Break Beats in the Bronx

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C., Jr. Ewoodzie
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Symbolic Boundaries ◽  
The South ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
New Evidence

The origin story of hip-hop—one that involves Kool Herc DJing a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx—has become received wisdom. But Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. argues that the full story remains to be told. In vibrant prose, he combines never-before-used archival material with searching questions about the symbolic boundaries that have divided our understanding of the music. In Break Beats in the Bronx, Ewoodzie portrays the creative process that brought about what we now know as hip-hop and shows that the art form was a result of serendipitous events, accidents, calculated successes, and failures that, almost magically, came together. In doing so, he questions the unexamined assumptions about hip-hop's beginnings, including why there are just four traditional elements—DJing, MCing, breaking, and graffiti writing—and not others, why the South Bronx and not any other borough or city is considered the cradle of the form, and which artists besides Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash founded the genre. Ewoodzie answers these and many other questions about hip-hop's beginnings. Unearthing new evidence, he shows what occurred during the crucial but surprisingly underexamined years between 1975 and 1979 and argues that it was during this period that the internal logic and conventions of the scene were formed.

Creating Conventions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Ewoodzie
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
The South ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
Vital Part

If Part One of this book described the beginnings of a new entity, this second part describes how it coalesced. If the former showed how sites of difference developed and how proto-boundaries formed, the latter discusses how a certain set of relations and proto-boundaries became longer lasting. Chapter 3 argues that boundaries become more durable when an internal logic develops within them. It shows that some conventions were intentionally introduced from within the scene; some came from inside the scene but were the result of accidents; some came from outside but were intentionally incorporated; and some were imposed on the scene from changes in the surrounding context. The empirical details of these arguments about the making of hip hop include an exploration of how scratching was invented; how security crews became important; how MCing emerged as a vital part of South Bronx parties; how hustlers became part of the scene; and how DJs and MCs competed with one another for recognition in the South Bronx. Further, I show how, with the entrée of new actors, certain attributes of the emerging entity became standard while others died off.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Ewoodzie
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
The South ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
The World ◽  
Rock N Roll

The first section provides includes an assessment of what can be added to our understanding of how hip hop started. It points especially to areas for in which more data are needed. It also provides sketches of how one might use the theoretical framework developed in this work to study the evolution of hip hop beyond the 1970s. The second section concerns how the theoretical arguments in this book can go beyond the world of hip hop and be put to use in studies of the birth of similar entities, such as other musical forms (rock n’ roll or jazz), professions, academic disciplines, racial groups, and nations. The final sections of the chapter presents the substantive implications of this work. As opposed to the popular narrative that portrays life in the South Bronx during the 1970s as the quintessence of social and personal disorganization, the story of hip hop shows that, at least among youth, the South Bronx was a place of creative vibrancy with its own form of social order. It argues that, if we look closely, we shall see that other American ghettoes also exhibited (and continue to exhibit) such vivacity.

Crate Digging Begins at Home

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Global Art ◽  
At Home

Many scholars, music journalists, and hip hop heads have discounted the diversity of ways women helped create the now global art-form known as hip hop. One of these overlooked labors involves the cultivation and passing on of a black and Latina feminist listening praxis through record collecting and selecting. This chapter contributes to black feminist scholarship dedicated to moving hip hop historiography from the critical but critically well-worn streets into the more woman-centric and therefore often marginalized spaces of the South Bronx—those living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, hallways, stores, and stoops, where black women and Latinas not only participated in early hip hop, but helped to bring it into sonic being. Through archival evidence, rhetorical analysis, and an oral history, “Crate Digging Begins at Home” moves toward the interconnected goals of reconceiving gender in hip hop historiography, rethinking the figure of the “mother” in popular music studies and record collecting culture, and documenting the selecting practices of Black and Latinx women.

scholarly journals Battling in the Bronx: Social Choreography and Outlaw Culture Among Early Hip-Hop Streetdancers in New York City

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imani Kai Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
The South ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Life Lessons ◽  
Social Choreography ◽  
The Impact

This article closely examines oral histories of b-boys Aby and Kwikstep, b-girl Baby Love, and poppers Cartoon and Wiggles, and the social choreography necessary to navigate the streets of the South Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s that has an indelible link to four core battling principles as articulated by 1970s b-boy Trac2: survivalism, strategizing, nomadism, and illusionism. By comparing and contrasting foundational elements of battling techniques with life lessons about growing up in the Bronx, the comparison signals the impact of “outlaw culture” within hip-hop, and the counterdominant sensibilities taught in battle cyphers.

Sampling Myth

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Appert
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
The Other ◽  
The South ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
The Social ◽  
Musical Gesture ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis

This chapter traces how the stories people tell through and about hip hop produce diasporic connections. It introduces two fundamental and interlinked origin myths that are central to how music means in Senegalese hip hop (Rap Galsen). One connects hip hop to griots and indigenous oralities; the other centers on the South Bronx and urban marginalization. It argues that analyzing hip hop within specific local musical histories complicates frameworks of resistance in global hip hop studies. Rather than objectifying the sounds of hip hop or reducing them to a medium of resistance, it approaches hip hop meaning through an ethnographic analysis of musical genre that examines the social significances of sound and musical gesture. It shows how hip hop’s aural palimpsests relate to strategic practices of memory.

Race, Gender, and the Pursuit of Recognition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Ewoodzie
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Early Years ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
And Gender

Chapter 5 concentrates on the role of race and gender in the pursuit of recognition. Details about the role and influence of women in the early years of hip hop have mostly been ignored in previous works, but this chapter shows that women were significant to the internal logic of the scene. Exploring the rise and fall of The Mercedes Ladies, the first all-female DJing and MCing crew, we see that the masculine orientation of the scene limited how much symbolic capital could be accrued because the most important social networks in the scene (e.g., those of party promoters, club owners, and security crews) were dominated by males. This chapter also explores the rise of Charlie Chase, a popular Puerto Rican DJ, to demonstrate how race mattered in the pursuit of symbolic capital. Even though all young people in the South Bronx neighborhoods, including non-blacks, were invited to the parties, not all could, without opposition, become famous performers. This was because the most desirable role in the scene, being a performer, was reserved for blacks, while non-blacks who attempted to cross this boundary faced some resistance.

South Bronx DJs vs. Other DJs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Ewoodzie
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
The South ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Skill Sets ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

This chapter’s first section, introduces two new actors, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, both of whom followed in the footsteps of Kool DJ Herc. It provides their biographical portraits and discuss how they became established DJs in the South Bronx. It present the different skill-sets they brought with them. It further discusses the importance, at least for Herc and Bambaataa, of graffiti writing. The chapter then takes the reader to Harlem, Brooklyn, and Queens to examine the DJing scene in these other locales. The stories included here, for the most part, have never been published, and thus have never been part of popular narratives about how hip hop emerged. Nevertheless, they are crucial because they illuminate the social worlds against which the South Bronx DJs defined themselves. The final portion of the chapter identifies the bases on which the South Bronx scene opposed itself to those of other parts of the city: (a) break-centered DJing versus song-centered DJing; (b) bigger, more established, and more lucrative venues versus smaller, less established, and less lucrative venues; (c) dancing with a partner versus competitive break dancing; (d) twenty-one-and-older audiences versus twenty-one-and-under audiences; and (e) formal attire, including suits and dresses, versus less formal attire, including jeans and sneakers.

Flow

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Ohriner
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Voice Flow ◽  
Computational Music Analysis

Originating in dance parties in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip hop and rap music have become a dominant style of popular music in the United States and a force for activism all over the world. So, too, has scholarship on this music grown, yet much of this scholarship, employing methods drawn from sociology and literature, leaves unaddressed the expressive musical choices made by hip-hop artists. This book addresses flow, the rhythm of the rapping voice. Flow presents theoretical and analytical challenges not encountered elsewhere. It is rhythmic as other music is rhythmic. But it is also rhythmic as speech and poetry are rhythmic. Key concepts related to rhythm, such as meter, periodicity, patterning, and accent, are treated independently in scholarship of music, poetry, and speech. This book reconciles those approaches, theorizing flow by integrating the methods of computational music analysis and humanistic close reading. Through the analysis of large collections of verses, it addresses questions in the theories of rhythm, meter, and groove in the unique ecology of rap music. Specifically, the work of Eminem clarifies how flow relates to text, the work of Black Thought clarifies how flow relates to other instrumental streams, and the work of Talib Kweli clarifies how flow relates to rap’s persistent meter. Although the focus throughout is rap music, the methods introduced are appropriate for other genres mix voices and more rigid metric frameworks and further extends the valuable work on hip hop from other perspectives in recent years.

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