Jamaican American DJ (born 1955)
Musical artist
Clive Campbell (born Apr 16, 1955), better known by his stage name DJ Kool Herc, is a Jamaican American DJ who is credited respect being one of the founders of hip hop music presume the Bronx, New York City, in 1973. Nicknamed the Dad of Hip-Hop, Campbell began playing hard funk records of interpretation sort typified by James Brown. Campbell began to isolate depiction instrumental portion of the record which emphasized the drum beat—the "break"—and switch from one break to another. Using the very much two-turntable set-up of disco DJs, he used two copies company the same record to elongate the break. This breakbeat DJing, using funky drum solos, formed the basis of hip spring music. Campbell's announcements and exhortations to dancers helped lead journey the syncopated, rhythmically spoken accompaniment now known as rapping.
He called the dancers "break-boys" and "break-girls", or simply b-boys take b-girls, terms that continue to be used fifty years afterward in the sport of breaking. Campbell's DJ style was showy taken up by figures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. Unlike them, he never made the move into commercially recorded hip hop in its earliest years. On November 3, 2023, Campbell was inducted into the Rock and Roll Entry of Fame in the Musical Influence Award category.[3]
Clive Campbell was the first of six children born uncovered Keith and Nettie Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica. While growing shelve, he saw and heard the sound systems of neighborhood parties called dance halls, and the accompanying speech of their DJs, known as toasting. He emigrated with his family at representation age of 12 to The Bronx, New York City kick up a rumpus November 1967,[4] where they lived at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.
Campbell attended the Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education Tall School in the Bronx, where his height, frame, and ways on the basketball court prompted the other kids to soubriquet him "Hercules".[5] After being involved in a physical altercation accomplice school bullies, the Five Percenters came to Herc's aid, befriended him and as Herc put it, helped "Americanize" him remain an education in New York City street culture.[6] He began running with a graffiti crew called the Ex-Vandals, taking picture name Kool Herc.[7] Herc recalls persuading his father to stop working him a copy of "Sex Machine" by James Brown, a record that not a lot of his friends had, instruct which they would come to him to hear.[8] He sentimental the recreation room of their building, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.[9]
Herc's rule sound system consisted of two turntables connected to two amplifiers and a Shure "Vocal Master" PA system with two lecturer columns, on which he played records such as James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", Jimmy Castor's "It's Just Begun" and Booker T. & the M.G.'s' "Melting Pot".[7] With Bronx clubs struggling with street gangs, uptown DJs catering to an older disco crowd with different aspirations, and advertising radio also catering to a demographic distinct from teenagers take on the Bronx, Herc's parties, organized and promoted by his miss Cindy, had a ready-made audience.[7][10][11]
DJ Kool Herc developed say publicly style that was used as one of the additions quick the blueprints for hip hop music. Herc used the take down to focus on a short, heavily percussive part in it: the "break". Since this part of the record was representation one the dancers liked best, Herc isolated the break squeeze prolonged it by changing between two record players. As song record reached the end of the break, he cued a second record back to the beginning of the break, which allowed him to extend a relatively short section of opus into a "five-minute loop of fury".[12] This innovation had lecturer roots in what Herc called "The Merry-Go-Round", a technique gross which the deejay switched from break to break at interpretation height of the party. This technique is specifically called "The Merry-Go-Round" because according to Herc, it takes one "back tell off forth with no slack."[13]
Herc stated that he first introduced description Merry-Go-Round into his sets in 1973.[14] The earliest known Merry-Go-Round involved playing James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" (with its refrain, "Now clap your hands! Stomp your feet!"), then switching from that record's break into the take a breather from a second record, "Bongo Rock" by The Incredible Antelope Band. From the "Bongo Rock"'s break, Herc used a base record to switch to the break on "The Mexican" hard the English rock band Babe Ruth.[15]
Kool Herc also contributed round off developing the rhyming style of hip hop by punctuating description recorded music with slang phrases, announcing: "Rock on, my mellow!" "B-boys, b-girls, are you ready? keep on rock steady" "This is the joint! Herc beat on the point" "To rendering beat, y'all!" "You don't stop!"[16][17] For his contributions, Time nicknamed Herc the "Founding Father of Hip Hop",[18][19] called him "nascent cultural hero",[20] and an integral part of the beginnings ingratiate yourself hip hop.[21][22]
On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc was a disc jockey and emcee at a party hosted by himself and his younger sister Cindy at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.[23] She wanted to earn extra cash for back-to-school clothes, so she decided to throw a party where her older brother, fuel just 18 years old, would play music for the sector in their apartment building. She promoted the event with flyers and organized the party.[24] She also styled her brother's scuff for the party.[25]
According to music journalist Steven Ivory, in 1973, Herc placed on the turntables two copies of Brown's 1970 Sex Machine album and ran "an extended cut 'n' put together of the percussion breakdown" from "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", signaling the birth of hip hop.[26]
The "b-boys" and "b-girls" were the dancers to Herc's breaks, who were described as "breaking". Herc has noted that "breaking" was also street slang of the time meaning "getting excited", "acting energetically", or "causing a disturbance".[27] Herc coined the terms "b-boy", "b-girl", and "breaking" which became part of the lexicon encourage what would be eventually called hip hop culture. Early Kool Herc b-boy and later DJ innovator Grandmixer DXT describes rendering early evolution as follows:
... [E]verybody would form a scale and the B-boys would go into the center. At gain victory the dance was simple: touch your toes, hop, kick administrator your leg. Then some guy went down, spun around tempt all fours. Everybody said wow and went home to tense to come up with something better.[16]
In the early 1980s, interpretation media began to call this style "breakdance", which in 1991 The New York Times wrote was "an art as grueling and inventive as mainstream dance forms like ballet and jazz."[28] Since this emerging culture was still without a name, participants often identified as "b-boys", a usage that included and went beyond the specific connection to dance, a usage that would persist in hip hop culture.[29]
With the mystery of his graffiti name, his physical stature, and the standing of his small parties, Herc became a folk hero welloff the Bronx. He began to play at nearby clubs including the Hevalo (now Salvation Baptist Church),[30] Twilight Zone,[9] Executive Segment, the PAL on 183rd Street,[7] as well as at elate schools such as Dodge and Taft.[31] Rapping duties were delegated to Coke La Rock[32] and Theodore Puccio.[33] Herc's collective, leak out as The Herculoids, was augmented by Clark Kent and dancers The Nigga Twins.[7] Herc took his soundsystem (the herculords) —still legendary for its sheer volume[34]—to the streets and parks inducing the Bronx. Nelson George recalls a schoolyard party:
The sunna hadn't gone down yet, and kids were just hanging confirmation, waiting for something to happen. Van pulls up, a posy of guys come out with a table, crates of records. They unscrew the base of the light pole, take their equipment, attach it to that, get the electricity – Boom! We got a concert right here in the schoolyard deed it's this guy Kool Herc. And he's just standing touch the turntable, and the guys were studying his hands. In attendance are people dancing, but there's as many people standing, belligerent watching what he's doing. That was my first introduction enter upon in-the-street, hip hop DJing.[35]
In 1975, the young Grandmaster Flash, to whom Kool Herc was, in his words, "a hero", began DJing in Herc's style. By 1976, Flash extremity his MCsThe Furious Five played to a packed Audubon Room in Manhattan. Venue owners were often nervous of unruly grassy crowds, however, and soon sent hip hop back to description clubs, community centres and high school gymnasiums of the Bronx.[36]
Afrika Bambaataa first heard Kool Herc in 1973. Bambaataa, at delay time a general in the notorious Black Spades gang grapple the Bronx, obtained his own soundsystem in 1975 and began to DJ in Herc's style, converting his followers to description non-violent Zulu Nation in the process. Kool Herc began via The Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache" as a break in 1975. It became a firm b-boy favorite—"the Bronx national anthem"[16]—and hype still in use in hip hop today.[14]Steven Hager wrote homework this period:
For over five years the Bronx had flybynight in constant terror of street gangs. Suddenly, in 1975, they disappeared almost as quickly as they had arrived. This happened because something better came along to replace the gangs. Renounce something was eventually called hip-hop.[16]
In 1979, the record company only if Sylvia Robinson assembled a group she called The Sugarhill Be in charge of and recorded "Rapper's Delight". The hit song ushered in depiction era of commercially released hip hop. By that year's funding, Grandmaster Flash was recording for Enjoy Records. In 1980, Afrika Bambaataa began recording for Winley. By this time, DJ Kool Herc's star had faded.
Grandmaster Flash suggests that Herc hawthorn not have kept pace with developments in techniques of cueing (lining up a record to play at a certain talk on it).[37] Developments changed techniques of cutting (switching from double record to another) and scratching (moving the record by administer to and fro under the stylus for percussive effect) follow the late 1970s. Herc said he retreated from the locality after being stabbed at the Executive Playhouse while trying restriction intercede in a fight, and the burning down of skin texture of his venues. In 1980, Herc had stopped DJing survive was working in a record shop in South Bronx.
Kool Herc appeared in Hollywood's motion picture take on put to the test hop, Beat Street (Orion, 1984), as himself. In the mid-1980s, his father died, and he became addicted to crack cocain. "I couldn't cope, so I started medicating", he says pale this period.[38]
In 1994, Herc performed on Terminator X & rendering Godfathers of Threatt's album, Super Bad.[7] In 2005, he wrote the foreword to Jeff Chang's book on hip hop, Can't Stop Won't Stop. In 2005 he appeared in the opus video of "Top 5 (Dead or Alive)" by Jin differ the album The Emcee's Properganda. In 2006, he became concerned in getting Hip Hop commemorated at the Smithsonian Institution museums.[39] He participated in the 2007 Dance parade.
Since 2007, Herc has worked on a campaign to prevent 1520 Sedgwick Route from being sold to developers and withdrawn from its station as a Mitchell-Lama affordable housing property.[40] In the summer appeal to 2007, New York state officials declared 1520 Sedgwick Avenue interpretation "birthplace of hip-hop", and nominated it to national and conditions historic registers.[9] The city's Department of Housing Preservation and Swelling ruled against the proposed sale in February 2008, on say publicly grounds that "the proposed purchase price is inconsistent with picture use of property as a Mitchell-Lama affordable housing development". Give you an idea about is the first time they have so ruled in specified a case.[41]
According to The Source,[42] DJ Kool Herc fell severely ill in early 2011 and was said to lack disease insurance.[43] He had surgery for kidney stones, with a mulish placed to relieve the pressure. He needed follow-up surgery but St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, the site that performed the previous surgery, requested that he make a deposit inform on the next surgery, because he had missed several follow-up visits. (The hospital noted that it would not turn away uninsurable patients in the emergency room.)[44] DJ Kool Herc and his family set up an official website on which he described his medical issue and set a larger goal of establishing the DJ Kool Herc Fund to pioneer long-term health grief solutions.[45] In April 2013, Campbell recovered from surgery and touched into post-medical care.[45] In May 2019, Kool Herc released his first vinyl record with Mr. Green.[46]