Bronx Hip-Hop

You're asking about a borough, not a genre — because for about fifteen years the Bronx was where the technique got invented and everyone else copied it. It starts as a DJ practice: find the four bars of a funk record where the band drops out, buy two copies, loop it by hand.

The records come later, and most of them are documents of something that already worked in a park.

August 11, 1973: Cindy Campbell throws a back-to-school party in the rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, her brother Clive — Kool Herc — plays. He isolates the drum break and runs it between two turntables.

Afrika Bambaataa, ex-Black Spade from the Bronx River Houses, builds the Universal Zulu Nation around it and plays anything with a break — Kraftwerk, rock, Munich disco. Grandmaster Flash, trained in electronics, works out cueing and the quick mix; Grand Wizzard Theodore reportedly stumbles onto the scratch.

Vinyl arrives from outside: Sylvia Robinson's Sugar Hill in Englewood, New Jersey, then Bobby Robinson's Enjoy out of Harlem, then Tom Silverman's Tommy Boy in Manhattan. By 1986–88 the Bronx is making albums instead of park tapes, and the SP-1200 replaces the second copy of the break.

Who: Herc at Cedar Park and the Hevalo, Bambaataa at Bronx River Community Center, Flash and the Furious Five, the Cold Crush Brothers, later KRS-One and Scott La Rock out of a Franklin Avenue men's shelter, and Ced-Gee's Ultra-Lab.

What: the break as the whole point — drums forward, bass loud, MCs working crowd control before they work verses. How a record gets in: it has a usable four bars.

Nobody cared about the genre on the label. Melvin Bliss's "Synthetic Substitution" drum break entered rap through Ultramagnetic's "Ego Trippin'" and became one of the most sampled records there is.