Introduction
by DJ Kool Herc
When I started DJing back in the early ’70s, it was just something that we were doing for fun. I came from “the people’s choice,” from the street. If the people like you, they will support you, and your work will speak for itself.
We threw our first party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx. We were hoping for new housing after we got burned out of the South Bronx. We got a call and went to check out this apartment over by the Major Deegan Expressway.
When we got there we looked at it and it blew us away because we had two bathrooms. It was like The Jeffersons—we were moving on up! We were on the second floor and that’s how I really was able to do this. I could get my equipment in and out. If it was more than a couple of floors up, we would’ve never got our equipment in and out of there.
My father helped us out. He said, “This is what you wanna do? You love music?” I said, I love it. And my mom helped us out when we gave the party. I asked my friends to not start any trouble around here. We have always been about respect. Because the management, they wanted something bad to happen. But nothing bad ever happened.
Instead, the parties I gave happened to catch on. They became a rite of passage for young people in the Bronx. Then the younger generation came in and started putting their spin on what I had started. I set down the blueprint, and all the architects started adding on this level and that level. Pretty soon, before we even knew it, it had started to evolve.
Most people know me as DJ Kool Herc. But sometimes when I introduce myself to people, I just tell them that my friends call me Herc. Later on, they might ask, “Are you that Herc?” My thing is: Come and meet me as who I am. My head is not swollen, I don’t try to front on people. If you like what I do, if you like me playing music or giving parties, hey, that’s what I do for my friends and people. It’s what I’ve always done.
To me, hip-hop says, “Come as you are.” We are a family. It ain’t about security. It ain’t about bling-bling. It ain’t about how much your gun can shoot. It ain’t about two-hundred-dollar sneakers. It is not about me being better than you or you being better than me. It’s about you and me, connecting one-to-one. That’s why it has universal appeal. It has given young people a way to understand their world, whether they are from the suburbs or the city or wherever.
Hip-hop has also created a lot of jobs that otherwise wouldn’t exist. But even more important, I think hip-hop has bridged the culture gap. It brings white kids together with Black kids, brown kids with Asian kids. They all have something in common that they love. It gets past the stereotypes and people hating each other because of those stereotypes.
People talk about the four hip-hop elements: DJing, b-boying, MCing, and graffiti. I think that there are far more than those: the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you look, the way you communicate. Back in my era, we had James Brown and civil rights and Black Power; then you have people calling themselves hip-hop activists. Now we have Black Lives Matter. These young people today are talking about their era. They have a right to speak on it the way they see it coming up.
Hip-hop is the voice of this generation. Even if you didn’t grow up in the Bronx in the ’70s, hip-hop is there for you. It has become a powerful force. Hip-hop binds all of these people, all of these nationalities, all over the world together.
But we are not making the best use of the recognition and the position that it has. Do we realize how much power hip-hop has? There are lot of people who are doing something positive, who are doing hip-hop the way it was meant to be done. They are reaching young people, showing them what the world could be—people living together and having fun.
But too often, the ones that get the most recognition are those emphasizing the negative. Music is sometimes a medication from reality, and the only time you get a dialogue is when tragedy happens. When Tupac or Biggie or Jam Master Jay died, that’s when people wanted to have a dialogue. It was too late. Not enough people are taking advantage of using hip-hop as a way to deal with serious issues, as a way to try to change things before tragedy strikes.
I lost my son to gun violence. We have to be aware of what’s going on right now. Hip-hop did not create the violence. You don’t need the gun to prevail. What you have to do is master your craft that you love. You don’t have to go astray from that.
We have the power to change things. If Jay-Z comes out one day with his shirt hanging this way or LL Cool J comes out with one leg of his pants rolled up, the next day everyone is doing the same thing. If we decide one day to say that we’re not gonna kill somebody senselessly, everyone will follow.
I don’t want to hear people saying that they don’t want to be role models. Cut the crap. That’s escape. That’s the easy way out. You might be living lovely. But if you came out of the neighborhood, there was somebody who was there to guide you when you needed it, someone that said, “Son, here’s two dollars.” You might have beat up on the ghetto to get out of it, but what have you done for the ghetto lately? How can you come from nothing to get something, but at the same time, still do dirt to tear it all down?
Hip-hop has always been about having fun, but it’s also about taking responsibility. And now we have a platform to speak our minds. Millions of people are watching us. Let’s hear something powerful. Tell people what they need to hear. How will we help the community? What do we stand for? What can we change if we get organized? We can see how powerful we really can be.
Hip-hop is a family, so everybody has got to pitch in. East, west, north, or south—we come from one coast and that coast was Africa. This culture was born in the ghetto. We were born here to die. We’re surviving now, but we’re not yet rising up. If we’ve got a problem, we’ve got to correct it. We can’t be hypocrites. That’s what I hope the hip-hop generation can do, to take us all to the next level by always reminding us: It ain’t about keeping it real, it’s about keeping it right.
For the younger generation—here’s what I want you to know about hip-hop and where we come from. Every five years or so somebody pops up with something brand new and that’s what I see going on right now. You’re a whole different generation. You all have created a whole world of ideas with your art, music, and I love you for it. Hip-hop is endless. I’m surprised and I’m glad it’s come such a long way. This culture is yours. Make something of it.
1
Babylon Is Burning
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter emerged from a state motorcade at Charlotte Street in the heart of the South Bronx—three helicopters overhead, Secret Service agents at his side—to gaze silently upon four square blocks of dead city.
The president stood amid the smashed brick and concrete, stripped cars, rotting vermin, and garbage—his secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patricia Harris, Mayor Abraham Beame, and a small army of reporters, photographers, and cameramen tailing behind. For miles and miles, apartment buildings that had once been proud homes for thousands lay in ruins. The Bronx had become a national symbol of urban decay.
Decades before, a powerful urban planner named Robert Moses had decided to build a highway right through the heart of the Bronx. That’s how an unbroken continuum of cohesive, diverse communities was cleared for the Cross Bronx Expressway, which Moses hoped would get people from the suburbs of New Jersey to the suburbs of Queens in just fifteen minutes. It was as if the million people living in the Bronx in between didn’t matter at all.
Sixty thousand Bronx residents were caught directly in the crosshairs of the Expressway. Moses bulldozed right through them. As the historian Robert Caro wrote, “where once apartment buildings or private homes had stood were now hills of rubble, decorated with ripped-open bags of rotting garbage that had been flung atop them.”1
When the sound of automobiles replaced the sound of jackhammers on the length of the Expressway, the fuel was in place for the Bronx to burn. Apartment buildings passed into the hands of slumlords, who figured out that they could make more money by destroying their own buildings than by collecting rent.
A fireman described the scheme. First the slumlords refused to provide heat and water to the tenants. Frustrated residents moved out. Then the slumlords hired thugs to burn down their own buildings, so that they could collect sums of up to $150,000 in insurance money. “Before you know it,” the fireman said, “you have a block with no one living there.”2 Between 1970 and 1975, the Bronx lost 43,000 apartments, almost one sixth of all its stock.3 Thousands of vacant, devastated lots and empty buildings littered the borough. In the streets, heroin dealers and junkie thieves followed the contract arsonists like vultures.
During the 1960s, half of the white residents left the Bronx. With them went the businesses and the jobs. The official youth unemployment rate hit 60 percent. If blues culture developed under the conditions of forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work at all.
In the words of one Dr. Wise, a neighborhood clinic director, the Bronx was nothing less than “a Necropolis—a city of death.”
Copyright © 2021 by Jeff Chang
