By most accounts, hip-hop has a specific birthplace – so specific, in fact, that it has a street address: 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the Bronx, New York. Here, on 11 August 1973, Clive Campbell a.k.a DJ Kool Herc a.k.a the “Father and Founder of hip-hop” debuted what would come to be one of the foundations of hip-hop. At this moment in time, DJ Kool Herc started performing with not only one but two turntables, elongating the rhythm and beats, prepared for a crowd hungry to dance.
Herc, along with many other New York DJs, gradually finessed the technique, and soon they had perfected what we now know as ‘breaking’ and just like that, the foundations of a revolutionary new genre were laid.
Soon there were a handful of key DJs and early MCs making an impact in New York clubs, particularly in The Bronx. Artists like Grandmaster Flash ran huge, popular block parties, and by the end of the decade, youth culture across the entire state of New York was under the spell of hip-hop. On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc did something that no one had witnessed before; approximately six years before the term “hip hop” even entered the popular vocabulary. This is when the genre was headed to a place where nobody expected it to go.