1/23/2024 0 Comments November hip hop history month![]() Herc is described in the Yale anthology as “the man most often mentioned as the sonic originator of hip-hop.” He invented “the break” by using two turntables – and two copies of the same album – to extend a song’s instrumental, typically highly percussive, portion. “They walking in fours and kicking in doors / dropping Reds and busting heads / drinking wine and committing crime / shooting and looting / high-siding and low-riding / setting fires and slashing tires / turning over cars and burning down bars / making Parker mad and making me glad / putting an end to that ‘go slow’ crap and putting sweet Watts on the map / my black ass is in Folsom this morning but my black heart is in Watts!”Ĭleaver describes the laugh shared by the men in the cipher – or small, circular gathering – as “cleansing, revolutionary,” as “tears of joy were rolling from (the speaker’s) eyes.”Ĭalifornia rapper Ras Kass named his debut album, released in 1996, after Cleaver’s book. The men “were wearing jubilant, triumphant smiles, animated by a vicarious spirit.” A round of signifying hand gestures turned to speech after one asked, “What they doing out there? Break it down for me, Baby.”Ĭleaver writes that one of the low riders stepped into the middle of the circle and began to speak: The Watts uprising had been going on for four days by then. He refers to young men he calls “low riders” assembled in a circle on the basketball court after leaving the mess hall in Folsom State Prison that previous Sunday morning. 16, 1965 – describes a type of rap he heard in the wake of the Watts uprising, a six-day-long rebellion in the predominantly Black neighborhood in Los Angeles sparked by a violent exchange between police and bystanders when a young Black motorist was stopped and arrested by a member of the California Highway Patrol. In the 1968 memoir of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, “ Soul On Ice,” Cleaver – in an entry dated Aug. writes that the first person he heard “rap” was his father, who was born in 1913, as he was “signifying,” or playing “ the Dozens,” a pastime in which participants trade searing insults about one another’s relatives, typically their mothers, as a way to teach mental strength. In his introduction to the “ Yale Anthology of Rap,” historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. ![]()
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