Prior to the birth of Hip-Hop, jazz and rock and roll were viewed as the most important American-born genres of music — combining elements of the blues, ragtime, gospel, boogie-woogie, R&B, and country music to create new sounds and rhythms that felt exotic and dangerous. Whereas sampling is often singled out as the primary way in which peripheral genres influenced Hip-Hop’s sound, the infancy of the form reveals an unexpected connection to both Jamaican sound system culture and the immigrant who helped launch it in the Bronx on that sweltering August day in 1973.

As a young child in Jamaica, DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) could be seen flying kites on the beach, the vivid hues dancing in the sky. Like the gusts of wind keeping Herc’s kite afloat, local DJs and musicians used their massive sound systems to power a real sonic movement occurring on the island. Notable people like Tom Wong, Duke Reid, “Sir Coxsone” Dodd, King Tubby, Joe Gibbs, and Lee “Scratch” Perry earned acclaim by winning sound clashes — informal battles between two sound systems set up near each other. These systems bore names like Reid’s “The Trojan,” Coxsone’s “Downbeat,” and Prince Buster’s “Voice of the People” and were transported around the island on pick-up trucks that looked like rudimentary Transformers. The speaker setups became more complex throughout the 1950s and ’60s, but ultimately it was about who had the clearest, loudest sound using a combination of a turntable, mixer, subwoofer, midrange speaker, tweeter, and an echo chamber (an element that provided reverb).

“When the sound system drops the bass, you feel it from your feet right up to your belly,” Mikey Dread of Channel One Sound System told Red Bull Music Academy.

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