Word: herc
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Disc jockeys, of course, have been around for decades. In the 1970s hip-hop founding fathers Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash helped turn record spinning into an art. And rock acts--Aerosmith, R.E.M. and others--have long sought to bottle the lightning of hip-hop by collaborating with rappers. Today, though, something new is happening: more rock groups--from Limp Bizkit to Sugar Ray--are making deejays fully fledged members, on equal footing with the guitarist and drummer. A couple of years ago, being a deejay in a rock band was maybe the equivalent of being the backup vocalist-designated...
...Bronx high-rise, was a success: Clive and Cindy charged 25[cents] for girls and 50[cents] for boys, and it went till 4 a.m. Pretty soon Clive was getting requests to do more parties, and in 1973 he gave his first block party. He was Kool Herc now--that was the graffito tag he used to write on subway cars--and he got respect. At 18 he was the first break-beat deejay, reciting rhymes over the "break," or instrumental, part of the records he was spinning. He had two turntables going and two copies of each record...
Joseph Saddler loved music too. He thought Kool Herc was a god--but he thought he could do better. Saddler figured most songs had only about 10 seconds that were good, that really got the party going, so he wanted to stretch those 10 seconds out, create long nights of mixing and dancing. Holed up in his Bronx bedroom, he figured out a way to listen to one turntable on headphones while the other turntable was revving up the crowd. That way a deejay could keep two records spinning seamlessly, over and over again. Herc was doing it by feel...
Sitting in the conference room on the 24th floor of the Time & Life Building, Kool Herc thinks back to the start of rap with a mixture of fondness and sadness. He'd like to see rappers "recognize their power, in terms of politics and economics." Hip-hop has not made him powerful or rich. "I never looked at it like that," he says. "I was just having fun. It was like a hobby to me." But he would appreciate more recognition. When he calls local radio stations, looking for an extra ticket or two for a hip-hop show...
...children in an inexplicable fit of rage and is condemned to perform his superhuman feats as a way of atonement. There's a lesson here, maybe, about the disproportion between human ability--mental or muscular--and our capacity for moral reflection. But in the movie the tormented demigod becomes "Herc," an ultra-buff teenage superstar who adores "Meg" and addresses the Great Goddess Hera as "Mom." Maybe Disney didn't realize that Socrates was forced to drink hemlock for impieties far milder than that. What next? Medea, who kills her own sons after Jason jilts her, as a perky homecoming...