*MIC CHECK* *TESTING , TESTING 1, 2, 1,2* Alright y'all during the course of a few days beginning right now,(cuz a brotha got shit to do smh) It's time to put faces to contributions, explain origins , revisit who did what and dead myths regarding one of America's favorite genres https://twitter.com/move_over/status/1265053852203614211

It's me, your local Long Island griot and MC, and I'll be correcting the recent historical revisionism regarding who created Hip-Hop and what music it's based off of. You'd have to do some Jedi Mind Trick shit to convince yourself otherwise now lmao: LET'S BEGIN!!

So we'll begin with a definition of Hip-Hop: what is it ? Hip-Hop is defined as- A culture and artform involving four elements: MCing or rapping, DJing or Turntablism , Graffiti and Breakdancing. It has been recorded to have begun in the South Bronx, New York City in the 1970s

I'll be challenging the ahistorical idea that it was one man or one group of non-Black Americans who created the entire genre themselves. While West Indians like Kool Herc played a role, they certainly were not without the help of their Black American comrades and competition

We'll begin with Kool Herc and his 1973 party at 1520 Sedgwick Ave or the "Rec Room" , and we'll discuss how it couldn't have possibly come from one man

DJ Kool Herc, born Clive Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica in 1955, immigrated to the South Bronx in 1967, at age 12. Herc, a long time fan of James Brown, Disco and Funk , first started off in NYC as a *Graffiti artist (we gon revisit this) and threw his first party on 8/11/1973

The party was thrown with the intention of helping his sister younger sister Cindy Campbell raise money for school clothes , as NYC was competitive in everything from fashion to DJing. Kool Herc, 18 at the time, would make his mark along with other DJs in the area.

Kool Herc is believed to have been behind the culmination of DJing, MCing or rapping, Breakdancing and Graffiti , when in all reality the major contribution Herc is responsible is the "break beat" ( you see him flipping James Brown records in the video)

Kool Herc however did not bring DJing nor the Sound System culture to America. What's also associated with DJing which is talking over records, scratching , sound system equipment etc. were already present in America long before Kool Herc immigrated to the United States

To understand the long lasting DJ culture of NYC, we'd have to look at both Herc's contemporaries at the time and his precedents who were Black Americans. As a DJ, he would be surrounded by company all throughout the South Bronx and other boroughs

Now whether or not these DJs were playing Disco and Funk, just like Kool Herc was , their existence proves that Herc didn't introduce DJing to New York and that it had long been a community thing among the city's black population. But we're gonna go older than that too

I'll be beginning with brother Pete DJ Jones, who is a forgotten titan and large contributor to the sound of Hip-Hop as we know it and recorded to have been DJing three years before Herc

Born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1939, Pete DJ Jones migrated to New York City in 1970 to play basketball and get discovered, and there he began throwing parties in restaurants and rec halls in the same year. I'm gonna be quoting from an interview he did before he passed

Also here's what Kurtis Blow, the first solo rap star, had to say about Pete DJ Jones before I begin the quoting

" … I got started as a DJ in 1970. They had just had the first Gramley Morgan game, which is a game between two black schools, and I had just moved here. [This club] had a back room, and I asked the guy there if I could have a party. I rented the room before I got the DJ. "

Q:You know the mixing that you were doing, where did you learn those skills from? Were there other DJs around you doing that?
A: No. I was the first DJ that started running records, and I’ll tell you why. This is the reason. Most of these records were about two minutes long or so

...We didn’t have no TK Records and Salsoul. I was using a mixer that didn’t have a cueing system. I don’t know whether they had mixers with cueing systems, but if they did I didn’t know about it. There were about three other DJs downtown..."

Me, Maboya, Flowers, then later on came DJ Plummer, around ’73. We got all the jobs. We was the names you heard on the radio, WBLS. ".

Q: If you didn’t have a cueing system, what did you do?

A:" I developed a knack so that I could read the grooves with a portable flashlight and see the changes. I’d play a record over and over again, because you didn’t have many hits in those days..."

Q: Mixing, then?
A:You understand the groove part, the beat part of the record?
Q:Yeah, the break.
A: We used to sometimes play ten records with nothing but the beat part. I think hip-hop is nothing but R&B music that took a turn from that..."

Q: When did you start using MCs?
A: I started MCing myself, I used to like talking over the music. You got guys like Kool Herc and Bambaataa that claimed they started hip-hop, they gotta remember that hip-hop emerged from R&B. I had a lot of rappers say they was influenced by me.

Q: When did you meet Kool Herc?
A: I met Kool Herc around ’76. I battled him at the Executive Playhouse. Kool Herc and those guys, they never played outside the Bronx.

[On Herc and others ] : Q: If you credit them for getting it to the world, who would you give credit to for having the idea in the first place?
A: You can’t give it to just one person. I’d say there was at least five to ten DJs who were contributors to the hip-hop scene.

Q: You said that you were using MCs – had you seen other DJs using it?
No. I started off doing it myself, until I realized I had to work too hard to do it. It wasn’t really MCing. It was just yakking. If it comes to putting the rap to a beat...

"..., I gotta give guys like Hollywood, Starski and Eddie Cheeba the credit for putting it to the beat. But if I was talking about just yelling and screaming, well, I was doing that in the mid-’70s. I always had a mic and a mic stand..."

...I was always influenced by radio DJs, like Frankie Crocker, Eddie OJ and all those guys. I don’t know who I influenced; I know Kurtis Blow says I influenced him. "-(which as I just showed you, Blow always showed love and paid homage to Pete DJ Jones til this day)