Davey D Interviews Hip Hop Pioneer and early promoter Van Silk

Hip-hop's foundations were being laid in the 1970s, brick by brick, by DJs in the South Bronx, sometimes even in burnt out or deteriorating buildings. These pioneers invented sampling (isolating one sound and reusing it in another song) and hip-hop's other key elements through trial and error, mostly by fooling around with records at home.

DJ Kool Herc, a.k.a. Clive Campbell, laid the first building block of hip-hop down in 1973. That was when he reportedly hosted a party in his building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue with a sound system, or sound equipment used to DJ a party. Herc's sound system was a guitar amp and two turntables.

"Kool Herc brought the idea of the Jamaican sound system to America," says Marcus Reeves, journalist and the author of Somebody Scream! Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power.

Herc also invented the now commonplace DJing technique of breaks, or breakbeats. He would, for example, play James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit A Loose” on two turntables, and would spin one of the records back to the break repeatedly. "His innovation was bringing the breakbeat to the sound of this new movement," Reeves says. "He would just kind of drop a needle on the record, and just kind of go back and forth."

DJ Afrika Bambaattaa, who formed the famous non-violent hip-hop crew Universal Zulu Nation in the Bronx, used DJ Kool Herc's breakbeats in his own DJing. "Then you would have innovators of that sound, like Afrika Bambaataa, who would take global sounds like West Indian music, salsa music, great beats from rock records," Reeves says." Bambaattaa may be best known for his 1982 song "Planet Rock," which samples an electronic piano sound from the German group Kraftwerk.

Grand Wizzard Theodore, a.k.a. Theodore Livingston, also incorporated breakbeats into his music in the Bronx. And he added another technique to the hip-hop toolbox: scratching. Grand Wizzard Theodore reportedly invented the technique (when DJs move records back and forth while they are playing) in his bedroom; while talking to his mother one day, he started moving a playing record back and forth. "He thought it would be a great percussive sound to add to the arsenal," Reeves says.

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Hip hop first became a part of the mainstream music industry in the early 1980s, when major record labels released albums from such accessible groups as Run DMC and the Sugarhill Gang. But the true origins of one of the most powerful pop-cultural influences in the world are in the spontaneous, progressive musical culture that grew out of tough Bronx neighborhoods of the 1970s and led to a renaissance of poetry, music, and fashion.Through years of research, writer and curator Johan Kugelberg has pulled together the scattered remains of a movement that never had its eye on posterity. The book includes the improvisational artwork of previously unpublished street flyers of the era, Polaroids buried for decades in basements across the Bronx, and testimonials from influential figures such as Tony Tone, LA Sunshine, and Charlie Chase. Through the work of pioneering hip-hop photographer Jow Conzo–the man The New York Times calls “the chronicler who took hip hop’s baby pictures”–Born in the Bronx presents a unique introduction to an explosive and experimental period in music history.