ALTHOUGH NO INDEX-CARD invites exist for that August night, it still became legendary. Starting in the Nineties, Herc began talking up that party and date, and it was further cemented in history thanks to stories in The Source magazine and journalist Jeff Chang’s vital hip-hop history, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. “It’s the breaks,” say Dan Charnas, author of two essential hip-hop histories, The Big Payback and Dilla Time. “Herc found these particular records and played a crucial role in the creation of the breakbeat canon.”
At the same time, the focus on one specific day has led some in the hip-hop community to wonder: Is it possible to narrow down the birth of the music to a single moment? Was that day the genesis or one of rap’s many important evolutionary steps along the way? “It’s an arbitrary designation that I accept out of respect for Herc’s contribution and the contributions of all pioneers,” says Gray. “It is very good that we have this anniversary because it gives us a point in time to analyze. We know that the culture of hip-hop was affected by the sociopolitical and economic realities of the Bronx. But who was that first person who picked up that first guitar and did that first rock lick? When was gospel created? We don’t know any of these things!”
As Gray and others have pointed out, Herc wasn’t the only DJ prepping the world for a new genre. In Harlem, DJ Hollywood was talking over records around the same time; another Bronx native, Disco King Mario, was also pumping the music. For Gray, who grew up in the Bronx, another icon was DJ Smokey, a now obscure but influential DJ whom Gray would see engage in turntable battles with Herc. “If Smokey had won some of those battles, we’d be celebrating Smokey,” he says. “But Herc had something that Smokey didn’t have — power. Herc could set up right across from Smokey and turn on his equipment and you couldn’t hear Smokey anymore. Herc used his sound system well. Everyone he battled, he blew them out.”
Given the important records that were released in 1973, maybe that year, as much as Herc’s DJ work, should be seen as a pivotal moment in rap, as Charnas argues. “It was a landmark year for hip-hop because it was the moment that DJs started thinking about emphasizing the breaks in a crucial way,” he says. “And when they did, they picked records of the day like ‘Apache.’ If Aug. 11 is the first of anything, it’s not the birth of the hip-hop genre or hip-hop culture per se. It’s the birth of the hip-hop religion — the sainthood, the anointments, the sacraments, and the debates.”