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2009 is a year to celebrate : Hip Hop is 30 years old. Gosh, yes it is, 30. Back in the 70’s, there seemed to be no future for the first proto rap records pressed in the New-York tristate, a time when stampers were roaring disco-funk edits day after day, while the Paradise Garage was erecting the music-cum from the doom of that decade-to-end. Paul Winley and his daughters’ record for some (Rhymin’ and Rappin’, 1978), Fatback and his King Tim III (Polydor, 1979) for others, Sugar Hill Gang and Rapper’s Delight for the mainstream audiences… the first rap record became a controversial issue among the forefathers. Doesn’t matter! Rap and Hip Hop music were born and that was the main thing, word. And it took only a few years and a few clever transformations for Hip Hop to gain popularity.

Beyond the remote disputes Hip Hop brought about, the precursors’ inventiveness and the strength of a people with their back to the wall boosted a culture in search of its limits. The 1977 blackout and the South Bronx fires that broke out in the same year gave rise to the first dancers’ impulses, the streams of water coming out of the fire hydrants and the local actors’ sense of a need to regain ground. With the socio cultural inheritance of a world divided into gangs and communities, the non-intervention of the State and the families’ breaking up, the Bronx in the seventies became the emasculated cocoon of a Hip Hop which still knew only very little of itself. The block parties appeared at that time and developed their own structure in the middle of Jerome Avenue, Sedgwick Avenue, 174th Street and 176th Street.

The block parties began to emerge, that’s the turning point. Information about DJs and MCs, champions of a dubious but so danceable funk-rock, began to circulate by word of mouth. Vocals were exemplified by such artists as James Brown, Gil Scott Heron, The Last Poets, and break dancing by others, vinyl of god, wax from Jimmy Castor Bunch, Rare Earth or The Incredible Bongo Band. That cosmogony was galvanised into action in the Bronx of the Reagan era and the economic crisis in that New York arena. Step into, the Guru said: BBQ, bloody-bricked projects, the block parties, or neighbourhood parties, have spread into many subcultures today. For that ‘cosmic oven’  which produced some incredible ‘musical bread’ combining jazz, funk, disco, reggae, rock, the street has become the ideal experimental breeding ground.

Indeed, besides mercantile phenomena and technological developments, Hip Hop as a funky dream of a bloodsucking disco beam, emerged in block parties, skating pools and in gyms as a way to get out of the cyclic Savage Skulls -Ghetto Brothers- Spades, that’s to say to get out of the pain due to the rival gangs that used to control the projects. The gang members said to themselves : ‘How about becoming a DJ?’, ‘How about setting up a dancers’crew?’, ‘And there would be gals as well?’. With the help of style, chicks teasing, fun and competitions, invitations to dance became more frequent, Pete DJ Jones, Herc, Bam and Flash in battles, Soulsonic Force, Jazzy Jay, Fab 5, Red Alert, Frosty Freeze & Rock Steady Crew, bboys and Fly gals on their knees, backs…head! Stomp ya feet, here come the Block party era, bro.

‘Competition’, ‘cypher’, ‘circle’ and ‘dance’ have always been closely associated to the meaning of the word ‘Hip Hop’. Redefining the borders, moving southward, putting down your fly cases in Manhattan clubs, Negril, Roxy… The street as a hip hop playground has become a regrettably outdated concept today. However, the street sound systems and the parties which evolved spontaneously around them do have a future and will continue their rise into the top of new millennium. Seen: kids poppin’ in Kinshasa, Kwaito vixens in Jobourg, boxes packed in Trenchtown, the kuduru-rap rhyming and punchlined lyrics from Lagos to Luanda…B- boys and b-girls are breaking worldwide, from left to right, north to south. The verbal and body fighting duels in Africa, Che Guevara shoulder-tattooed cumbieros in Columbia, krump & bounce in New-Orleans, the musical expression, the dozens have been absorbed and reinvented around the world and seemed to have globalized into many subcultures worldwide… Poverty and despair, first degree of cultural re-invention? Get out and Move your back, street, finally, could be your musical future.

Lucas Blaya for Grandcrew

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