Hip Hop Artist Jamaican born DJ Clive “Kool Herc” Campbell is credited to be highly significant in the pioneering phase of hip hop music in the Bronx, after moving to New York at the age of thirteen. Herc came up with blueprint for rap music and culture by building upon the Jamaican tradition of toasting impromptu, boastful poetry and speech over music which he witnessed as a youth in Jamaica. Herc and other DJs would take advantage of the power lines to connect their equipment and perform at locations such as public basketball courts and at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, Bronx, New York, a historic building where rap was given birth to. Their equipment was composed of numerous speakers, turntables, and one or more microphones. By using this technique DJs could produce a number of music. DJ Kool Herc is credited as being highly influential in the pioneering stage of hip hop music.
Herc was also the creator of break-beat deejaying, where the breaks of funk songs the part best suited to dance, usually percussion-based were isolated and repeated for the purpose of all-night dance parties. This form of music playback, using hard funk, rock, and records with Latin percussion, created the foundation of hip hop music. Campbell’s announcements and exhortations to dancers would lead to the syncopated, rhymed spoken accompaniment right now referred to as rapping. He dubbed his performers break-boys and break-girls, or simply b-boys and b-girls. According to Herc, “breaking” was also street jargon for “getting excited” and “acting energetically”. Herc’s terms b-boy, b-girl and breaking started to be part of the lexicon of rap culture, before that culture itself had formulated a name.
Later DJs such as Grand Wizard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash and Jazzy Jay refined and created the use of breakbeats, including cutting and scratching. The approach used by Herc was soon widely replicated, and by the late seventies DJs were releasing 12″ records where they would rap to the beat. Well-known tunes included Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” and The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”.
Emceeing is the rhythmic spoken delivery of rhymes and wordplay, delivered over a beat or without accompaniment. Rapping is derived from the griots (folk poets) of West Africa, and Jamaican-style toasting. Rap created both outside and inside of hip hops lifestyle, and started with the street parties thrown in the Bronx neighbourhood of New York in the 1970s by Kool Herc and others. It originated as MCs would talk over the music to promote their DJ, promote other dance parties, take light-hearted jabs at other lyricists, or talk about problems in their areas and issues facing the city as a whole. Melle Mel, a rapper/lyricist with The Furious Five, is often attributed with being the first rap lyricist to call himself an “MC”.
Hip hop as a culture was further defined in 1982, when hip hop artist Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force released the seminal electro-funk track “Planet Rock”. Instead of simply rapping over disco beats, New Hip Hop Artist Bambaataa created an electronic sound, taking advantage of the rapidly improving drum machine Roland TB-303 synthesizer technology, as well as sampling from Kraftwerk.
Tags: hip hop artist, new hip hop artist