The History of Hip-Hop

That lecture on the History of Hip Hop by the Teacha, KRS-One, was excellent.

The Teacha first brought us to 1972 in the South Bronx, where DJ Cool Herc used to play music at a little park at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, which is one of the places where the culture of Hip-Hop: the b-boys, the b-girls, two turntables and a microphone, etc. was born. But before describing the particulars, he tried to put the scene into context, and made some observations:

In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, with the Vietnam War raging, there was intense anger against the US government, and urban violence.

The focus points of that “near-revolution” were the poor, inner-city neighborhoods, i.e. “the ghettos” whose (mostly, but not exclusively) Black and Latino populations were seeing young men die in Vietnam.

Those urban neighborhoods were then flooded with heroin, in a deal sealed by the FBI and the Mafia, and the records of these deals are in the public record. Look it up!

That was part of a deliberate attempt to emasculate those communities: with the heroin, Vietnam, the expanding prisons, etc., Uncle Sam figured: if we take away their men, they will have no power.

But Uncle Sam miscalculated: most of the early hip-hoppers were raised by single mothers, who spawned the Hip Hop Generation, which has since created an entertainment industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

These hip-hoppers were brought up with the creative energies of their single mothers; they didn't play GI Joe and want to be soldiers; instead, they were creative, which, according to Teacha, is largely a feminine instinct.

If you asked somebody outside the hip-hop community, “what's your name?” they would say, “Bob.” But if you asked somebody within the hip-hop community, “what's your name?” they would say, “I'm DJ Super-Mike-Ski from the 152nd!”

The very first rule of hip-hop was: change your name. Hip-hoppers were rejecting EVERYTHING the mainstream system had to offer. The mainstream was saying: “to be somebody, you gotta go to school, dress nice, act polite, talk proper, and THEN maybe we will let you into college, but REALLY, we're never gonna let you in anyway.”

We early hip-hoppers rejected everything in the mainstream. That made us free: to spray-paint some hieroglyphics-lookin' tags on the wall and say “That's Art!”; to scratch a record backwards on a turntable and say: “That's Music!”

We heard Jimi Hendrix play a guitar and we said: “Wow! That's def!” And we asked each other: “You got a guitar?” Nope. “You got a guitar?” Nope. “You got a guitar?” Nope, but my Mom's got a turntable. And we played around with the turntable until somebody screeched it backwards to make it sound like Jimi Hendirx, and we all said: “That's def!”

So: we never complained: “Oh, I will never be a musician because my Dad won't buy me a guitar” (because we knew that would never happen anyway) . . . we just used what we had . . . THAT is freedom.