Silk also shared something that, perhaps, highlights at least one temporal error of that notecard, too - that Herc hadn’t met Clark Kent (“Klark K”), one of his DJs, until two years later in 1975. According to Van Silk, Herc told him by phone the card was created to launch the extortionate Sedgwick & Cedar clothing line just a few years back.
In other words, it’s a retro-facsimile with its own complicated backstory (if you want to read more about this object, a recent essay in Perfect Sound Forever outlines its knotty history).
However, the ubiquitous “A DJ Kool Herc Party” notecard wasn’t included, with Christie’s deeming it “an artistic recreation.” Per an article in Forbes, Cindy Campbell also clarified the notecard wasn’t real, and “attested that the flier strewn over the internet purported as an actual Auginvitation does not exist.” In August 2022, Christie’s Auction House sold a number of Herc’s possessions, bringing in over $850,000. It always seemed a little too complete, a little too perfect, though I ultimately accepted it for what it seemingly wasn’t. Roy Kemp/BIPS/Hulton Archive/Getty Imagesīut perhaps the most notable point - one that really speaks to this complicated origin story - is that the widely-shared invite card that has become so synonymous with this party, doesn’t actually exist. If writers are part of hip-hop (let alone b-boys), how could Herc be father to something that precedes him?Ī group of teenage boys tagging the newly cleaned wall of the West Side Hospital with spray paint, New York, US, 1972. I went to elementary school in NYC and remember seeing pieces on the outside of elevated trains in 1970. Herc was a would-be artist and b-boy before he became a DJ. Where are the people today who attended the August 11 party? There don’t seem to be many, if any, and even Van Silk agreed: “There’s nobody in hip-hop, in its current space today, who was there.”Īlso, writers (aerosol artists) - purveying hip-hop’s fourth element - were doing pieces on trains years before August 11, 1973. Well, for one, there seem to be few people who’ve said they were there that night. Given all of this, what, if any, are good reasons to think the origin myth is untrue, or at least flawed? The widely-circulated "A DJ Kool Herc Party" invite, which many believe was given out in advance of the event. Many believe was given out in advance of the event. Lastly, we appear to have documentary evidence in the form of the widely-circulated “A DJ Kool Herc Party” invite, which “He was anointed.” The same sentiment is held by many other very early hip-hop pioneers of the pre-vinyl era. Melle-Mels, the Scorpios, all those from the Bronx was goin’ to Herc parties,” legendary promoter and historian Van Silk added. Flash never said that he saw anybody else do it. “All the great DJs were directly influenced by something that Herc did very early,” said Jay Quan, a hip-hop journalist, historian, and lecturer. There’s also the fact that so many people who have deep roots in hip-hop also hold this origin story to be true, and have for a very long time. As a result, the story makes sense and seems to correlate with historical developments - musical, technological, social, and otherwise - taking place at that time. The story is useful, and compactly describes how the important roles in hip-hop performance (DJ, rapper, dancer) came to be. What good reasons do we have to think this actually took place? Well, no one's ever put forward a more satisfactory narrative.
The cachet to cross the borders of every nation on the planet, including ones English itself, has barely broached. In short, Herc’s incipient act ultimately gave hip-hop life, then license. Doing so extended the “break” - the chewy center of a bass-snare-and-timbale-rich record - and unlocked the core formula of what would change the world as hip-hop.įurther aided that night by syncopated delicacies from his key emcee Coke La Rock, the duo laid down the fundamental rapper-over-music paradigm that has since made vocalists like JAY-Z, Eminem, and Drake multi-multi-millionaires and cultural paragons. This atypical gesture required going back and forth between two identical discs on two identical record players. Like an anti-Oppenheimer, a then 18-year-old Herc formed two critical masses by pulling one apart. It was a radical musical act, akin to an earlier one in physics. Or, said another way, on that day Jamaican expat Clive Campbell godfathered it, performing break-based turntable music in public for the first time as DJ Kool Herc, for his sister Cindy’s back-to-school party in the community room of their 1520 Sedgwick Avenue apartment building home in the Bronx. On Friday, August 11, 2023, anyone sufficiently enraptured by rap music and/or its associated forms - writing (aerosol art), b-boying (breakdancing), and DJing - will, as if on a hair trigger, declare what happened exactly half-a-century ago:
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