Bronx Origins

A party on Sedgwick Avenue

Hip hop's origin story starts on August 11, 1973, in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx. Cindy Campbell threw a back-to-school party, and her brother Clive, a Jamaican-born teenager who DJed as Kool Herc, played the records. Herc noticed that dancers went wildest during the break, the short stretch of a funk record where the band drops out and the drums take over. So he bought two copies of the same record and switched between them to stretch those few seconds into minutes. He called it the Merry-Go-Round.

The dancers who waited for those breaks became break boys and break girls, b-boys and b-girls. Herc's friend Coke La Rock grabbed the mic to shout out the crowd, and the MC was born alongside the DJ.

Three kings of the Bronx

By the mid-1970s the Bronx had three giants. Herc ruled the West Bronx with the loudest sound system around. Afrika Bambaataa, a former Black Spades member from the Bronx River Houses, turned his following into the Organization, which grew into the Universal Zulu Nation, and became famous for playing anything with a beat, from James Brown to rock and later Kraftwerk. Grandmaster Flash, a student of electronics from the South Bronx, treated the turntable like an instrument. His Quick Mix Theory cut between breaks with precision, and his protégé Grand Wizzard Theodore is credited with discovering the scratch.

Parks, tapes and no records

None of this was on record yet. Parties ran in parks, schoolyards and community centers, with sound systems sometimes powered from streetlights. Live tapes of DJs and MCs were copied and traded, and they became the era's only recordings. By 1978, crews like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and the Cold Crush Brothers were turning the MC into the star of the show. The first rap record was still a year away.

The breaks

The albums on this page aren't rap records. They're the funk, rock and soul records the Bronx DJs played, the source of the breakbeats this archive is named after. Every one of them was later sampled on countless hip hop tracks.