Lauren Terp

Anth 3980

Biography of a Hip Hop Pioneer

Oct. 9, 2006

 

 

 

George Washington of Hip Hop: A biography of DJ Kool Herc

 

“I’m a disc jockey, I play the discs to make you jockey.  I play the records that get you up, I got records that sit you down, I play records that make you could talk over it and I get you back on the dance floor.“

–Kool Herc

 

        

         If you were to go looking for the godfather of hip hop, seeking out his name on the outside of record labels, albums, songs… you wouldn’t find him listed alphabetically, chronologically, as an artist in record stores or on Amazon.  Type in the name Clive Campbell, and, just like back in the day, I-tunes will ask if you meant “Clyde” Campbell.  Kool Herc?  No search results found.  That’s because, amazingly enough, the originator of the break-beat- the father of rap, the man with the plan- never recorded an album.  But just look and listen, and instead, you’ll find him inside the music, on the dance floor, and on the mic, Kool Herc’s influence and style is present, infinitely and inextricably, throughout the development of hip-hop.

          Kool Herc wasn’t always “Kool.”  Born in 1955, in Kingston, Clive Campbell was the oldest of six.  In Jamaica, Clive was exposed to musical traditions with deep political and economic histories (Chang, 25).  He witnessed first hand the scene happening in Kingston, the sound systems parties and the practice of toasting (Gross, 2005).  His father, Keith Campbell, had a diverse record collection, broadening Clive’s musical tastes from reggae to country to jazz.  The Campbell’s lived comfortably in Jamaica, but Clive’s mother, who was working an studying in Manhattan, saw opportunities for a better future in States (Chang, 68, 71).

         Clive was the first of his family to join his mother in the Bronx.  He arrived in 1967, armed with a corduroy coat, “roach killer” cowboy boots, and a head full of Jamaican beats.  He quickly realized his style was more “hick” than “hip,” but he began going to dances and house parties, picking up slang, listening to new music, and ditching his Jamaican accent (Chang, 73).

         Like many youths in the Bronx during the early 70’s, Clive was (re) inventing his identity.  He joined the legions of kids who were putting their names up all over New York.  Graffiti brought Clive a reputation (Gross, 2005).  Out of convenience, Clive became Clyde, and eventually picked up Kool from a cigarette commercial.  KOOL AS CLYDE began appearing along side UNCLE RICH and soon Clive was hanging out with legendary writer’s, the EX-VANDALS (Chang, 75).  At school, a classmate began to call him Hercules, which dropped to HERC, replacing CLYDE, becoming KOOL HERC (Gross, 2005).

         Graffiti began to blow up everywhere in New York, but KOOL HERC knew better than to get into trouble.  His father’s firm discipline had helped keep him away from gangs and, as Herc says, “He’d a mopped up the floor with me if he’d known his son was destroying public property” (Gross, 2005).  After 1973, however, Herc didn’t need tags to spread his celebrity.  When the name KOOL HERC moved from the walls onto index cards inviting people to party, it fueled curiosity that drove people to his first parties to find out just who this cat was.  Just who this cat would turn out to be and what that be would do, was so far out of sight, nobody would really find out until years later.

It was back to school time, that year, and Herc’s little sister, Cindy, wanted to “flip her money” and have a little extra cash to buy some new clothes, so she decided to rent the Recreation room of the family’s apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue and have a party, charging admission at the door (Gross, 2005).  Herc had been DJing for several years at this point and his father, who had sponsored a blues band, purchased a new Shure P.A. sound system (Chang, 68).  While messing around with it behind his father’s back, Herc figured out how to peak the system.  After words, his father would let him play in between sets of the blues band, giving him the experience that would lead to Cindy asking him to play at her party, which turned out to be a huge success that led to the Campbell’s holding parties nearly once a month (Chang, 70).

            After that first party, Sedgwick Avenue became a recreational outlet, the place for the youth of the Bronx to party.  The success of the back-to-school party spawned more parties that eventually moved outside, spilling beats into the streets of New York.  B-Boys and B-girls would get out and break, get down, and go postal.  Kool Herc tapped his system into light-posts and his wide range of musical samples, from James Brown to Manu Dibango, rocked until the break of dawn, setting the stage for new styles and new identities to form within the cultural phenomena of what would come to be known as hip hop.  Before Sugar Hill Gang, before the Message, Kool DJ Herc embodied the lifestyle that gave rise to hip-hop.  He played records that nobody else had, that nobody heard on the radio.  Staying exclusive was essential to retaining his audience, and to stop people from stealing his beats, he used to lift the labels off his records to (Gross, 2005).

          One night, while watching the dancers, feeling out the vibe of the crowd, trying to plan his next move to keep the party going, Herc noticed people waiting for certain parts of the records to dance, the breaks.  His observation lead to an “experiment” that would influence the fate of hip-hop, DJ’s, and B-boys forever.  He decided to put all of his breaks together, to prolong the part of the record that people wanted to dance to (Gross, 2005).  To keep these breaks going, Herc started using a method called “merry go round” in which he would take two records and cue up the beginning of the break just as the other was ending, perpetually looping the breaks (Chang, 79).

         As Herc continued to experiment on his impressive sound system, he inspired many other kids to participate in one or more of the elements of hip hop.  B-boys and B-girls flocked to Herc’s parties, hooked on his “merry go round” of breaks.  New DJ’s started showing up, including Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, who would also go on to the be some of hip-hop’s founding pioneers (Davey D, 1989).  As Brian Brown (2003) notes, “The records spun by Herc and Bambaataa became not just “classics” but the sonic backbone for hip-hop, songs sampled with the frequency of a teenager quoting Austin Powers.”  In 1977, Herc introduced a record that would become perhaps his most widely recognizable influence in later generations of hip hop music and the anthem for B-boys and girls, “Apache” played by the group Incredible Bongo Band (Brown, 2003).  Covered by Sugarhill Gang in 1981, and most recently by Nas on his album, “Made You Look,” “Apache” appears on a string of hip-hop albums since Herc's introduction in the 70’s (Matos, 2005).  Producer Pete Rock, who used to swarm Kool Herc’s parties along with the likes of Prince Paul and other aspiring DJs, puts it this way, “If you don’t know ‘Apache,’ you don’t know hip-hop” (Brown, 2003).

            Despite burying his Jamaican accent underneath his new Bronx image, Herc’s roots still flowed with the musical influences from his beginnings in Kingston.  He began to mimic the toasts of Jamaican DJ’s, giving shout outs and saying rhymes, transporting the musical culture of Jamaica to the Bronx (Youngquist, 184).  As his responsibilities as DJ became more complicated, Herc’s friends Coke La Rock and Clark Kent took over the microphone, and they became rap’s first emcee team, known as Kool Herc and the Herculoids (Jahsonic, 2006).

         Kool Herc transformed the role of the DJ by pioneering the compositional technique that allowed DJ’s to be more that just jockeys, riding the works of other musicians.  Rather, DJs became authors, creating and composing their own pieces.  The break-beat illustrated the possibility of isolating existing pieces of music and lifting them from their original context.  These pieces could then be integrated with other isolated pieces, providing the opportunity for new, original, compositions to be created (Smith, 76).  As Smith (2000) states, “The development of the break-beat was groundbreaking as it forced musicians to question the concrete nature of a musical text”

         When Kool Herc started throwing parties in the Bronx in 1973, New York’s youths were shifting their attention away from the gang era that dominated the boroughs throughout the 60’s and focusing on personal projections of flash and style (Chang, 73).  The parties, the DJ’s, and the music present at Herc’s parties brought people together and allowed opportunities for creating and projecting identities.  In an interview, Jeff Chang discusses the role of the party:

So, you know, when you get to the party, it's all about your style, what you wear.  Can you rap?  Can you dance?  All those kinds of things are what, you know, will make you your name in that borough.  And so style is the thing that drives hip-hop, when you really get down to it (Gordon, 2005).

 

 

         In a recent National Public Radio interview with Terry Gross, traces of Clive Campbell’s Jamaican origins can just barely be heard underneath his Bronx accent.  In his own words, he says he “dominated the 70’s,” that he was the “George Washington of Hip Hop” and he moved from the street parties into the clubs, playing for adult crowds (Gross, 2005).  Herc and his sidekick, Coke, were tearin’ it up, but the arrival of new DJ’s on the scene influenced Herc’s reign over the Bronx.  Grandmaster Flash and his Casanova crew and Afrika Bambaataa with his Zulu Nation were starting to come up in the Bronx (Chang, 83).  In the midst of preparing for a show, one night, Herc noticed his buddy Mike being hassled.  He went to mediate a situation and instead, he was stabbed several times in his side and once in his hand (Chang, 85).  Campbell claims he never left the Hip Hop scene, though he admits that he did retreat, a little bit, after being stabbed and that he was almost swept up by the surge of drugs brought in by the eighties (Gross, 2005).

            Clive Campbell, a.k.a .CLYDE AS KOOL, a.k.a. KOOL HERC, a.k.a. “the man with the plan,” the father of hip-hop, is still mixin’ it up these days, mostly in Europe and Australia (Gross, 2005).  When Terry Gross asks what records he’s buying these days, Kool Herc still doesn’t give it up, keeps it underground, only saying, “Good stuff they don’t play on the radio.”

 

 

“Who’s the man with the master plan from the land of gracie grace. Herc Herc.”

 

-Dickey

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

 

Brown, E. (2003, April 7). A Beat That Goes On: In a single sample, the story of hip             hop. New York Magazine. Retrieved October 6, 2006 from:             http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/anniversary/35th/n_8585/index.html

 

Chang, J. (2005). Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. St.

         Martin’s Press: New York.

 

Davey D. (1989) Interview w/ DJ Kool Herc. Retrieved October 6, 2006, from:             http://www.djhistory.com/djhistory/archiveInterviewDisplay.php?interview_id=2          3

 

Kool Herc (1955-) Retrieved October 6, 2006, from:             http://www.jahsonic.com/KoolHerc.html

 

Gordon, E. (2005, March 10). Jeff Chang on his book about the history of hip-hop.                 National Public Radio

 

Gross, T. (2005, March 30).  Kool Herc: A Founding Father of Hip Hop.

            Fresh Air from WHYY. Retrieved October 6, 2006, from:            http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4567450

 

Matos, M. (2005, April 19). All Roads Lead To Apache. Retrieved October 6, 2006,             from: http://soul-sides.com/2005/04/all-roads-lead-to-apache.html

 

Smith, S. (2000, August). Compositional strategies of the hip-hop Turntablist. Organized          Sound, 5 (2), 75- 79.

 

Youngquist, P. (2005, April). The Afro Futurism of DJ Vassa, Paul Youngquist

         European Romantic Review, 16, (2), 181–192.