Further Adventures in the Unregulated Dissemination of Culture (Hip Hop Edition)

Further Adventures in the Unregulated Dissemination of

Culture(Hip Hop Edition)

“This is where it came from,” said Clive Campbell, pointing to the building’s first-floor community room. “This is it. The culture started here and went around the world. But this is where it came from. Not anyplace else.”  1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the Bronx

Cedar Park, the Bronx

The Birth of the Break

"The thing that both Herc and Jones did was release the music on the record from linear and temporal constraints..."

- Chang, 112

New media practices -- the plastic, the malleable, the recombinant, the remixed, the infinite -- in an old media form

"It just may be that the kids who write graffiti are the healthiest and most assertive people in their neighborhood.  Each of these people has to 'invent' his life -- his language, his culture are lifted, remodeled, and transformed.  In that ferocious application of energy to style lies the source of all flash."

- Richard Goldstein, 1973

Could the same be said of hip hop?  An art that takes from the property of others and makes something new?

Graffiti was a key part of the landscape in which hip hop emerged.

And then there's "broken windows"...

The Silicon Valley of Urban Music, Art, and Dance

“On the one hand, rap was becoming known outside the seven-mile cipher.  Live bootleg cassette tapes of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Flash and Furious 5, the L Brothers, the Cold Crush Brothers and others were the sound of the OJ Cabs that took folk across the city.  The tapes passed hand-to-hand in the Black and Latino neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, Queens and Long Island’s Black Belt.  Kids in the boroughs were building sound systems and holding rap battles with the same fervor the Bronx once possessed all to itself.”[1]

[1] Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005): 127-128.

“The crew turned its gaze 'to the south, the west, to east, to the north,' brimming with the child's eye self-importance that hip hop music would need to jump out of the boroughs and go worldwide.”[1]

[1] Chang, 133

Public Enemy (Long Island, 1982-present)

Wu Tang Clan (Staten Island/Brooklyn, 1992-present)

Nas (Queens, 1991-present)

East Coast to West? How did this happen? Was it an example of The Critical Mass Theory? The theory which states that when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, it may be communicated from mind to mind? Possibly an easier explanation is one summer vacation, somebody’s cousin from South Central takes Poppin’ to The Bronx and brings back B-Boying to L.A. - Gregory "G-Bone" Everett

N.W.A. (Compton/Los Angeles, 1986-1991)

Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and producer/executive Suge Knight (1995)

Geto Boys (Houston, TX, 1986-2007)

Outkast (Atlanta, GA, 1991-present)

Planet Rock  "If you want rock and roll, you need money for instruments. With hip-hop you can bang on a table and rap. In its rawest form it's very easy to make."  

- Ben Herson, founder of New York-based Nomadic Wax label, which specializes 

in African hip-hop      

Is this really true?

Da Arabian MCs (Israel, 1999 - present)

Advanced Chemistry (Germany, 1987 - present)