Thousands of people celebrated 50 years of hip-hop late into the night on Friday at a mega-concert in the Bronx given by pioneers of the genre such as Run-DMC, Nas and Snoop Dogg, in a Yankee Stadium with an overheated atmosphere.
For more than eight hours, New Yorkers and tourists celebrated in demonstrative joy five decades of a music born on 11 August 1973, whose immense influence would irrevocably shake up culture and the music industry.
It was on the ground floor of a council flat at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Bronx, that Jamaican-born DJ Clive Campbell aka DJ Kool Herc broke new ground by spinning the same record on two turntables. This isolated sequences of rhythms and percussion and made them last through the speakers, prefiguring the “breakbeat”, an essential component of hip-hop.
During the marathon concert which started after 01:00, the stars of the genre followed one another with one hit after another, such as Run-DMC and his “It’s Tricky”, drawing howls from an overjoyed audience.
Another veteran, Nas, played a series of tracks from his seminal album “Illmatic”, including “The World Is Yours” and “N.Y. State of Mind”. A cheer went up from the crowd when the New York icon closed his set by inviting Lauryn Hill onstage to sing the track they collaborated on “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)” as well as his rendition of “Killing Me Softly”, originally sung with the Fugees.
Snoop Dogg, meanwhile, chose some of his fans’ favourites, including “The Next Episode”, “Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang” and “Gin And Juice”.
Legends of the Hip Hop scene (L–R): Nas, Lauryn Hill, Clive Campbell. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
This concert was the culmination of a series of events, with New York having seen a number of cultural initiatives blossom throughout the summer, from graffiti and breakdance sessions, to “block parties” and concerts.
For some critics and fans, giving an official date to the birth of a style of music, which in fact already existed before 11 August 1973, seems a little arbitrary. But for decades hip-hop has been reviled and censored by an industry it helped profoundly shape, in a country where rappers have produced massive hits and had a huge impact on everything from music and fashion to language and dance.
While life was bitter and violent in New York, the first block parties offered young African-Americans an escape from poverty and discrimination. Hip-hop then spread to the four corners of the planet, and most countries now have their own scene.
