Early New York Hip-Hop

Before hip-hop had a name, there were sound systems. Clive Campbell—DJ Kool Herc—left Kingston at twelve, arriving in the Bronx in 1967 carrying memories of Jamaican dancehall culture. He remembered watching guys hauling speaker boxes to outdoor parties, the bass so heavy it moved through your chest before you heard it. His mother was a nurse. His father fixed forklifts at Clark's Equipment Company in Queens and collected records obsessively: Caribbean rhythms, African American funk, soul. Young Clive would sneak into his father's closet to stare at the vinyl, touch the grooves, get caught, get punished, go right back.

The Cross Bronx Expressway had carved the borough in half by then, accelerating white flight and concentrating African American, Latin American, and Caribbean communities in the southern sections. Robert Moses's highway destroyed neighborhoods, displacing sixty thousand residents. What remained was a massive, multi-ethnic, working-class neighborhood where young people were creating something new from the wreckage. Herc's sister Cindy needed money for back-to-school clothes. On August 11, 1973, they threw a party in the rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. She hand-wrote invitations on index cards: twenty-five cents for girls, fifty cents for boys. Olde English 800 or Colt 45 for a buck.