I often focus on the Campbells’ back-to-school party as the culture’s “Big Bang” moment when I deliver my hip-hop history lecture in World History, Modern U.S. History, and African American History courses. August 11, 1973 is an easy shorthand for the origins of hip-hop culture; it zeroes in on a single place, with identifiable (male) protagonists (as Cindy’s contribution is often erased), in a particular moment of time. In this narrative, DJ Kool Herc, as well as other pioneering DJs like Grandmaster Flash, served as agents of technological and cultural discovery and empowerment for young Black and brown kids at a time when national policymakers, local politicians, urban planners, and industrial capitalists left them for dead.
Of course, as with all origin myths, hip-hop’s story is more complex, and in a full semester we can go further back in time. Scholars, journalists, critics, and practitioners have scoured histories of gospel and soul music, spoken word, Black politics, sports, migration, labor, and legal and urban policy to locate some of its antecedents. Journalist Vann Newkirk looks to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 as an origin moment: “Specifically, something of hip-hop’s genesis can be detected amid the chaos following April 4, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Riots swept the nation, both the largest of the wave of annual multi-city uprisings in the ’60s, and the last such outbreak for decades.” As Dr. King’s death disrupted the Civil Rights Movement and national and local law enforcement agencies disorganized Black Power’s left flank, radical Black bards such as the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron recorded albums where they performed their spoken-word lyrics about racism, policing, revolution, and the Vietnam War over instrumentals.
But to understand the origins of rapping, one must dig deeper and consider histories of Black folk culture, radio, and sports. Rap’s roots lay in a variety of folk traditions like jive talking, boasting, toasting, gospel music, and radio deejaying. Boasting and jive talking, or creating one’s own stylistic slang, goes back to the 1940s. Consider the gospel quartet The Jubalaires’ soothing performance of “Noah,” recorded in 1946, for an early, yet impressively rhythmic, spoken word verse. Radio listeners surely heard DJs like Harlem’s Frankie Crocker spitting rhymes between songs on WWRL. Public Enemy’s frontman, Chuck D, often credits Muhammad Ali as an influential rapper. He told journalist Michael Tillery: “Muhammad Ali not only influenced hip-hop of course from the rhyming aspect, which is a known fact, but the brash swagger of backing it up: going into the dozens, making predictions. . . . It’s like he was saying, ‘. . . And I’m gonna throw some rhyme on top of it.’ It’s total hip-hop. Total rap!” And regarding lyrical content, blues singer Bessie Smith’s songs documenting Black workers’ experiences dealing with working-class life in a racist nation predated rapper Melle Mel’s urban tales in Reagan’s America by nearly sixty years. Smith, a queer Black woman, also spoke to sexuality and other issues affecting Black women in ways that Queen Latifah and Salt-N-Pepa would on their records in the 1980s and 1990s.