FEATURE:
Flow, Rhyme, and Style
IN THIS PHOTO DJ Kool Herc, who is considered to have invented Hip-Hop (the origins of Hip-Hop can be traced back to 11th August, 1973, at Cindy Campbell’s back to school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx)/PHOTO CREDIT: DJ Kool Herc for Vanity Fair via Huck
A Modern Film About the Birth and Rise of Hip-Hop
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I will do other features…
around the approaching fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Hip-Hop. That happens in August. There have been many films through the years about Hip-Hop. Whether it is 1983’s Wild Style, or the 1997 documentary-film, Rhyme & Reason, there has been representation and exploration of the genre. The birth of Hip-Hop might sound quite modest, but it started a revolution. Here is some background regarding how Hip-Hop got its start:
“DJ Kool Herc is credited with throwing the switch at an August 1973 dance bash. He spun the same record on twin turntables, toggling between them to isolate and extend percussion breaks—the most danceable sections of a song. It was a technique that filled the floor with dancers who had spent days and weeks polishing their moves.
The effect that night was electric, and soon other DJs in the Bronx were trying to outdo Herc. It was a code that has flowed through Hip Hop ever since: 1) Use skills and whatever resources are available to create something new and cool; 2) Emulate and imitate the genius of others but inject personal style until the freshness glows. Competition was, and remains, a prime motivator in the Hip Hop realm.
Like a powerful star, this dance-party scene quickly drew other art forms into its orbit. A growing movement of hopeful poets, visual artists, and urban philosophers added their visions and voices by whatever means available. They got the word out about what was happening in their neighborhoods—neighborhoods much of mainstream, middle-class America was doing its best to ignore or run down. Hip Hop kept coming, kept pushing, kept playing until that was no longer possible.
Today, some Hip Hop scholars fold as many as six elements into Hip Hop culture. They include:
DJing—the artistic handling of beats and music
MCing, aka rapping—putting spoken-word poetry to a beat
Breaking—Hip Hop’s dance form
Writing—the painting of highly stylized graffiti
Theater and literature—combining Hip Hop elements and themes in drama, poetry, and stories
Knowledge of self—the moral, social, and spiritual principles that inform and inspire Hip Hop ways of being.
From its work-with-what-you-got epicenter in the Bronx, Hip Hop has rolled outward to become a multibillion-dollar business. Its sounds, styles, and fashions are now in play around the world. DJs spin turntables in Sao Paulo, Brazil. MCs rap Arabic in the clubs of Qatar. B-boys and b-girls bust baby freezes in Finland. Graffiti rises on the Great Wall of China. Young poets slam poetry in D.C.”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Viola Davis/PHOTO CREDIT: Dario Calmese for Vanity Fair
I don’t think there have been many recent films around the birth and rise of Hip-Hop. There are some great Hip-Hop documentaries. The BBC produced a documentary about how Hip-Hop changed the world. In the same way it would be good to see a modern film that harks back to the golden days of Disco or Studio 54 in New York – 54 was released in 1998, but it received mixed reviews -, it would be great to see something that goes back to August 1973, and then maybe looks forward at youths or aspiring Hip-Hop artists. Maybe focusing on the queens of the genre or Hip-Hop D.J.s, it could be based in New York or Los Angeles. I have been particularly struck by the recent film, AIR. It may sound random, but there is a lot in the film – The film is based on true events about the origin of Air Jordan, a basketball shoeline, of which a Nike employee seeks to strike a business deal with rookie player Michael Jordan – that struck me. For a start, the always-incredible Viola Davis appears in AIR. She is someone I love as an actor, and it would be terrific to have her in a new film. One about the foundations and growth of Hip-Hop. She brings so much to each role, and it would be amazing having her on board. Of course, this feature is a suggestion to have this sort of film made, so I won’t be writing or directing it. It is the passion you feel through AIR that drew me in. That desire to achieve something almost impossible. I kind of feel that with Hip-Hop. Taking something quite small and building this incredible and burgeoning new type of music.
I don’t think there has been anything like this before. Most Hip-Hop films have been about a particular period (a single year or few months), or they have looked at specific artists from the scene. I am interesting in the roots. As Hip-Hop is fifty in the summer, it is fascinating to sort of visit that time and, from there, build this story around how Hip-Hop changed the world. Maybe using actors to portray real Hip-Hop artists, there would be a central storyline. Maybe bringing together troubled teens in New York in 1973. I am interested in how Hip-Hop captured something and arrived at a time when there were communities in America lost, abandoned and neglected. When reviewing Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World, this is what Jack Searle wrote for The Guardian:
“The 1970s began with The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron prefacing hip-hop by talking, not singing, about black power on records with “revolution” in the title. Fight the Power’s fine roster of contributors – KRS-One, Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mel, Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC, and indeed Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets – recall a decade in which black consciousness continued to rise, boosted by Shirley Chisholm’s run for the presidency in 1972 under the slogan “unbought and unbossed”, and in reaction less to overt state violence and more to administrative oppression. The documentary cites the phrase “a period of benign neglect”, used by one of Richard Nixon’s advisers in a January 1970 memo to the president and taken here as summing up the period when, with social programmes persistently underfunded and the South Bronx bisected by a new expressway that seemed designed to hasten urban decay, richer New Yorkers fled the city’s astronomical crime rates and left the poor black and Hispanic folk to it.
Fight the Power’s central observation is that hip-hop comes from a community that has been abandoned. The New York police, no longer minded to intervene in poor neighbourhoods, happily allowed hundreds of working-class youths to attend block parties, at which a generation that hadn’t had the money to buy or learn to play instruments made a new kind of music by setting up two turntables, so that a funky horn motif from one record could be segued into a tight drum break from another. The documentary makes the point that one of hip-hop’s most important influences wasn’t musical: at the end of the 70s, no effort was made to stop graffiti covering every inch of the New York subway, so spray-painted slogans and art became an ocean of protest and propaganda, impenetrable to some observers but vital as a form of expression for artists and activists with no other outlet.
Graffiti was, in other words, exactly what hip-hop lyrics would soon become, and was one of the four phenomena – along with rap, breakdance and DJing – brought together by DJ Kool Herc, credited here as hip-hop’s great pioneer. Then, as the 80s began, Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency by visiting the Bronx – we see him verbally jousting with angry residents in the rubble – and promising more federal aid, before gaining power and instead beginning the further systematic redistribution of wealth from poor to rich. Conditions are now perfect for a fierce new genre of music to take hold, as Chuck D explains: “Hip-hop is creativity and activity that comes out of the black neighbourhood when everything has been stripped away”.
The documentaries and films that have come before are great, but I have not really seen a film that takes us back to that moment in August 1973 when DJ Kool Herc started a revolution. It would be about telling his story and recognising him. Also a chance to show how Hip-Hop transformed the cultural landscape; see portrayed some of the leaders and innovators who made the genre what it is. In 1973, a fuse was lit. Hip-Hop started and burned a fire that gave voice to those previously forgotten or silenced. Over five decades, Hip-Hop has changed the world. It is a fire that is…
BURNING bright to this day.