August 11, 1973 is the date hip hop historians circle as the genre's birthday, and it all traces back to a modest apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. That evening, an eighteen year old Jamaican immigrant named Clive Campbell, known to the world as DJ Kool Herc, was spinning records at a back to school party in the building's recreation room, an event organized by his younger sister Cindy Campbell to help her earn some money for new school clothes.
Herc noticed something at parties long before this one, that dancers went wild not during the vocals or melodies of funk and soul records but during the short instrumental percussion breaks, the parts where the band would strip down to just drums and bass. So on this humid summer night he tried something radical. Using two turntables and identical copies of the same records, mostly funk breaks from artists like James Brown, he began extending those breaks by switching back and forth between the two copies, looping the same few seconds of drums over and over so dancers could keep going and going. He called this technique the Merry Go Round, and it would later become known as breakbeat deejaying.
That simple mechanical trick of isolating and extending the break is now considered the technical spark that ignited hip hop. The breakdancers who flipped and spun during those extended rhythmic sections became known as break boys and break girls, giving us the term b boys and b girls. Herc also began speaking rhythmically over the music to hype up the crowd, an early form of what would become emceeing and rapping.
What started in that rec room with a borrowed sound system and a folding table spread through the Bronx like wildfire, moving from house parties to block parties to public parks where Herc and his Herculoids crew would tap into streetlights for power. Within a few years this new culture had four pillars, deejaying, emceeing, breakdancing, and graffiti art, and it would eventually explode out of New York to conquer the entire globe.
The building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue still stands today, and in 2007 it was recognized by the Smithsonian Institution and later added to the National and State Registers of Historic Places as the birthplace of hip hop. Every August, hip hop's founding is celebrated around this date, with cultural institutions and artists honoring Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell for throwing what may be the single most influential party in modern music history. Not bad for a back to school fundraiser.
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