The story of hip-hop’s birthday on August 11, 1973 is an amazing one. But…is it true?
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: hip-hop was born. 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.
Is Hip-Hop's Birthday Mythology?
by Editor's Pick
Aug 12, 2023
The story of hip-hop’s birthday on August 11, 1973 is an amazing one. But…is it true?
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: hip-hop was born. 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.
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