The Concrete Jungle

Transcript

Into America

Street Disciples: The Concrete Jungle

Trymaine Lee: Nearly all of my earliest memories of hip-hop go through my older brother O. When he was 16, O formed a rap group called 360 Degrees and he started going by O Love.

Definition of a Hyped Up Blackman, 360 Degrees: Talk about, talk about. What’s the definition, definition, definition, definition? The definition of a hyped upBlackman is truly a brown-skinned brother whose mothers stays coolie. High school kids wonder why I do this, to get paid big and fly. I love to max with big stars and clock out a single. Slam off an album and chill like Kris Kringle. Jingle, I need more than that in my pocket. I don’t want to be a star, simply a rap pocket.

Lee: Sometimes, I’d sneak into his room and go through his rhythm books and the lyrics he’d write down on scraps of loose-leaf, folded in with letters, lots and lots of letters, from girls. I’d read both, both with deep anticipation and appreciation.

And when his group dropped their one and only single in 1989, a record called “Definition of A Hyped Up Blackman,” I carried that vinyl into my sixth-grade dance, proudly shoving it into the DJ’s face and he actually played it. My friends went wild.

Definition of a Hyped Up Blackman, 360 Degrees: When I was just a kid, my man, so here’s the definition of a hyped up Blackman. What’s the definition? The hype.Blackman. What’s the definition? The hype. Blackman. What’s the definition? The hype.Blackman. What’s the definition, definition, definition?

Lee: But the very first time, I remember hearing rap music, I must have been like 6 or 7 years old, and my brother was playing UTFO’s Roxanne Roxanne, back in 1984.

Roxanne Roxanne, UTFO: Roxanne, Roxanne, I wanna be your man.Roxanne, Roxanne.

After that, I was hearing rap in passing cars and at my cousin’s house and even on the radio. It was everywhere. LL Cool J was Rocking The Bells and couldn’t live without his radio, Schoolly D dropped What Does It Mean?, and Run-DMC were the rising kings of rap.

In those early years, my teenage brother and his boys had big boomboxes and would go on these wild missions to find huge pieces of cardboard that they could lay out on the cement to breakdance on.

Once, him and a couple friends even walked seven miles each way to a flooring place to buy a gigantic 12-by-12 roll of linoleum to dance on.

By the time I was 10, I was starting to understand what rap was, or at least what it sounded like, with that signature boom bap.

But it wasn’t until I heard Slick Rick’s a Children’s Story, a cautionary tale about young life in the streets, that rap really made sense as an art, as a device, as something powerful and uniquely ours.

Children’s Story, Slick Rick: Rick the Ruler presentation.

Lee: And when Public Enemy released Fight the Power, we raised our fists and our voices up high. I felt strong and Black. And more than anything, I felt this feeling of falling in love with the boom bap, the lyrical craftsmanship, the Kangols, and Adidas and gold chains.

Hip-hop has been the soundtrack of my life. When I was young and trying to understand the world as a Black man, it offered a beat to step to the world with.

During the crack era, when I was struggling to understand my own stepfather’s addiction and how many of my peers were pushing poison, the music reflected that struggle.

In my formative years, in the early ’90s, when I was coming of age, so was the music.It grew more sophisticated, more complicated and, in so many ways, captured the multitudes in our social and cultural contradictions.

These were our beats to step to. We freestyled and made mixtapes. The way we dressed, the slang we used, the knowledge we kicked was all mirrored in the music. The good times, the bad, all of it came with that boom bap.

And then I grew older as a man and confident in my own pen game as a writer. My sensibilities were notions I carried over from hip-hop. There was urgency and finesse, often something raw and palpable principles of Black pride and a deep skepticism and interrogation of the status quo.

As I’ve been shaped in deep and meaningful ways by hip-hop, hip-hop has shaped and been shaped by America.

Born in the South Bronx from broken glass and bad policy, ingenuity and creativity, hip-hop has defined decades of music, culture, politics and youth movements, all at the hands of these street disciples, making magic with two turntables and a microphone.

The music and culture of hip-hop was, and still is, political.And the evolution of the genre to show where we’ve been as Americans.

This year, 2023, marks the 50th anniversary of hip-hop.

So, all through February, in celebration of Black history,”Into America” is looking back at the 50 years of hip-hop and the political, economic, and social forces that have shaped it along the way. Because hip-hop was never just musical or rhymes, it was a message, a revolution and a way for young Black people to be heard and to fight back against the powers that tried to break us.

This is “Street Disciples: Politics, Power, and the Rise of Hip-Hop.”

I’m Trymaine Lee and this is “Into America.”

Hip-hop is the rose that grew from concrete. And there’s no other place this rose could have taken root than the South Bronx. From the neighborhood’s collision of cultures to the policies that shaped people’s lives to the actual physical landscape, the story of the Bronx is inextricably linked to the story of hip-hop.

On part one of “Street Disciples,” we bring you the “Concrete Jungle.”

Rap is now America’s pop music. But it’s not only the most popular music genre in the country, it’s a global phenomenon. It informs how we dress, our commercials, everything is touched by hip-hop.

But half the story of how hip-hop came to be has nothing to do with the music. To understand how hip-hop got here, how the sound of hip-hop developed, and how it became the music that had defined generations of Americans, we have to go back to its roots.

Archival Recording: For me, the truth was the Bronx was an amazing place to grow up.

Lee: It all started in the South Bronx.

Archival Recording: You know, growing up with a grocery store on the corner where I could get pickled pig feet and I could get pickled sausage and that you’d walk into the grocery store and there’d be all these elders, right, at the time 60, 70 years old, who just kind of hung out in front of the store. And if you gave them 2 or 3 minutes, right, they would impart some knowledge onto you.

Archival Recording: You know, it’s a whole world on to itself. Your project was a world. Your building was a world. Your block was a world.

Archival Recording: We played scale Zs on the streets. When it got too hot, we really didn’t have no pools, so we turned on the pumps so we could stay cool. We played basketball on the streets, shooting the ball inside garbage cans and stuff like that.

Archival Recording: I felt a sense of belonging, like, this is my part. This is my tribe. These are my people.

Lee: The South Bronx that birthed hip-hop didn’t just happen.It was made by a series of policies and decisions that impacted the flow of people to and from the city and altered the built environment, leaving the South Bronx racially divided, economically devastated and mostly neglected.

In 1940, the Bronx was 98 percent white, but that was quickly changing. During the second wave of the Great Migration, beginning in the ’40s and stretching well into the ’70s, about 4 million Southern African Americans will make their way to northern cities like New York, where just decades earlier the Harlem Renaissance had sparked a cultural revolution.

These new migrants brought with them pieces of the Black South, including their musical traditions of gospel, blues and jazz, and all the hopes they carried for what was to come.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal: New York City was very expensive, even then. I would argue, as someone who grew up in the Bronx, that Brooklyn was always too far away. So the Bronx represented a kind of proximity to Manhattan to go to work. So, it made sense that you would see a concentration of these new migrants to New York City to settle in the borough of the Bronx.

Lee: Mark Anthony Neal is an African American studies professor at Duke University, where he specializes in hip-hop culture. Dr. Neal grew up in the South Bronx, the portion of the borough situated just north of Harlem.

His family was part of this wave of the Great Migration. They came from Georgia and Maryland in the 1950s. And just like in cities all across the country, as Black families moved in, white families moved out.

Neal: The demographics of the Bronx changed dramatically. You know, all these white folks leaving New York City and going out to the suburbs in Westchester. You know, like Ricky Ricardo and Lucy Ricardo, right? They leave their apartment on 68th Street and move up to Connecticut.

Lucille Ball: Oh, Ethel, there’s nothing like living in the country. Clean, fresh air, homegrown food.

Neal: That’s what all the white people were doing in New York at that time.

Lee: These white people were moving to New Jersey and Long Island, out to suburban developments that largely excluded Black people.

Neal: And then the biggest thing for thinking about the infrastructure of the Bronx, that point in time, is the creation of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Lee: As white people moved to these suburbs, they still needed a way to get into the city for work. So, in came the Cross Bronx Expressway. The city started construction in 1948, and it’s a freeway that cuts through the Bronx, joining New Jersey, Connecticut, and Long Island.

Neal: You can literally see communities that emerge on one side of the Cross Bronx Expressway, and communities exist on the other side of it.

Lee: To build the seven-mile expressway, the city destroyed more than 1,500 homes, calling it slum clearance and tried to put a positive spin on the whole thing.

Archival Recording: In New York’s expressways; in its bridges, beaches and parks; in its steady elimination of slums lie the principles of one of the world’s great physical planners, Robert Moses.

Lee: Here’s Robert Moses, the controversial, powerful city planner talking to NBC News back in 1959.

Robert Moses: You’ll have to move a lot of people out of the way of a big housing project or, or out of the way of an approach to a bridge that they’re not, a lot of them are not, going to like it. Many of them are misinformed. Many of them in the end come around to feel that they’ve done them a great service.

Lee: But Moses wasn’t just any bureaucrat. He was the city’s master planner. Targeting predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in order to build infrastructure that would benefit the white middle class.

Here’s Professor Tricia Rose, a sociologist who teaches Africana studies at Brown University.

Dr. Tricia Rose: So, the Cross Bronx Expressway was a combination of slum clearance and pathway creation for a white middle class. That hides it because they can hide under the, hey this is just a highway for the purposes of getting between New Jersey and Connecticut. And at the same time, to make sure that it’s routed in such a way that the people they most want to displace are displaced.

Lee: And the Black and brown people who were displaced often end up in public housing. In the late 1930s, New York City had started building massive high-density housing projects for lower-income families.

These segregated projects were meant to be temporary homes spread out all over the city, from Manhattan to places like Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood or Long Island City in Queens, home of Queensbridge, still the largest public housing development in the country.

At first, the projects in the South Bronx were overwhelmingly white. But in the ’40s and ’50s, Black and Puerto Rican families began moving in. And by 1960, public housing in New York was majority people of color. But even after these changes, the Bronx overall was still mostly white.

President Lyndon B. Johnson: And this measure that we will sign today will really make us truer to ourselves, both as a country and as a people.

Lee: Then in 1965, a year after signing the Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a new immigration policy that abolished immigration quotas on countries outside of Northwestern Europe. That opened the door for more immigrants from non-white countries.

Johnson: Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers, from a hundred different places or more. They have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.

Lee: Dr. Neal told us the Immigration Act of 1965 brought a massive demographic shift to the Bronx.

Neal: Which changed everything, which really did open up the gates for an influx of Afro-Caribbeans and Afro-Latinos into the U.S. They’d come into New York, obviously, because New York is a port city. And the places they end up primarily is someplace like the Bronx.

Lee: And as white people continued to move out of the housing projects in the Bronx and out to the suburbs, Afro-Caribbean immigrants took their place, expanding the city’s Black population. By 1970, the Bronx was almost a quarter Black.

And as New York was experiencing this one shift, there was an economic shift as well.

Archival Recording: Unemployment among young people in New York is around 30 percent.

Lee: In the early ’70s, New York was facing a budget deficit, and all but divested from some of the poorest parts of the city. Huge swaths of the South Bronx were left torn asunder in abandonment and rubble. Leaving a landscape littered with the detritus of social isolation and economic abandonment.

Adding to that destruction, the city closed several fire companies in the South Bronx. And soon after, the number of fires soared.

Neal: The official narrative was that these folks who had just come to New York from the South and the Caribbean didn’t know how to take care of a community. They didn’t have the same kind of values that other folks in this city had in their community.

Lee: But the people who lived in the South Bronx knew this wasn’t true.

Neal: The feeling was always that there was something else going on, couldn’t quite put our hands on it, but these were just not simply accidental fires. It seemed like a real effort to remove people from these communities for whatever what.

Lee: Although it’s hard to quantify, many derelict landlords did get insurance payouts from these fires and often refused to rebuild. This led to the idea that some landlords who operated mostly as slumlords were setting the fires on purpose.

Neal: You know, as a kid I wasn’t always aware of the why, but I knew enough folks, you know, who had to go to live with kin someplace because their building burned down.

Lee: New York City was reaching a breaking point, and places like the South Bronx were hit the hardest.

Neal: The New York City of the 1970s, in the South Bronx specifically, is a place that we might identify as being disinvested in. The kind of labor and resources that were there were disappearing. We talked about white flight, high unemployment rates, the emergence of a gang culture, which you might expect in the context of impoverishment.

Rose: Cities were under tremendous financial distress and the federal government was very anti-city because it was considered a Black space at that point. In so doing, they said, well, we’re not going to fund anything. We’re not going to support cities terribly well.

And public schools took a huge beating. All the music and arts programs took the biggest beating.

I was actually in a music talent class in public school in the Bronx in the seventh grade, right around this time when the city went bankrupt, and they just collected our instruments. We’d had them. We took them home. I was a clarinetist. And they just, it was horrible. We were crying and they just took our instruments. We were like, that was it.

Lee: Like Professor Neal, Dr. Tricia Rose also grew up in the Bronx.

Rose: And so, when you think about that, it’s like: what happens with the musical memory in a community when there’s no place to go, you know, learn the instrument in, in real-time with community?

And so, hip-hop is an incredible response to this void.

Lee: For years, as the cultural panoply of the Bronx continued to shift and evolve, so did the soundtrack of the people who lived there.

Neal: Different cultural sensibilities, different language. Growing up in the Bronx, I can remember listening to the soul music that I listened to, but I was also hearing Eddie Palmieri. I was also hearing Sparrow, right, and reggae and Jamaican groups in the same building that I was growing up in.

Archival Recording: Inventing a song in my musical laboratory.

Lee: And regardless of what politicians were or weren’t doing for the neighborhood, people were still going to get together and have a good time.

In the early ’70s, house parties were popular in the Bronx. If you lived in a housing project, you could actually rent out the rec room. There’d be a DJ playing, soul or disco, but usually, just changing records from one song to the next.

But then, people at these Bronx parties started really getting down to one particular part of these songs called the break.

Theodore Livingston: Oh, a break, man, a break is like the best part of the record.

Lee: That’s Grand Wizzard Theodore.

Livingston: It’s when a drummer start to get funky. That’s what the break part is.

Lee: There are a bunch of dancers known as break boys, and later B-boys, who used the break as their time to get busy.

Livingston: Sometimes you might see the B-boys in a B-boy stance, standing up against the wall, waiting for the break to come. And then once the break comes, they jump on the floor, they do their little dance, and then they go back — they go back to the wall and stay in the B-boy stance and wait for the next break to come.

Lee: One record with a really long extended drum break was called Apache by the Incredible Bongo Band, a group of studio musicians put together to score a blaxploitation movie. Apache was a cover of a 1960 song that was a hit in the U.K.

This version of Apache had a bridge with a long percussion solo, with a melody that I know you’ve heard before.

Apache, Incredible Bongo Band: (MUSIC PLAYING)

Lee: When a break from a song like Apache would come on, people would flood the dance floor. At first, the B-boys at these Bronx parties would have to wait forever until the song’s break came on. Until, as the legend goes, one man changed all that.

Clive Campbell was 12 years old when his family came to the South Bronx from Jamaica, two years after the Immigration Act lifted those quotas. Clive and his sister Cindy brought their love of Kingston Dancehall parties with them.

And as they grew up, they started to host their own parties for other teenagers in their neighborhood. And just like the parties from back home, they were loud, crowded, raucous and filled with young people.

Clive’s job was to spin the records and, eventually, he went by the name DJ Kool Herc, as in Hercules. He literally towered over everyone else, standing a crazy six feet nine inches tall.

Like other Bronx DJs, Herc knew how much people loved those breaks in the records he spun. So, we had an idea. What if I played the same record on two different turntables and moved between them to keep the break going? He called it The Merry-Go-Round.

And on August 11th, 1973, DJ Kool Herc got the chance to unveil his new technique. His sister, Cindy, wanted to buy new clothes for school, so she rented a rec room at the bottom of their apartment building, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, to throw a back-to-school party.

Cindy made fliers advertising ladies $0.25, fellows $0.50. About 300 people packed in. And the story goes, when the break came and kept on going, the crowd lost its mind. And with that extended break beat, before it even had a name, hip-hop was born.

Kool DJ Red Alert: What Herc would do, he would play from one turntable to the other. And I’m hearing that going on. I’m seeing that there’s people out there doing some footwork that I never seen before. And that was being considered, like the get down, the breakdancing and so forth.

Lee: Kool DJ Red Alert wasn’t at that now-famous August 11th Kool Herc party, but he wasn’t far behind.

Red Alert: A group by the name of the Coolest Legend, The Cool, the DJ, the Red Alert.

Lee: Like Herc, Red Alert was born in the West Indies. When he came to New York, he lived with his grandparents in Harlem, where they played lots of records, Motown, soul, Latin jazz and calypso.

Red Alert: So, I would listen to a little bit of everything in the household.

Lee: He went to school in the Bronx, so he was always hanging out with friends up there.

Red Alert: They used to always mention about this guy by the name of Herc. Say, Herc, Herc.

Lee: Red Alert still remembers the first Kool Herc party he pulled up to.

Red Alert: I, along with fellas around the neighborhood where I grew up at, we all went together to the Bronx.And we step on in there, and I start hearing something different, seeing something different.

It was a whole crazy vibe that I’d never witnessed before. People, just as they are, you know, dressed as they are and just joined together listening to variations of what this man Kool Herc is playing, and that was like some of the commercial sound, some of the disco sound, but a lot of obscure sounds that I never heard before.

Lee: Eventually, the sounds of those Kool Herc parties would inspire Red Alert to become a DJ himself and change the trajectory for whole generations of young Black kids just like him.

Red Alert: I was skinny, skinny, big red afro and, you know.So when I started to DJ, first I was known as DJ Red Alert, but I got along with everybody so well. And then I would just add Kool to it. But I had to ask permission from Kook Herc because in street terms you can’t bite somebody else’s name.

So in respect, I stepped up, I went to Herc one day. And I said it him, I’d say, you know I’m a DJ. And he already saw me around but, you know, he’s the top man. You know? So he was, in respect, I said, you know, I want to add Kool to my name. Can I add Kool? And so, he took time. He thought about it. You’re all right, man. You’re all right.

Lee: Were you nervous going up to him? I mean, he’s the man.

Red Alert: Oh, yes, I was nervous going to him. You know? I mean, this man is a giant figure at the time. Kool Herc is the blueprint. A lot of us in our time, as we was fans, turn into students looking up to him. He gave us a way to go and do our thing. So, it had to start with him. But you know, he’s a trendsetter.

Lee: When we come back, hip-hop begins to spread across the Bronx and to the rest of New York City. And we speak with the man behind one of hip-hop’s most signature sounds.

Stick with us.

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Lee: Theodore Livingston was just 10 years old when Kool Herc started throwing his legendary parties, so he wasn’t around early on. What he did have were older brothers who were tight with the now-iconic, but then-up-and-coming Grandmaster Flash, who, like Herc, was laying the groundwork for what hip-hop would become.

Livingston: Now, when I seen the two turntables and a mixer, which was introduced to me through my brother Mean Gene and Grandmaster Flash, that’s when everything became full circle. And that’s when I realized that I was born into a culture, born into an art form that we now call hip-hop.

Lee: Theodore was born and raised in the South Bronx in a house that was filled with music.

Livingston: Every Saturday, we would get in front of the TV and watch “Soul Train” and music, music is medicine, man. You know? I mean, my mom, she played music when she was cooking. She played music when she was happy. She played music when she was sad. She played music when she was about to whip our butts, you know? So, you could always tell what kind of move my moms was in when we came home.

Lee: With music in their blood, it made sense that Theodore’s brothers plugged into hip-hop right away. Cordi O worked the equipment and DJ Mean Gene would spin the records.

Mean Gene had talent and he caught the eye of DJ Grandmaster Flash, who was already iconic for improving on Kool Herc’s technique of extending breakbeats with two turntables.

Theodore, who got to tag along to some of these parties, was mesmerized.

Livingston: Grandmaster Flash, man, he started backspinning a record, you know, the clock theory. When a record spinning at 360, he will spin it back to the original point so that he can get it back to the beginning of the break. So, if the break goes from 360 and goes all around to zero, he will spin it back to the regular 360 to beginning of the break so he can start to extend the break. You know, mixing records together and stuff like that, that’s where the blueprint came from, man, Grandmaster Flash.

Lee: That meant Flash was able to extend the breaks more seamlessly, keeping the beat smoother for all the partygoers. Flash’s genius inspired Theodore. And even though he was just a kid, he started messing around, trying to emulate his idol and teach himself how to DJ.

Livingston: I was in the living room, because the equipment that they used was in my mother’s house in my brother Mean Gene’s room. And I was in the living room playing music on my mom’s stereo.

My moms had a stereo that looked like a coffin. The TV was in the front. You open up the coffin, inside she had the 8-track, she had the radio. You know, I was playing her 45s, playing all the breaks on her 45s and stuff like that.

Lee: Pretty soon, Theodore was inventing DJ techniques of his own. It all started when Theodore’s principal let him make a mixtape to play during lunchtime in the cafeteria.

Livingston: I’ll go home, took my boombox, put it in front of the speaker, press record, started making my cassette tape. The music was so loud in the house to the point where my moms had to come into the room and tell me, turn the music down or turn the music off.

I turned the music down. I did my little baby scratch. Moms left the room. I finished my cassette tape. Rewind it back. And when it got to the point where she came in the room, I could hear myself baby scratching.

And I was like, wow, I can incorporate that into all the things I’m doing as a DJ. So, I practice another couple of days, another couple of hours. And that’s how it became the scratch. 1975, I was 12 years old.

Lee: Just 12 years old and literally changing the game. Theodore was so ahead of his time with creating these new techniques. Flash and his friends called him a wizard, which is how he got his name, DJ Grand Wizzard Theodore.

Hip-hop would never be the same. The introduction of scratching would take this burgeoning art form to the next level. But Theodore wasn’t the only one.

There was a lot of this innovation going on in hip-hop at the time. The style was so new and so fresh, there was just so much room to push the limits.

And another thing. This equipment was no joke. It was big, heavy analog stuff full of wires and capacitors and resistors. And the DJs and artists of the time, they could do incredibly inventive things, like rigging the machines to play the breaks in different ways or power a stereo or speakers from a lamppost.

Dr. Tricia Rose, the sociologist from Brown, actually connects this inventiveness to an unlikely source, the city’s neglect.

Rose: Some of them know this kind of electrical talent. Why? Because they were being trained in vocational schools. Another abandonment factor. Right? They weren’t being trained to go off to college. They were being trained to go off and fix turntables and fix TVs that were going to be out of date any minute with, you know, tubes versus the new technology.

So, they were equipped to technologically sort of figure out how to work the machine from the inside. And, at the same time, the musical outlets they might have historically had in school were being cut.

Lee: The city could take away music and art classes. It could find infinite ways to tell Black and poor kids what they thought of them. But no city or public policy could take away the ingenuity of a people.

Davey D, a hip-hop journalist and DJ, who grew up in the Bronx in the ’70s, says, in his opinion, the early pioneers of hip-hop have never been properly recognized for what they were: geniuses.

Davey D: It wasn’t something that was nurtured compared to, if we’re talking about that time, what happened in the early ’80s.We’ll move up a few years, you get Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. I like to use them as examples. You know, here they are in college or whatever and they’re figuring out how to wire boxes so people can make free phone calls, right.

Technically, that’s wire fraud, right? Technically, that makes them a lawbreaker. But they’re framed as geniuses, had, you know, ingenuity that we marvel at. But do we have that same sort of outlook for all those kids that were abandoned in the Bronx who were figuring out a way out of nowhere? These were things that folks had to figure out.

Lee: Hip-hop still doesn’t get the credit it deserves, and it certainly wasn’t getting it back in. Hip-hop was Black. But beyond that, it was young.

Davey D: You know, our parents and others were like, what the hell is this? This is garbage. This is crap. This is not music.

(LAUGHTER)

You know, I remember the first time letting my parents hear these breakbeats, and they were looking like, what the hell is this?

And I remember my pops was like, man, we spent all this money to get these records, and you just play the same part over and over again?

Lee: It didn’t matter that old folks didn’t understand. They didn’t have to. This wasn’t for them.

This was music for young people who were trying to make their way in a city that wasn’t looking out for them. Plus, this new hip-hop generation didn’t need older folks to spread the music around. They didn’t need the radio. They didn’t even need record deals. As Kool DJ Red Alert says, all you needed was a cassette player and a blank tape.

Red Alert: Cassette tapes, what I always called the Internet of our time, was keeping everything in motion. When you heard these cassette tapes or some hip-hop sounds, you know, from a party or from anything, it grab everybody attention.

Lee: Almost from the beginning, people were taking tape recorders and recording live DJ sets being played on turntables, so they could listen back and pass it on.

Red Alert: Cassettes was traveling everywhere, you know, all throughout the city, even out of town. People going away to college, people going into the service, people who had family, you know, these cassettes was traveling everywhere. You know, people was playing them in their cars, you know, in the boomboxes, boy. So, you know, that sound was being dominated on the outside before it reached radio.

Lee: Grand Wizzard Theodore remembers family coming to visit and being blown away by what they were hearing in the Bronx.

Livingston: And my cousin come up to me, be like, yo, you guys have got all this music and stuff like that. Can you make me a cassette tape?

We would make a cassette tape, give it to my cousin. And he would take it back to Baltimore. And then he might end up making a copy of that tape for someone. And then that person would make a copy of that tape for someone. And then the tape, just like a snowball effect, everybody keep making copies of the tape. So it’s like, cassette tapes, man, were going on, and on, and on and on.

Lee: Through the mid-’70s, hip-hop was taken off. Block parties, late nights hanging out in the parks, and those cassette tapes being passed around meant the music was being heard by more and more people.

And for a while there, the star of the show was still the DJ. Rapping wasn’t really a thing yet. But as time went on, MCs or masters of ceremonies, began to pick up the mic and joined DJs on stage.

Pulling from Black America’s long history of spoken word and poets like Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets, MCs started getting up to the microphone to rhyme over the breakbeats.

At first, these MCs were just giving shoutouts to the neighborhood big-timers in the crowd. Then, they started rhyming in short, simple bursts. Their rhymes started to get longer, the storytelling more complex and adventurous.

Eventually, rapping along with DJing and be B-boying, would find its place as a key player of hip-hop. And it would become the domain of representation in the culture. But to make the sound they rapped over, the core of the music, you needed that expensive equipment.

Turntables cost around $300 back then. That’s more than $1,600 in today’s money. Sometimes you were lucky enough to find old stuff on the street or speakers from abandoned cars. But for the most part, the average Bronx teen just couldn’t afford it.

But then, lightning struck.

Archival Recording: At 9:34 last night, it all went black.

Lee: On a sweltering night in July of 1977, New York City lost power.

Archival Recording: The streets, homes, hotels, theaters, restaurants, plus subways and elevators and the people in them were stuck wherever they happened to be.

Lightning struck a power line 50 miles out of town. And then one after another, the power stations became overloaded because on a hot summer night, the air conditioners were running. And one by one, they shut themselves down.

Lee: It’s one of those moments where everyone who was there remembers exactly where they were.

Livingston: It had to be at least 99 degrees, almost 100 degrees that night, because it was like, sweat, sweated it all day long.

Neal: I was playing outside when the lights went off. And I think, on the ground, we just simply assumed that it was some minor blackout in the neighborhood.

Livingston: And when I was walking home, there’s a flight of steps that you go up, and when you go up the flight of steps and you turn around, you can see all the lights going out on the west side and all the lights start to go out on the east side. And I was like, it’s time to get back to the block. And once I got back to the block, it was a blackout. Blackout was official.

Neal: And as a kid, you know, it was fun, right? Because it’s not like you could go upstairs and go to sleep. You can’t watch TV. So, it was a night that we got to stay up all night, outside.

But far removed from all of that, in other different parts of the city, there was looting, there was criminality.

Lee: The power didn’t come back on until the next night, 25 hours later.

Archival Recording: With the lights back on, it was clear to see the devastation in several parts of New York City after a night of looting, vandalism and arson. Whole blocks wiped out. A policeman, after 16 hours of watching it, made the city’s most quoted remark,”It was the night of the animals.”

Lee: But there was, for some, a silver lining.

Archival Recording: The seventh month of 1977 was another Christmas for the people.

Livingston: I mean, I heard a lot of people stole equipment. They went right to the electronics store, stealing amplifiers, speakers, all kinds of stuff.

Red Alert: The electronics store, called Crazy Eddie’s, wiped out. We traveled all the way downtown and we just seen all different scenes there. But then I learned everything overnight, there was people that became DJs.

Neal: Hip-hop seemed to be present after the blackout in a way that it wasn’t prior to that point in time.

Lee: After the blackout, hip-hop continued to grow. MCs like Grandmaster Caz and Melle Mel were raising the bar for rhyming. And Bronx DJs at shows in Manhattan, spreading the music to other boroughs.

And, you know that feeling where you could just tell you’re on the cusp of something? Davey D was awash in it.

Davey D: I remember on several occasions thinking to myself when I was at certain parties or events, and going, I wonder if the rest of the world is doing what we’re doing? Because New York was like, New York was special. So it’s like, I don’t think they’re doing this in D.C. I don’t think they’re doing this in Boston. I don’t think they’re doing this in Philly.

But right now, at this moment, I wonder, you know, if the rest of the world knows, you know, what we’re doing. But we didn’t have, at least I didn’t have any idea that it would one day be a thing that we’re talking about 50 years later, you know, on radio or TV about, you know, this thing. It was just magic moments.

Lee: For the first several years as hip-hop grew and spread, it belonged to New York and sat firmly outside the mainstream, until 1979.

At what point did you realize that hip-hop, and DJing and MCing, it was bigger than just the Bronx where it was born? At what point did you realize like, yo, this is — this is something, something more than we ever even imagined?

Livingston: When Rapper’s Delight came out. When Rapper’s Delight came out. I was like, whoa!

Rapper’s Delight, The Sugarhill Gang: I said-a hip-hop, the hippie, the hippie.To the hip,hip-hopand you don’t stop.Arock it out baby bubba to the boogie, the bang-bang.The boogie to the boogie, the beat.

Lee: The opening lines of Rapper’s Delight championed the name of the culture, highlighting the importance of the music, and have a clear objective: to make you dance.

Rapper’s Delight, The Sugarhill Gang: Now, what you hear is not a test, I’m rapping the beat. And me, the groove, and my friends are going to try to move your feet.

Lee: Rapper’s Delight was the brainchild of R&B singer and producer Sylvia Robinson. After hearing hip-hop for the first time at a club in Harlem, Robinson realized this music had the potential to make it big.

Her son helped her track down some guys who said they could rap. And she called them The Sugarhill Gang after her record label.

She brought the three rappers to her studio and hired a band to play the disco soul hit, Good Times by Chic, and they played it over and over.

Good Times, Chic: Good times, these are the good times. Leave your cares behind.

Lee: What came out of that studio session was a 14-minute song that, by now, many of you all could probably wrap from memory.

Kool DJ Red Alert remembered the first time he heard it. People were just shocked.

Red Alert: We were doing a party up in Harlem. And here it is that when the song came on, I’m hearing somebody rapping on it. And we’re all looking around like, who’s that? Who’s that?

And the person who was on the microphone, he said, it’s not me. And we started hearing it word for word. And that was Rapper’s Delight. We was amazed with that.

Lee: It was almost unimaginable at the time.A hip-hop song was being played on the radio.

Red Alert: It was amazing because what we were actually doing in real-time, now I’m hearing it in recorded. And I be like, wow, you know. And I’m not knowing that people had done something like that in some sense of a way for other different genres of music, but this is actually like considered like, quote/unquote, the first rap song.

Lee: The song introduced hip-hop to the rest of the country outside of New York, and eventually peaked at number 36 on the Billboard charts. But while Rapper’s Delight was an international success, Davey D remembers that the OGs in the Bronx weren’t impressed.

Davey D: I think some of the more established MCs were like, this is garbage because this is, we never heard of these people. This is not what we do. This is not how we’re flowing.

You know, we didn’t know who Sugarhill was. They was from Jersey.

Neal: So the irony that this thing that’s so New York-centered, so Bronx-centered that most folks who know of hip-hop or first hears it from three dudes from New Jersey.

Lee: But Grand Wizzard Theodore says people didn’t spend too much time being mad about it. They could see the promise of real financial success. Like, yo, if these guys can become superstars, why not me?

Livingston: Once the records came out and stuff like that, we knew for a fact that it would take us up out of the hood. We would be on a tour somewhere. We would be on the airplane. We would be doing all these cities.

Because, to some of us, we never got on an airplane and went to Florida. We never got on the airplane and went somewhere and started doing parties and stuff like that, until you actually made a record.

Lee: Because you could sell it?

Livingston: Yes. Once you make a record, it opened up a whole new big audience for us. People in Detroit, people in Canada, people across the water, people, you know, West Coast, East Coast, people will start seeing who we are and stuff like that. And then open up a lot for us economically, you know?

Lee: Grand Wizzard Theodore still DJs all over the world, and he credits that, in part, to the opportunities that opened up after Rapper’s Delight.

Kool DJ Red Alert began working radio in the ’80s and has broken some of the biggest names in hip-hop. And he’s still on the air in New York City today.

And just like the music would eventually spread, Davey D moved out West, finding a Bay Area audience that loved hip-hop as much as he does, and established himself as a pioneering hip-hop journalist.

And Mark Anthony Neal and Tricia Rose brought hip-hop to the ivory tower, making careers out of studying hip-hop at elite universities.

Of course, hip-hop has changed in the decades since Herc’s party shook up the Bronx and Rapper’s Delight took rap to the rest of America.

Like most rap in the late ’70s, that record was about partying and having a good time. But as the decade came to a close, New York City was falling further into decay. Crime was on the rise and police were cracking down, adding to the violence that was plaguing the city.

Archival Recording: The federal government and this administration has done a great deal to hurt the South Bronx as well as inner cities in general, whether it’s New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles.

Lee: After a decade of fires and abandonment, the Bronx, birthplace of hip-hop, was suffocating. And hip-hop, with its newfound popularity and a sense of urgency, had to figure out what it needed to say and how to harness some power.

In 1982, it did just that, finding its voice loud and clear with The Message.

The Message, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five: Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge. I’m trying not to lose my head. Ha hahaha. It’s like a jungle sometimes. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under.

Livingston: You know, it’s like, rats in the front room, roaches in the back, junkies in the alleys with the baseball bats, all of that is true. All of that’s what we went through. You know?

Neal: I think anyone who listened to that song that was young and Black knew exactly where that song was coming from, whether you were in New York or not.

Rose: But when the message came out, now it was the first time you could be certain that this genre could be the most profound articulation of political social vision, like, ever produced.

Lee: Next week, how artists took the inescapable policies of abandonment, violence, and neglect and created music, fashion and art that address these conditions head-on. That’s on episode two of “Street Disciples: Broken Glass Everywhere.”

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook using the handle @intoamericapod. Or you can tweet me at @trymainelee. That’s @trymainelee, my full name. And if you want to write to us, our e-mail is IntoAmerica@nbcuni.com. That was IntoAmerica@nbc and the letters U-N-I.com.

If you love the show help spread the word. You can do that by rating and reviewing “Into America” on Apple Podcast or wherever you’re listening right now.

“Into America” is produced by Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Mike Brown, Aaron Dalton, Max Jacobs and Janmaris Perez. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer is Aisha Turner. Special thanks to Bryson Barnes, Stephanie Cargill, Joe Hoerdemannand Jim Mueller for recording it. I’m Trymaine Lee.

We’ll be back next Thursday with the next episode of “Street Disciples.”

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