equipment. They went right to the electronic store, stealing amplifiers, speakers, all kinds of stuff. The electronic store called crazy eddies wiped out, re-traveled away downtown, regia seeing all different things. But then I learned everything overnight. There was people that became DJs. Hip hop seemed to be present after the blackout in a way that it wasn't prior to that point in time. After the blackout, hip hop continued to grow. MCs like Grandmaster Caz and Melly Mel were raising the bar for rhyming, and Brock's DJs had shows them in hand, spreading the music to other burrows. And you know that feeling when you can just tell you're in the cusp of something, David D was awash in it. I remember on several occasions thinking to myself when I was at certain parties or events, and going, "I wonder if the rest of the world is doing what we're doing." Because New York was like, New York a special, so it's like, "I don't think they're doing this in DC. I don't think they're doing this in Boston. I don't think they're doing this in Chile." But right now at this moment, I wonder if the rest of the world knows what we're doing. But we didn't have, at least I didn't have any idea that it would one day be a thing that we're talking about 50 years later on a radio or TV about this thing. It was just magic moments. For the first several years, as hip-hop grew and spread, it belonged to New York and set firmly outside the mainstream until 1979. At what point did you realize that hip-hop and DJing and MCN, it was bigger than just the Bronx where it was born? At what point did you realize, "Yo, this is something more than we ever even imagined?" When rappers the light came out, when rappers the light came out, I was like, "Whoa." The opening lines of rappers the light championed the name of the culture, highlighting the importance of the music and have a clear objective to make you dance. A lot of tests on the rapping to the beat, and me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet. Rapper's delight was the brainchild of R&B singer and producer Sylvia Robinson. After hearing hip-hop for the first time at a club in Harlem, Robinson realized this music had the potential to make it big. Her son helped her track down some guys who said they could rap, and she called them the Sugarhill gang after her record label. She brought the three rappers to her studio and hired a band to play the disco soul hit "Good Times" by Sheik and they played it over and over. What came out of that studio session was a 14-minute song that by now, many of y'all could probably rap for memory. Cool DJ Ritalert remembered the first time he heard it. People were just shocked. We've been doing the party up in Harlem, and if it is that when the song came on, I'm hearing somebody rapping on it. And we all look in the mind like, "Who's that? Who's that?" And the person who was on the microphone, he said, "It's not me." And we started hearing it word for word, and that was rappers that liked you as amazed with that. It was almost an imaginable at the time. A hip-hop song was being played on the radio. It was amazing because what we actually do in the real time, now I'm hearing it and recorded, and I'd be like, "Wow, you know, and I'm not knowing that people had done something like that in some sense of a way for other different genres of music, but this is actually like, consider like, the first rap song. The song introduced hip-hop to the rest of the country outside of New York, and eventually peaked at number 36 on the Billboard charts. But while rappers' delight was an international success, David D. Remembers, that the OGs and the Bronx weren't impressed. I think some of the more established MCs were like, "This is garbage because we never heard of these people. This is not what we do. This is not how we're flowing." You know, we didn't know who Sugar Hill was. It was from Jersey. So the irony that this thing that's so New York Center, it's no Bronx Center, that most folks who know of hip-hop are first hears it from three dudes from New Jersey. But Graham was a theater assistant. People didn't spend too much time being mad about it. They could see the promise of real financial success, like, "Yo, if these guys can become superstars, why not me?" Once the records came out and stuff like that, we knew for a fact that it would take us up out of the hood. We would be on tour somewhere. We would be on the airplane. We would be doing all these cities, because to some of us, we never got on the airplane and went to Florida. We never got on the airplane and went somewhere and started doing parties and stuff like that until you actually made a record. Because you could sell it. Yes, once you make a record, it opened up a whole new big audience for us. People in Detroit, people in Canada, people across the water, people in West Coast, East Coast, people are starting seeing who we are and stuff like that, and then open up a lot for us economically, you know? Graham was a theater where still DJs all over the world, and he credits that in part to the opportunities that opened up after rapper's delight. Cool DJ Red Alert began working radio in the 80s and has broken some of the biggest names in the hip-hop, and he's still on the air in New York City today. And just like the music would eventually spread, David D moved out West, filing a Bay Area audience that loved hip-hop as much as he does, and established himself as a pioneering hip-hop journalist. And Mark Anthony Neil and Trisha Rose brought hip-hop to the Ivory Tower, making careers of studying hip-hop at elite universities. Of course, hip-hop has changed in the decades since Herk's party shook up the Bronx, and rappers' delight took rap to the rest of America. Like most rap in the late 70s, that record was about parting and having a good time, but as the decade came to a close, New York City was falling further into decay, crimes on the rise, and police were cracking down, adding to the violence that was plaguing the city. The federal government and the government administration has done a great deal to hurt the South Bronx as well as the inner cities in general, whether it's New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. After a decade of fires and abandonment, the Bronx birthplace of hip-hop was suffocating. And hip-hop, with its newfound popularity and the sense of urgency, had to figure out what it needed to say and how to harness some power. In 1982, it did just that, finding its voice loud and clear with the message. You know, it's like rats in the frontroom, roaches in the back, junkies in the outies with the baseball bats, all of that is true, all of that's what we would do. You know? I think anyone who listened to that song that was young and black knew exactly where that song was coming from, whether you were in New York or not. But when the message came out, now it was the first time you could be certain that this genre could be the most profound articulation of political social vision like ever produced. Next week, how artists took the inescapable policies of abandonment, violence, and neglect and created music, fashion, and art that addressed these conditions head on. That's on Episode 2 of Street Disciples, Broken Glass Everywhere. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook using the handle @IntoAmericaPod, or you can tweet me @Tremainly. That's @Tremainly, my full name. And if you want to write to us, our email is
[email protected]. That was intoAmerica@NBC and the letters UNI.com. If you love the show, help spread the word. You can do that by reading and reviewing IntoAmerica on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. IntoAmerica is produced by Isabelle Angel, Alison Bailey, Mike Brown, Aaron Doughton, Max Jacobs, and Jan Maris Pariz. Original music is by Hans Brown. Our executive producer is Aisha Turner, special thanks to Bryson Barnes, Stephanie Cargill, Joe Horderman, and Jim Mueller for recording up. I'm Tremain Lee. We'll be back next Thursday with the next episode of Street Disciples.
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