Everything about Dj Kool Herc totally explained
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. Unlike them, he never made the move into commercially recorded hip hop in its earliest years.
Biography
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. The creation of the
Cross Bronx Expressway by
Robert Moses (completed 1963, with further construction continuing through to 1972) had uprooted thousands in the Bronx, displaced communities, and led to "white flight" due to lowered property values in its wake. The Bronx that Campbell's family moved into was in the process of becoming in effect run by various street gangs. Campbell attended the Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx, where he spent a lot of time in the weight room. That fact coupled with his height spurred the other kids to call him
Hercules. He began running with a graffiti crew called the Ex-Vandals, and took the name Kool Herc. He recalls persuading his father to buy him a copy of "
Sex Machine" by James Brown (
King, 1970), a record that not a lot of people had, and one which they'd come to him to hear. He and his sister, Cindy, began hosting back-to-school parties in the recreation room of their building, 1520 Sedgwick Ave. Herc's first soundsystem consisted of two turntables and a guitar amp, on which he'd 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'd 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". This innovation had its roots in what he called "The Merry-go-round"—a switching from break to break done at the height of the party. Herc told the
New York Times he first introduced The Merry-go-round into his sets in 1972. The earliest known merry-go-round involved playing the break from James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit A Loose" (with its refrain, "Now clap your hands! Stomp your feet!"), then switching to the break from "Bongo Rock" by
The Incredible Bongo Band, and from "Bongo Rock"'s break into that of "
The Mexican" by the English rock band
Babe Ruth. Kool Herc also contributed to developing the rhyming style of hip hop by occasionally punctuating the music with slang phrases from the DJ's microphone: "Rock on, my mellow!" "B-boys, are you ready?" "This is the joint!" "To the beat, y'all!" "You don't stop!"
The b-boys were the dancers to Herc's breakbeats, who were said by him to be "breaking". The obvious connection is to the breakbeat, but Herc has said that "breaking" was also street slang of the time for "getting excited", "acting energetically". Herc's terms b-boy, b-girl and breaking became part of the lexicon of hip hop culture even before that culture itself had a name. Early Kool Herc b-boy and later DJ innovator
Grandmixer D.ST describes the early evolution thus: " ... [E]verybody would form a circle and the B-boys would go into the center. At first the dance was simple: touch your toes, hop, kick out your leg. Then some guy went down, spun around on all fours. Everybody said wow and went home to try to come up with something better."
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. Herc branched out from the recreation room of his building in Sedgwick Avenue to the nearby Twilight Zone club, Rapping duties were delegated to
Coke La Rock, and Herc's posse, known as The Herculords, was further augmented by Clark Kent and dancers The Nigger Twins.—to the streets and parks of the Bronx.
Nelson George recalls a schoolyard party: "The sun hadn't gone down yet, and kids were just hanging out, waiting for something to happen. Van pulls up, a bunch of guys come out with a table, crates of records. They unscrew the base of the light pole, take their equipment, attach it to that, get the electricity – Boom! We got a concert right here in the schoolyard and it's this guy Kool Herc. And he's just standing with the turntable, and the guys were studying his hands. There are people dancing, but there's as many people standing, just watching what he's doing. That was my first introduction to in-the-street, hip hop DJing."
A young
Grandmaster Flash, to whom Kool Herc was, in his words, "a hero", began DJing in Herc's style in 1975. By 1976, with his
MCs The Furious Five, Flash could play to a packed
Audubon Ballroom in
Manhattan, and was already associated with a famous break known as "The Bells", a cut up of the intro to smooth jazz artist
Bob James's 1975 cover of Paul Simon's "Take Me to the Mardi Gras". Nervous venue owners, however, would soon send hip hop back to the community centers and high school gymnasiums of the Bronx.
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. Kool Herc began using
The Incredible Bongo Band's "
Apache" as a break in 1975. It became a firm b-boy favorite—"the Bronx national anthem" There were also developments in cutting (switching from one record to another) and scratching (moving the record by hand to and fro under the stylus for percussive effect) in the late seventies. Herc himself puts it down to a series of events: an incident at the Executive Playhouse where he was stabbed while attempting to intercede in a fight, which took him out of action, and which he suggests would make people wary of attending events hosted by him subsequent to it, and the burning down of one of the venues at which he used to DJ. In 1980, Herc had stopped DJing, and was working in a record shop in South Bronx.
[ ]
Kool Herc appeared in Hollywood's take on hip hop, Beat Street (Orion, 1984), as himself. In 1994 he appeared on Terminator X & the Godfathers of Threatt's album, Super Bad.[ In 2005, he wrote the foreword to Jeff Chang's book on hip hop, Can't Stop, Won't Stop.
]Legacy
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.[
DJ Kool Herc is mentioned in numerous hip hop songs, among them "It Doesn't Matter" by Wyclef Jean in the lyrics:]
"Foundation like Kool Herc / or DJ Red Alert goes berserk / The needle ain't skip the record jerked / 'Cause y'all jumpin' too hard"; the Nas song "Who Killed It?"; and The Roots' song "Web", which states "Kool Herc ain't never get a royalty check". Herc is featured in Jin's Top 5 (Dead or Alive) music video, where he explains the history of hip hop.
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