It is daring, controversial and controversial to set a specific date and place for the outbreak of a revolution that has created music and industry, but also created its own economy and radically and profoundly transformed the art, culture and fashion felt. from politics to sports. But when it comes to hip hop, “people needed a great origin story for such a great culture.”as Jay Quan, one of the historians of the phenomenon, has occasionally said. And the best time and place to celebrate his 50th birthday is at a party on August 11, 1973 at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, Southwest. Bronx.
It’s a neighborhood, then, that Robert Moses’s city plan has broken up with the first major highway to divide a large populated city center in the United States. Never has a neighborhood in New York been so battered and abandoned. in the midst of the economic crisis that has brought the city to the brink of destruction. Making the Bronx a symbol of mobility and integration, middle-class blacks and Latinos emigrated from there, and a lack of service for the remaining poor and incoming immigrants has become so widespread: gang violence or heroin crisis. The Bronx is literally on fire, building owners burning them to collect insurance.
On that Saturday night, more than 300 people accustomed to street parties and music in the parks come to a community room on the first floor of that residential building. They were summoned with a handmade ‘flyer’ by Cindy Campbell, who wanted to raise money to buy clothes for her back to school. Coming from Jamaica six years ago, Campbell’s family provides drinks and food at prices as reasonable as admission (25 cents for them, 50 cents for them). His brother Clive, known as DJ Kool Herc, is in charge of the music.
Clive is only 18 years old. The funk and soul he played were very common back then.like seeing graffiti on subway cars or buildings, which has become a means of creative expression. But Kool Herc realized that people really enjoyed the musical interludes of those songs by James Brown, The Jimmy Castor Bunch, the Isley Brothers, or the Incredible Bongo Band. a technique called “carousel” or carouselby prolonging these ‘breaks’ creates the time b-boys and b-girls need to immerse themselves in dance, breakdancing, which will debut as a discipline at the Olympic Games in Paris next year. He and his friends like Coke La Rock also throw lyrics to the beat of the music. They rap.
It would still be years before the term hip hop was coined, and decades of evolution and revolution from the black community to this form of expression and creativity born out of necessity and giving “voice to the silent.” What happened with folk, jazz or blues and rock has been confirmed to be: movement and dominant force, as it is today in music and culture, globally. But the revolution had already begun.
That’s why a huge concert at Yankee Stadium on August 11 featuring historical figures like Run-DMC, Sugarhill Gang, Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne and Ice Cube, as well as newer names, will mark this 50th birthday. One thing the latest edition of the Grammy Awards also does is awards that they didn’t give their own category until 1989 and that have more than questionable relevance to the genre they continued. ignoring and mistreating despite their power and influence.
“The most popular music in the world”
“Many people thought it would be a fashiontakes no more than a few months, but the most popular music in the world today”, Rocky Bucano, director of the Universal Hip Hop Museum, said in an interview. The center is now surrounded by an exhibit dedicated to the golden age of the genre in a small space in the Bronx Terminal Market, where it awaits as work is completed on the magnificent new headquarters, a project that has received more than 40 million municipal support, across the highway. , state and federal dollars, and whose purpose is to “protect hip hop’s contributions to culture.”
These contributions are too numerous to count, but actions trying to bring them forward are proliferating this anniversary year. And that’s what public libraries in the United States do, like in Brooklyn, for example; heard, danced and analyzed.
For example, there was DJ, journalist, and multimedia creator Brandon ‘Jinx’ Jenkins, who presented the “ten commandments of hip hop.” This decalogue begins with a call to “continue to challenge the status quo” and maintain awareness (“hip hop is our megaphone, our mirror, and the mind is its real estate,” he proclaimed). The urgency of being inclusive (the fight against misogyny and homophobia that in many cases overshadows hip hop) and “defend against invaders and appropriators” (“hip hop is what we want it to be, not what it’s supposed to be”). And it closes with two commandments: “Keep nurturing creativity and curiosity” and keep being not just political but also “fun.”
“Middle age crisis”
The night also listened to the analysis of journalist and professor Naima Cochrane, who studies the evolution of a species.It was not originally a commercial entity, but spread by word of mouth.without moving real money, through cassette tapes sold in cars”, until it became the influential global tentacle industry that moves billions of dollars today and permeates almost everything, if not everything.
“It was a counterculture, but not anymore, now the mainstay of popular culture“He likened the hip hop situation to a midlife crisis,” Cochrane said. He starts combing gray hair at age 50, has a Pulitzer (Kendrick Lamar’s) and has grown so much that “at the time it was christened “black America’s CNN” and was supposed to be the voice of the people, “he won’t know whose voice it is at what point.” There are so many things that make you think that it is growing up.
Despite this, Cochrane pointed to the potential of a movement like Jenkins, marked above all by “consistent innovation” and “entrepreneurial spirit” that overcomes the marginalization the industry has suffered over the years despite its commercial success. or the image that for years portrayed her as a woman dangerous sound embodiment of violence. Also, Bucano believes it’s the strength of its roots that gives hip hop its resistance.
“When everything stays the same, they die,” he argues. “It’s a powerful culture where every generation changes direction. And it’s so popular that you can’t get away with owning it, other people out there buy items here and there, but will always belong to young people living in underserved communitiesand it continues to tell the truth about power, lack of opportunity or access to education or police brutality. It’s authentic,” he adds, “it keeps hip hop authentic.”
“The important thing is how to ensure that it stays relevant for the next 50 years,” Bucano reassures. And this concept is also part of Jenkins’ ten commandments. “Our future is not our past“We have to let it move forward,” he assured Brooklyn.