Hip hop and rap history â€" the start of a new era for music! by ken wilson

Many wonder where it all began. Whether they’re fans or just part-time admirers that find curiosity about hip hop and rap within them, the answer will inevitably be the same. Believe it or not, it all started at the dawn of the seventies. Long before anyone ever made a hip hop mixtape (because there wasn’t anything to make it with, for that matter), a fairly known Jamaican DJ moved to New York. Thus, he brought to this area the otherwise well established Jamaican (sometimes dancehall or reggae-associated) practice of toasting.
Toasting doesn’t have much to do with drinks in this case, except perhaps that it also happens at usually large parties. It means that the person with the microphone speaks or chants over the existing record, which could’ve been reggae, dancehall, disco, funk, or of another type. This guy was known as Kool Herc and he used to hold such parties in the Bronx â€" this may explain the way hip hop and rap are known to have originated here. He would sometimes improvise poetry over the records, and as these parties became more and more popular, he and other DJs began holding them on basketball courts. They got power for the equipment by plugging into the power lines at the courts.

Extremely quickly, this practice spread. By the late seventies, people started releasing what eventually came to be known as some of the first hip hop and rap works ever. They used to simply rap to the beats, instead of singing, and Kurtis Blow, or the Sugar Hill Gang were among the pioneers. The same Herc was also responsible for a practice that could also be considered the precursor of modern turntables, and this also derives from funk music (as many elements of hip hop and rap, for that matter). In order to have night long dance parties, they used to take the most danceable part from funk songs (when used for studio tracks, this later came to be known as sampling, a widely controversial practice) and repeat it over and over again. This was usually the most prominent and easily recognizable part of the song as well, namely the drum part. A hip hop mixtape was often the result of such parties.

Those who are responsible for making the hip hop mixtape popular are Africa Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and other artists including the same Kool Herc. They would give away or sell a hip hop mixtape of their club performances, and the songs continued without interruption.