![]() ![]() This small party is considered the first domino in a chain that would create a billion-dollar art form and permanently transform US culture. He kicked off with reggae but the crowd didn’t respond – that was their parents’ music – so he switched to tough, percussive funk records such as the aptly titled It’s Just Begun by the Jimmy Castor Bunch. ![]() It was there, on 11 August 1973, that 18-year-old DJ Kool Herc played to a couple of hundred fellow teenagers at a back-to-school party organised by his older sister. “There’s no way that this would have been that enduring.”Īccording to the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, the official “birthplace of hip-hop” is an apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx. “If you’d told me that I would be writing on a TV show in 2016 about stuff that I went through when I was 20, that would have been a joke,” he says. George found it a rewarding experience and not one he anticipated. Each one of those forms represents a different part of the New York music world at the time.” “I’d get a call: ‘Would they use this slang in 1978? What shoes would they wear?’ I put together a 300-song playlist for Baz: funk, disco, salsa, reggae, free jazz, early hip-hop influences. “I thought I could bring some expertise to the party,” he says. The Get Down’s supervising producer (and writer of one episode) is Nelson George, the veteran critic, author and film-maker who covered hip-hop’s rise as a cub reporter. But for me,” he grins, “it was a great place to live.” Where the gangs lived, that’s where the rubble was. One of our biggest pastimes was flying kites on the roof. One local health official called it “a necropolis – a city of death”.īut when I ask the groundbreaking DJ Grandmaster Flash what he remembers about his adolescence on Fox Street, not far from the embattled police precinct known as Fort Apache, he says, “It was wonderful. Touring the rubble in 1980, Ronald Reagan compared the neglected neighbourhood to London during the blitz. By the end of the decade, the South Bronx had lost almost 40% of its population. ![]() Whole blocks were reduced to ghost towns as cynical landlords torched their unsellable properties for insurance money. Unemployment and poverty were sky-high, as was crime, overwhelming police precincts and fire stations that were squeezed by austerity. H istory remembers the South Bronx in the 1970s as an urban catastrophe the ground zero of a city in crisis. ![]()
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