The Concise Guide to Hip-Hop Music by Paul Edwards

Author:Paul Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250034823
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

PART III

HISTORY

7. Old School / New School

The Old School (1973–1984)

The old school runs from the creation of hip-hop music in 1973, up until the new school started to emerge and dominate around 1984. The old school is hip-hop’s first major era and includes many innovations and foundational techniques that remain with the genre today.

Breaks

Hip-hop music’s core, the musical element which spawned the whole genre, is the “break.” This is often found in funk or soul music, but it can be from any genre—it is where the band “breaks” down the music during a song to just the drums, percussion, and sometimes a minimal bass line or other rhythmic element. Kool Herc is the DJ widely regarded as “inventing” hip-hop music in the early 1970s by focusing on breaks—playing just this part of each record so that people could dance to the most rhythmically intense parts of various songs.

Grandmaster Flash

[Kool Herc] wasn’t playing the whole song. He jumped right to the middle of the song; the part where the rhythm section gets down to the basics of business. He would pick up the needle and drop it down on the vinyl. Pick it up and drop it down. Drums. A little bass. That’s it. That’s the break. Fuck the melody, forget the chorus, and leave the verses alone; we’re talking about the pure rhythmic groove.1

Breaks can be found across almost all genres of music that use drums: jazz, rock, salsa, soul, funk, R&B, and heavy metal, among others. Afrika Bambaataa was one of the key early figures who helped to introduce a wide range of genres for hip-hop to draw breaks and influences from.

DJ Breakout

Bambaataa used to play the wildest records in the whole entire world. He played stuff like Bugs Bunny—it’s got a beat on it. Everybody was breakdancing to that.2

Afrika Bambaataa

I’d throw on [the Beatles’] Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—just that drum part. One, two, three, BAM—and they’d be screaming and partying. I’d throw on the Monkees, “Mary, Mary, where are you going?”—and they’d start going crazy. I’d say, “You just danced to the Monkees.” They’d say, “You liar. I didn’t dance to no Monkees.” I’d like to catch people who categorize records.3

While Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa provided the template that hip-hop music is based on, it was the more precise technical skills of DJs such as Grandmaster Flash and Grandwizard Theodore that led to further creative expansion and development of hip-hop music in the mid-1970s. Although these early figures were DJs at parties (rather than beatmakers who made music that would be released on records), their innovations with breaks provided the basis that would later be used when hip-hop transitioned from parties onto records in 1979.

Grandmaster Flash developed intricate methods for extending a break so that it sounded like the beat never stopped playing. He did this by creating techniques where two copies of the same record could be cued up and played directly after each other, essentially “looping” the break manually with two turntables, so that it played over and over again, seamlessly.

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