Folks will argue back and forth all day about where hip-hop was born (see The Bridge Wars, KRS-One vs. MC Shan circa 1987). But you could do worse than say it all got started in the rec room of 1520 Sedgewick Avenue, an exceptionally ugly high-rise apartment building in the Bronx* where on August 11, 1973, Clive Campbell, a young Jamaican immigrant, threw a party to help his sister buy school clothes. For 50 cents (or 25 cents for girls), you could have seen Clive (or DJ Kool Herc, as he’s now known) playing two turntables at once and his friend Coke La Rock shouting over a microphone before anyone else had.

*And for the criminally scientific-minded among you, both Bronx and Brooklyn are corruptions of names left over from the 1600’s when New York was still Nieuw-Nederland.

Published on Apr 23, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop