DJ Kool Herc

Bio

Here is the founding moment of hip-hop, as it appears in basically every history book: on August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc threw a back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Here is the actual founding moment: Cindy Campbell, sixteen, asked her older brother Clive to DJ the party she'd already decided to throw.

Clive is Herc. He is eighteen. He'd moved to the Bronx from Kingston with his family six years earlier. The Bronx in 1973 was a city that landlords were torching for the insurance money, which means his block was, on a fairly regular basis, sometimes literally on fire. So he was throwing a party in a rec room.

What Herc does at the party that nobody had really committed to doing before is play the breaks. The break is the part of the record where the singer shuts up and the drums get to be the song for a second. James Brown's "Funky Drummer." The Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache." Every funk record has one. It's the part where people stop talking and start moving. Herc had two turntables and two copies of the same record. So when the break hit on Side A, he cued up Side B to the same break. When Side A ran out, he cut to Side B. Then he spun Side A back. He called it the Merry-Go-Round. The break, the part you wanted to last forever, now lasted forever.

This sounds small. It is NOT small. Every breakbeat-driven recording in the last fifty years — every Run-DMC song, every Public Enemy production, every Dilla beat, "Not Like Us" — descends from this. DJ Kool Herc is not important because he was the first to do hip-hop. He is important because he was the first to figure out what hip-hop is.

He stopped DJing professionally in 1977, after he was stabbed at a party. He has not had a comfortable life since. He does not get the royalties. He does not get the streaming residuals. He does not get the publishing. What he gets is the museum (the Smithsonian's NMAAHC has him) and the building (New York landmarked 1520 Sedgwick in 2007; the federal government followed in 2024). That is not nothing. It is also not, you know, the money. Just so we are clear on what is owed and what has been paid.