Covering Nick Field's Curveballs 21st August 2008 'Hip Hop - Be Bop DON'T STOP'

I returned to Thursday night's for the first time in a while as I covered my old Thursday night colleague Nick Field's show 'Curveballs' as he was away at the Reading Festival (more on that from him next week I'm sure) so what was I going to do tonight?

'Curveballs' is an eclectic mix of all forms of rock music and local Indie bands which I can't do justice to so with Nick's blessing I thought I'd do my own version of it and play the sort of material we don't hear too much of on Phoenix 98 fm. The first hour consisted of soulful garage and house hits from the last 10 years or so and the second hour I took a trip down memory lane to the early days of Hip Hip and it's forerunner - electro - and some of the important classics that helped shape the mutl-billion dollar music genre we know today. So just for fun I picked my personal all time top 10 (see playlist's below).

As for Hip-Hop itself, who started it all?

DJ Kool Herc (pictured above):

Clive Campbell (born April 16, 1955), AKA Kool Herc, DJ Kool Herc and Kool DJ Herc, is a Jamaican-born DJ who is credited as originating hip hop music, in the Bronx, New York City. His playing of hard funk records of the sort typified by James Brown was an alternative both to the violent gang culture of the Bronx and to the nascent popularity of disco in the 1970s. In response to the reactions of his dancers, Campbell in 1972 began to isolate the instrumental portion of the record which emphasized the drum beat—the break—and switch from one break to another to yet another.

Using the two turntable set-up of the disco DJs, Campbell's style led to the use of two copies of the same record to elongate the break. This breakbeat DJing, using hard funk, rock, and records with Latin percussion, formed the basis of hip hop music. Campbell's announcements and exhortations to dancers would lead to the syncopated, rhymed spoken accompaniment we now know as rapping. He dubbed his dancers break-boys and break-girls, or simply b-boys and b-girls. Campbell's DJ style was quickly taken up by figures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. But unlike them, he never made the move into commercially recorded hip hop in its earliest years.

While growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, Campbell saw and heard the sound systems of neighborhood parties called dancehalls, and the accompanying speech of their DJs, known as toasting. He moved to the Bronx, New York at the age of 13 in 1968.

He and his sister, Cindy, began hosting back-to-school parties in the recreation room of their building, 1520 Sedgwick Ave.[5] Herc's first soundsystem consisted of two turntables and a guitar amp, on which he would play records like James Brown's "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose", The Jimmy Castor Bunch's "It's Just Begun" and Booker T & the MG's's "Melting Pot". It was at these neighborhood parties that DJ Kool Herc developed the style that was the blueprint for hip hop music. Herc would get two copies of the same record and focus on a small part of each record, called the break. Since this part of the record was the one the dancers liked best, Herc isolated and prolonged it. As one record reached the end of the break, he would cue the other record back to the beginning of the break, thereby extending a relatively small part of a record into a long "five-minute loop of fury".

Kool Herc also contributed to developing the rhyming style of hip hop by punctuating the music with slang phrases from the DJ's microphone: "Rock on, my mellow!" "B-boys, b-girls, are you ready?" "This is the joint!" "To the beat, y'all!" "You don't stop!"etc. etc.The b-boys and b-girls were the dancers to Herc's breakbeats, who were said by him to be "breaking". With the mystique of his graffiti name, his physical stature, and the reputation of his small parties, Herc had become somewhat of a folk hero in the Bronx.

A young Grandmaster Flash, to whom Kool Herc was, in his words, "a hero", began DJing in Herc's style in 1975. Also, Afrika Bambaataa first heard Kool Herc in 1973. Bambaataa, at that time a general in the notorious Black Spades gang of the Bronx, obtained his own soundsystem in 1975 and began to DJ in Herc's style, converting his followers to the non-violent Zulu Nation in the process.

In a way, of course, Kool Herc's legacy is all of hip hop music. In Summer 2007, New York state officials declared 1520 Sedgwick Ave. as the "birthplace of hip-hop" making it eligible for national and state registers.

Afrika Bambaataa pictured in the early 1980's......

.....and Grandmaster Flash from the same period (before the invention of the iPod obviously).

Click here for more info on Afrika Bambaata

Click here for more info on Grandmaster Flash

Soulful Garage & House first hour playlist:

My Hip-Hop/Electro Eighties Top 10 (in order of merit):