Word: herc
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...likes of Philip Roth and Cassandra Wilson on a list of America's best artists? Well, 75 years ago, many critics thought jazz wasn't an art; 50 years ago, they derided rock; 25 years ago, they went after rap. In the '70s and '80s, DJs such as Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore helped established DJing as an integral part of hip-hop culture. Craze is taking the genre further. People dance to DJs, but "turntablists" like Craze they stand and listen to, they study, they admire as they might a jazz soloist. Craze's sets are meticulously planned...
...THOSE PARTIES in the "Boogie Down" South Bronx where hip-hop's founding fathers - Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaata and Grandmaster Flash - first began delivering spoken rhymes over the break beats on funk and disco records sometime in the mid-'70s. Today the signature beats-and-rhymes combination of the musical art form they created is as ubiquitous in America's tony suburbs as in its forgotten housing projects, and has kids in distant parts of the world whose first language may be French or Japanese or Wolof chanting choruses inviting their friends to "get at me, dawg...
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...
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...