Whence
Hip hop (music)
Music & dance

Where does Hip hop (music) come from?

Hip hop comes from the Bronx, New York City. Its best-known birthday is 11 August 1973, when an 18-year-old DJ called Kool Herc played a back-to-school party in the recreation room of an apartment block at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

A party for new school clothes

Cindy Campbell, 16, wanted money for new clothes before school started. She rented the community room of her building, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx, charged 25 cents for girls and 50 cents for boys, and asked her brother Clive, 18, to play the records. Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, had moved to the Bronx from Jamaica in 1967, aged 13. Back in Jamaica he had heard the sound systems at neighbourhood dances and their DJs 'toasting' over the music.

Stretching the break

Herc played hard funk, such as James Brown's 'Give It Up or Turnit a Loose', and saw that dancers went wildest during the break, the short drum-heavy passage. With two turntables and two copies of the same record, he cued one copy back to the start of the break while the other played it, turning a few seconds into a long loop. He called the dancers b-boys and b-girls, and his friend Coke La Rock spoke rhymes over the beat, an early form of rapping.

From one room to the world

Hip hop was not made in a single night: the genre grew in several places through the 1970s, and 1520 Sedgwick Avenue is honoured as the scene of one of its pivotal moments. Herc's style was quickly taken up by DJs such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, and within five years it had spread across the Bronx and into other boroughs. In 2007 New York State recognised the building as the 'birthplace of hip hop', and in 2023 Herc entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › 1520 Sedgwick Avenue ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › DJ Kool Herc ↗ · npr.org ↗

More Music & dance

Bandoneon
Music & dance

Bandoneon

📍 Germany (Krefeld & Chemnitz)

Tango's signature instrument is German. Krefeld music dealer Heinrich Band developed the bandoneon from the concertina in the mid-1800s, and emigrants and sailors later carried it to Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

Reggae (music)
Music & dance

Reggae (music)

📍 Kingston, Jamaica

Reggae grew out of ska and rocksteady in the late 1960s, mainly in the poor neighbourhoods of West Kingston, Jamaica. Toots and the Maytals' 1968 'Do the Reggay' was the first popular song to use the name, and UNESCO listed reggae in 2018.

Waltz (the dance)
Music & dance

Waltz (the dance)

📍 Alpine Bavaria & Austria

The waltz began in the 1700s as a country dance of the Alps, whirled by peasants in Bavaria, Tyrol and Styria; its name comes from German 'walzen', to turn. Vienna's ballrooms made it famous, though critics long called its close embrace indecent.

More from North America

Poinsettia
Plant

Poinsettia

📍 Pacific slopes of Mexico & Guatemala

Christmas poinsettias grow wild as shrubs on the Pacific slopes of Mexico and Guatemala. Their red 'petals' are really leaves, and the plant is named after Joel Poinsett, a US envoy to Mexico who sent it home in the 1820s.

Bengal cat
Animal

Bengal cat

📍 California, USA

Despite its name, the Bengal cat was created in the United States: breeder Jean Mill crossed a wild Asian leopard cat with a house cat in 1963 and founded the breed in California in the 1980s. 'Bengal' comes from the leopard cat's scientific name.

Corn flakes
Food

Corn flakes

📍 Battle Creek, Michigan, USA

Flaked cereal was born in 1894 at a health sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, when the Kellogg brothers rolled out cooked wheat that had been left standing and got flakes. Meant as plain food for patients, it switched to corn and conquered breakfast.