Most genres of music don't have a birth certificate. Hip-hop does: a hand-drawn party flyer, a specific Bronx address, and a date, August 11, 1973, that the culture itself points to as where it all began.
This episode traces DJ Kool Herc's path from Kingston, Jamaica's sound-system culture to a rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where he invented the Merry-Go-Round technique, isolating and looping a record's instrumental break to keep a crowd dancing indefinitely. That single technique became the breakbeat, the foundation underneath almost every form of hip-hop that followed, and set off a chain, MCing, b-boying, entire crews, that runs in a straight line to hip-hop as it exists today. It's also a story about how long recognition can take: Herc lived through real financial hardship for decades before the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Grammys finally caught up, fifty years later.
Sources include 50th-anniversary retrospective interviews with Herc and his sister Cindy Campbell, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction coverage, and contemporaneous accounts of the Bronx party scene.
Next episode: the Jamaican sound-system culture that shaped Herc years before he ever touched a turntable in the Bronx.
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