Rap Music, 20/20
ABC News - Rap Music, 20/20
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Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Emerging in New York in the late 1970s, Grandmaster Flash is credited as one of the foremost innovators of Hip Hop DJing as an art form. By backspinning, scratching, mixing and otherwise manipulating vinyl records in search of the “perfect beat,” Flash helped pioneer using the turntable as a musical instrument to create breakbeats, the backbone of any Hip Hop song. Along with the group the Furious Five, Flash came to national prominence in 1982 with the seminal Rap hit “The Message” – a track that with its chilling social commentary changed Hip Hop forever, retooling its image as good-time “party...
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DJ Kool Herc
(b. 1955) A Jamaican native who moved to New York City’s Bronx borough at the age of 12, Kool Herc is widely credited as the originator of Hip Hop. Herc (given name Clive Campbell) came to prominence in the early 1970s, when he began throwing dance parties in the rec room at his family’s apartment complex in the South Bronx – at the time a blighted, crime-ridden neighborhood. Noting a spike in crowd energy during the instrumental breaks on the Funk and Soul records he spun, Herc came up with the technique of extending the break by playing two copies of...