In the beginning, on Aug. 11, 1973, Clive Campbell—a Jamaican-born DJ better known as Kool Herc—played a back-to-school jam at a West Bronx apartment complex. Behind two turntables and a mic mixer, Kool Herc pioneered a breakbeat-extending technique he dubbed the “merry-go-round.” His sister, Cindy, responsible for organizing the storied rec-room party, in turn became hip-hop’s first promoter. It’s a party that has become legendary, effectively spawning one of the greatest cultural forces of the modern era.
In its infancy, hip-hop had no label. It was a product of DJs looping soul, funk, and disco—a new method of using percussive R&B music to entertain in an era of sweeping social changes. DJ Kool Herc mixed break-heavy favorites from James Brown to the Incredible Bongo Band, and with his hulking sound system and arsenal of funk and soul records, he brought a kind of people’s choice entertainment to New York’s uptown communities.
Herc soon emerged as a pioneer of New York City hip-hop culture. In 1977, while hip-hop was still a mostly underground phenomenon, this titan of sound eventually squared off in a legendary battle at the Executive Playhouse. Herc and his West Bronx crew, along with other intrepid DJs offering up looped breaks and party vibes, eventually became the center of gravity for young people of color in 1970s New York. Among new innovators were Kool DJ Red Alert, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa—all of them, like Herc, of Caribbean descent.
The Caribbean connection is critical to this history because it accounts for the competitive spirit, DIY inventiveness, and public spectacle of mobile jockey culture. These DJs, the stars of their neighborhood party scenes, relied on others—the MCs—to hype the crowd and boast about the supreme skills of the artist on the turntables. That relationship between the DJ and his MC derived from a Jamaican “toasting” tradition and its related “sound clash” culture.
Long before hip-hop’s inaugural moment in the Bronx in 1973, sound clashing was a central fixture in the inner-city neighborhoods of Kingston, Jamaica. By the mid-1950s, the formation of competing local DJ crews, or “sound systems,” generally included at least one record selector, MC, and sound tech operating a rig of amps, speakers, mics, turntables, and records. Youth from the community served as the system operators’ foot soldiers of hype and braggadocio in the heat of the clash.