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The Come Up

An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop

Author Jonathan Abrams
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On sale Oct 18, 2022 | 544 Pages | 9781984825131
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The essential oral history of hip-hop, from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its reign as the most powerful force in pop culture—from the award-winning journalist behind All the Pieces Matter, the New York Times bestselling oral history of The Wire
 
“The Come Up is Abrams at his sharpest, at his most observant, at his most insightful.”—Shea Serrano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hip-Hop (And Other Things)
 
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Spin

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.

And yet, the stories of many hip-hop pioneers and their individual contributions in the pre-Internet days of mixtapes and word of mouth are rarely heard—and some are at risk of being lost forever. Now, in The Come Up, the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hop’s rise, a multi-decade chronicle told in the voices of the people who made it happen. 
 
In more than three hundred interviews conducted over three years, Abrams has captured the stories of the DJs, executives, producers, and artists who both witnessed and themselves forged the history of hip-hop. Masterfully combining these voices into a seamless symphonic narrative, Abrams traces how the genre grew out of the resourcefulness of a neglected population in the South Bronx, and from there how it flowed into New York City’s other boroughs, and beyond—from electrifying live gatherings, then on to radio and vinyl, below to the Mason-Dixon Line, west to Los Angeles through gangster rap and G-funk, and then across generations.
 
Abrams has on record Grandmaster Caz detailing hip-hop’s infancy, Edward “Duke Bootee” Fletcher describing the origins of “The Message,” DMC narrating his role in introducing hip-hop to the mainstream, Ice Cube recounting N.W.A’s breakthrough and breakup, Kool Moe Dee recalling his Grammys boycott, and countless more key players. Throughout, Abrams conveys with singular vividness the drive, the stakes, and the relentless creativity that ignited one of the greatest revolutions in modern music.
 
The Come Up is an exhilarating behind-the-scenes account of how hip-hop came to rule the world—and an essential contribution to music history.
“A masterpiece in book form. After conducting over 300 interviews over the course of three years, [Jonathan] Abrams has accomplished the incredible feat of detailing the rise of hip-hop straight from the creators of the genre themselves.”—Spin

“Abrams’s beautifully edited book concentrates on hip-hop’s rise, perfectly capturing the excitement of its gathering momentum and regional spread, taking the time to dig deeper than the big names.”—The Guardian

“It’s an extraordinary tale, the story of how a grassroots culture created itself from the streets and became an international force. To his credit, Abrams doesn’t just talk to the architects. He also gets input from the stonemasons, the contractors and the other heavy lifters. It’s the oral history hip-hop deserves as its beat goes on.”—Los Angeles Times

“The Come Up . . . is a riveting account of how rap carried hip-hop culture from obscurity to ubiquity, from disrespected to winning the Pulitzer Prize—and how it should have been getting that respect all along.”—Andscape
 
“An ambitious collection of firsthand accounts of hip-hop’s birth and ultimate rise as the gravitational center of pop culture.”—Okayplayer
 
“Monumental and comprehensive . . . Sourced from years of in-depth interviews, The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop chronicles the culture from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its ongoing reign as the most powerful force in popular culture.”—Rock the Bells

“Jonathan Abrams, for the entirety of his career and regardless of the subject matter, has shown a profound ability to take the words and recollections of others and stitch them together into something big and special. The Come Up is Abrams at his sharpest, at his most observant, at his most insightful.”—Shea Serrano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hip-Hop (And Other Things)

“Hip-hop is a story machine, and Jonathan Abrams is unsurpassed in capturing the best of them. What Please Kill Me did for punk rock, The Come Up has done for hip-hop. These are the tales that made a movement.”—Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

“Abrams set out to accomplish a task that sounds absurd: assemble an oral history of hip-hop from the five boroughs to the Bay and from Memphis to Miami, and the ascendance of everyone from G-Funk to G-Unit. Brilliantly curated and meticulously reported, this book will last for decades.”—Jeff Weiss, founder of Passion of the Weiss

“To say this book is incredible simply doesn’t do it justice. It’s essential—a primary source. Eat this book. Steal this book.”—Cheo Hodari Coker, creator of Marvel’s Luke Cage and author of Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of The Notorious B.I.G.

“It's one thing to say you want to write an oral history on hip-hop. It’s another thing to actually do it. The result is special—even for one of this country’s truly legendary storytellers.”—Justin Tinsley, author of It Was All a Dream
© Nicola Borland
Jonathan Abrams is an award-winning staff reporter for The New York Times. He is the bestselling author of two previous books, Boys Among Men and All the Pieces Matter. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Abrams was formerly a staff writer at Bleacher Report, Grantland, and the Los Angeles Times. View titles by Jonathan Abrams
Lemonade from Lemons

Bronx, New York

1973–­1979

Clive Campbell migrated as a child with his family from Jamaica to the United States in the late 1960s, leaving one country roiled by political instability for another. In Kingston, Campbell had become infatuated with the reggae and dub music that blared from giant portable sound systems, and DJs who toasted or talked over instrumental tracks. Campbell arrived in the Bronx during the reign of feel-­good disco music, which intersected with the civil rights era and the dire financial straits of a New York City that was facing a declining population and labor unrest. Campbell involved himself in the city’s emerging graffiti scene—­which had arrived after originating in Philadelphia—­and assumed the tag name Kool Herc.

On August 11, 1973, Campbell hosted a back-­to-­school fundraising party for his sister, Cindy, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx—­and he is widely credited with birthing hip-­hop on that day. By then, the teenaged Campbell had assembled his own massive sound system, along with an eclectic record collection that included selections from James Brown and the Incredible Bongo Band. At the party, before an appreciative audience of neighborhood teenagers, DJ Kool Herc performed his “Merry-­Go-­Round” technique of isolating and prolonging the breakbeat sections of songs (the drum patterns used in interludes—­breaks—­between sections of melody) by switching between two record players.

DJ Kool Herc became a folk hero in the Bronx as his parties attracted larger and larger crowds. He hosted popular block parties and created Kool Herc & the Herculoids with Clark Kent. Acrobatic dancers known as b-­boys, b-­girls, and breakers (the media eventually labeled them as breakdancers, a term still in wide circulation today) flocked to DJ Kool Herc’s parties to compete in dance circles—­no longer having to wait out lengthy songs for a brief moment to get down. DJ Kool Herc enlisted the help of his friend Coke La Rock, regarded as hip-­hop’s first MC, as La Rock adapted toasting by shouting out the names of friends and encouraging partygoers to dance.

In time, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash joined DJ Kool Herc as Bronx DJs who forged groundbreaking contributions and laid the foundation for hip-­hop to flourish, spread, and evolve.

DJ Charlie Chase (Cold Crush Brothers): The Bronx [in the late 1960s and ’70s] was the epicenter for poverty, the epicenter for kids who were full of energy, who didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t have a lot of activities, didn’t have role models.

MC Debbie D (artist): The backdrop to the South Bronx is poverty-­stricken—­crime, gangs, slumlords, abandoned buildings everywhere. So they had coined the Bronx “The Bronx Is Burning.” And they wasn’t putting money into safe havens for young people. So, with the music outside, you went to a jam, there’s a thousand kids standing there. We ain’t got nothing else to do.

Easy A.D. (Cold Crush Brothers): We were creating something that took up our time and made us feel good and brought us together. You have to imagine walking out your house every day and seeing abandoned cars burnt up, empty buildings, and you’re going to elementary school.

Michael Holman (journalist): A lot of young people are going downtown to see major live acts like [Patti] LaBelle, James Brown, Funkadelic, as well as going to the famous discos, wearing their best clothes, doing the latest dances, and leaving those young punks and all the troubles in the neighborhood behind. What’s left behind is an audience of younger people, teenagers who can do all the dances—­hell, sometimes they’re the originators and are the best dancers.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): A big part of hip-­hop is breakdancing, b-­boying. The dance was around before hip-­hop, the actual dance style was developed from playing soul music and that playlist that [Kool Herc used].

Grandmaster Caz (Cold Crush Brothers): Herc was a mythical figure in the neighborhood. You heard about him before you saw him.

Sadat X (artist, Brand Nubian): I remember Herc being this larger-­than-­life figure, just muscles, with the glasses on. Herc was the commander, putting people in place.

MC Debbie D (artist): When Kool Herc comes out and he starts playing music and then other notable DJs get involved—­[Afrika] Bambaataa, [Grandmaster] Flash, L Brothers—­and they start playing their music. We’re all going to the jams.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): He played the music that we wanted to hear. There was a special playlist of b-­boy songs, breakdance songs—­ I can rename right now about ten of them: “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” by James Brown, “Get Into Something” by the Isley Brothers, “Listen to Me” by Baby Huey, “Melting Pot” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s. You got “Scorpio” by Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band. “Shaft in Africa.” “Apache” by Michael Viner’s Incredible Bongo Band. A couple more James Brown songs you can put in there like “Soul Power” and “Sex Machine” and “Escapism,” “Make It Funky”—­songs like that.

When you playing these songs, this is the time for the b-­boys to do their thing, to create circles of people around them. People were competing inside that circle, they were doing acrobatics and flips and twists and all kinds of routines, and going down to the floor doing the splits like James Brown, doing footwork, like the best dancers I’ve ever seen.

So that was a typical Kool Herc party, and the music was incredible. And of course, he was on the microphone with an echo chamber, “Young ladies, don’t hurt nobody-­body-­body. It’s Kool Herc-Herc-­Herc. Herculoids-­loids-­loids. Going down to the last stop-­stop-­stop-­stop.” It was mystical and magical at the same time. It was disco, but it was ghetto disco.

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five): It was his playlist that all of the other DJs who aspired to reach his level at the time in the Bronx played. That was Kool Herc’s contribution to hip-hop, his playlist.

What would become known as hip-­hop sprang from a foundation of DJs with powerful sound systems who operated around the same time as DJ Kool Herc in the early 1970s. Disco King Mario, who lived one floor above Paradise Gray, who would himself go on to help create X Clan, in the Bronxdale Houses projects, threw some of hip-­hop’s earliest jams with his Chuck Chuck City crew. Disco King Mario and Afrika Bambaataa were both members of the Black Spades gang, and Mario lent equipment for some of Bambaataa’s earliest sets.

Pete DJ Jones, a transplant from North Carolina, was popular in Manhattan club circles. He was the first DJ who many, including Kurtis Blow, ever witnessed working two turntables and duplicate copies of the same record, which become the foundation for DJing, extending the breaks of funk and soul songs. Pete DJ Jones also served as a mentor to Grandmaster Flash.

Brooklyn’s Grandmaster Flowers is recognized as one of the earliest pioneers of hip-­hop for mixing funk and disco records in sequence and throwing massive block parties. Flowers even opened for James Brown at Yankee Stadium in 1969.

They joined others, like Maboya and DJ Plummer, in laying a blueprint for hip-­hop to emerge, but never reaping the attention, adulation, or financial windfall that followed.

Daddy-­O (artist, producer, Stetsasonic): I think sometimes people think that the first time that equipment came out and people plugged into the streetlamps, it was hip-­hop. That’s not true. The first time you’d seen the sound systems, it was people playing disco: Grandmaster Flowers, my boy Pete DJ Jones. And it was the reggae guys that was playing all the Lone Ranger stuff, the Sly & Robbie stuff, Bob Marley and the Wailers. Those were the first sound systems you saw on the street, was disco and reggae sound systems.

Paradise Gray (manager of the Latin Quarter, X Clan): I call my mother the Mother of Hip-­Hop, because my first crate of records came from my living room. She was the one that introduced me to George Clinton, James Brown, Maceo [Parker], Bootsy [Collins], Sly and the Family Stone. So, a bunch of the breakbeats. When I finally heard Herc and Flowers and Bam and all of these guys playing the breakbeats, I had a whole bunch of those records already.

DJ Mister Cee (producer): That was the time when a lot of DJs was getting into the craft of DJing and buying them big kick-­ass speakers—­and I’m saying “kick-­ass” because there used to be a sticker on the speaker that said “Kick Ass.” That was around that time that DJs would play outside and break into a lamppost. Nowadays, there’s an outlet in there. Back then, we would break into the lamppost and splice the wires up and connect to an extension cord. That’s how we would power up.
Copyright © 2022 by Jonathan Abrams. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About

The essential oral history of hip-hop, from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its reign as the most powerful force in pop culture—from the award-winning journalist behind All the Pieces Matter, the New York Times bestselling oral history of The Wire
 
“The Come Up is Abrams at his sharpest, at his most observant, at his most insightful.”—Shea Serrano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hip-Hop (And Other Things)
 
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Spin

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.

And yet, the stories of many hip-hop pioneers and their individual contributions in the pre-Internet days of mixtapes and word of mouth are rarely heard—and some are at risk of being lost forever. Now, in The Come Up, the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hop’s rise, a multi-decade chronicle told in the voices of the people who made it happen. 
 
In more than three hundred interviews conducted over three years, Abrams has captured the stories of the DJs, executives, producers, and artists who both witnessed and themselves forged the history of hip-hop. Masterfully combining these voices into a seamless symphonic narrative, Abrams traces how the genre grew out of the resourcefulness of a neglected population in the South Bronx, and from there how it flowed into New York City’s other boroughs, and beyond—from electrifying live gatherings, then on to radio and vinyl, below to the Mason-Dixon Line, west to Los Angeles through gangster rap and G-funk, and then across generations.
 
Abrams has on record Grandmaster Caz detailing hip-hop’s infancy, Edward “Duke Bootee” Fletcher describing the origins of “The Message,” DMC narrating his role in introducing hip-hop to the mainstream, Ice Cube recounting N.W.A’s breakthrough and breakup, Kool Moe Dee recalling his Grammys boycott, and countless more key players. Throughout, Abrams conveys with singular vividness the drive, the stakes, and the relentless creativity that ignited one of the greatest revolutions in modern music.
 
The Come Up is an exhilarating behind-the-scenes account of how hip-hop came to rule the world—and an essential contribution to music history.

Praise

“A masterpiece in book form. After conducting over 300 interviews over the course of three years, [Jonathan] Abrams has accomplished the incredible feat of detailing the rise of hip-hop straight from the creators of the genre themselves.”—Spin

“Abrams’s beautifully edited book concentrates on hip-hop’s rise, perfectly capturing the excitement of its gathering momentum and regional spread, taking the time to dig deeper than the big names.”—The Guardian

“It’s an extraordinary tale, the story of how a grassroots culture created itself from the streets and became an international force. To his credit, Abrams doesn’t just talk to the architects. He also gets input from the stonemasons, the contractors and the other heavy lifters. It’s the oral history hip-hop deserves as its beat goes on.”—Los Angeles Times

“The Come Up . . . is a riveting account of how rap carried hip-hop culture from obscurity to ubiquity, from disrespected to winning the Pulitzer Prize—and how it should have been getting that respect all along.”—Andscape
 
“An ambitious collection of firsthand accounts of hip-hop’s birth and ultimate rise as the gravitational center of pop culture.”—Okayplayer
 
“Monumental and comprehensive . . . Sourced from years of in-depth interviews, The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop chronicles the culture from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its ongoing reign as the most powerful force in popular culture.”—Rock the Bells

“Jonathan Abrams, for the entirety of his career and regardless of the subject matter, has shown a profound ability to take the words and recollections of others and stitch them together into something big and special. The Come Up is Abrams at his sharpest, at his most observant, at his most insightful.”—Shea Serrano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hip-Hop (And Other Things)

“Hip-hop is a story machine, and Jonathan Abrams is unsurpassed in capturing the best of them. What Please Kill Me did for punk rock, The Come Up has done for hip-hop. These are the tales that made a movement.”—Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

“Abrams set out to accomplish a task that sounds absurd: assemble an oral history of hip-hop from the five boroughs to the Bay and from Memphis to Miami, and the ascendance of everyone from G-Funk to G-Unit. Brilliantly curated and meticulously reported, this book will last for decades.”—Jeff Weiss, founder of Passion of the Weiss

“To say this book is incredible simply doesn’t do it justice. It’s essential—a primary source. Eat this book. Steal this book.”—Cheo Hodari Coker, creator of Marvel’s Luke Cage and author of Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of The Notorious B.I.G.

“It's one thing to say you want to write an oral history on hip-hop. It’s another thing to actually do it. The result is special—even for one of this country’s truly legendary storytellers.”—Justin Tinsley, author of It Was All a Dream

Author

© Nicola Borland
Jonathan Abrams is an award-winning staff reporter for The New York Times. He is the bestselling author of two previous books, Boys Among Men and All the Pieces Matter. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Abrams was formerly a staff writer at Bleacher Report, Grantland, and the Los Angeles Times. View titles by Jonathan Abrams

Excerpt

Lemonade from Lemons

Bronx, New York

1973–­1979

Clive Campbell migrated as a child with his family from Jamaica to the United States in the late 1960s, leaving one country roiled by political instability for another. In Kingston, Campbell had become infatuated with the reggae and dub music that blared from giant portable sound systems, and DJs who toasted or talked over instrumental tracks. Campbell arrived in the Bronx during the reign of feel-­good disco music, which intersected with the civil rights era and the dire financial straits of a New York City that was facing a declining population and labor unrest. Campbell involved himself in the city’s emerging graffiti scene—­which had arrived after originating in Philadelphia—­and assumed the tag name Kool Herc.

On August 11, 1973, Campbell hosted a back-­to-­school fundraising party for his sister, Cindy, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx—­and he is widely credited with birthing hip-­hop on that day. By then, the teenaged Campbell had assembled his own massive sound system, along with an eclectic record collection that included selections from James Brown and the Incredible Bongo Band. At the party, before an appreciative audience of neighborhood teenagers, DJ Kool Herc performed his “Merry-­Go-­Round” technique of isolating and prolonging the breakbeat sections of songs (the drum patterns used in interludes—­breaks—­between sections of melody) by switching between two record players.

DJ Kool Herc became a folk hero in the Bronx as his parties attracted larger and larger crowds. He hosted popular block parties and created Kool Herc & the Herculoids with Clark Kent. Acrobatic dancers known as b-­boys, b-­girls, and breakers (the media eventually labeled them as breakdancers, a term still in wide circulation today) flocked to DJ Kool Herc’s parties to compete in dance circles—­no longer having to wait out lengthy songs for a brief moment to get down. DJ Kool Herc enlisted the help of his friend Coke La Rock, regarded as hip-­hop’s first MC, as La Rock adapted toasting by shouting out the names of friends and encouraging partygoers to dance.

In time, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash joined DJ Kool Herc as Bronx DJs who forged groundbreaking contributions and laid the foundation for hip-­hop to flourish, spread, and evolve.

DJ Charlie Chase (Cold Crush Brothers): The Bronx [in the late 1960s and ’70s] was the epicenter for poverty, the epicenter for kids who were full of energy, who didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t have a lot of activities, didn’t have role models.

MC Debbie D (artist): The backdrop to the South Bronx is poverty-­stricken—­crime, gangs, slumlords, abandoned buildings everywhere. So they had coined the Bronx “The Bronx Is Burning.” And they wasn’t putting money into safe havens for young people. So, with the music outside, you went to a jam, there’s a thousand kids standing there. We ain’t got nothing else to do.

Easy A.D. (Cold Crush Brothers): We were creating something that took up our time and made us feel good and brought us together. You have to imagine walking out your house every day and seeing abandoned cars burnt up, empty buildings, and you’re going to elementary school.

Michael Holman (journalist): A lot of young people are going downtown to see major live acts like [Patti] LaBelle, James Brown, Funkadelic, as well as going to the famous discos, wearing their best clothes, doing the latest dances, and leaving those young punks and all the troubles in the neighborhood behind. What’s left behind is an audience of younger people, teenagers who can do all the dances—­hell, sometimes they’re the originators and are the best dancers.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): A big part of hip-­hop is breakdancing, b-­boying. The dance was around before hip-­hop, the actual dance style was developed from playing soul music and that playlist that [Kool Herc used].

Grandmaster Caz (Cold Crush Brothers): Herc was a mythical figure in the neighborhood. You heard about him before you saw him.

Sadat X (artist, Brand Nubian): I remember Herc being this larger-­than-­life figure, just muscles, with the glasses on. Herc was the commander, putting people in place.

MC Debbie D (artist): When Kool Herc comes out and he starts playing music and then other notable DJs get involved—­[Afrika] Bambaataa, [Grandmaster] Flash, L Brothers—­and they start playing their music. We’re all going to the jams.

Kurtis Blow (artist, producer): He played the music that we wanted to hear. There was a special playlist of b-­boy songs, breakdance songs—­ I can rename right now about ten of them: “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” by James Brown, “Get Into Something” by the Isley Brothers, “Listen to Me” by Baby Huey, “Melting Pot” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s. You got “Scorpio” by Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band. “Shaft in Africa.” “Apache” by Michael Viner’s Incredible Bongo Band. A couple more James Brown songs you can put in there like “Soul Power” and “Sex Machine” and “Escapism,” “Make It Funky”—­songs like that.

When you playing these songs, this is the time for the b-­boys to do their thing, to create circles of people around them. People were competing inside that circle, they were doing acrobatics and flips and twists and all kinds of routines, and going down to the floor doing the splits like James Brown, doing footwork, like the best dancers I’ve ever seen.

So that was a typical Kool Herc party, and the music was incredible. And of course, he was on the microphone with an echo chamber, “Young ladies, don’t hurt nobody-­body-­body. It’s Kool Herc-Herc-­Herc. Herculoids-­loids-­loids. Going down to the last stop-­stop-­stop-­stop.” It was mystical and magical at the same time. It was disco, but it was ghetto disco.

Rahiem (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five): It was his playlist that all of the other DJs who aspired to reach his level at the time in the Bronx played. That was Kool Herc’s contribution to hip-hop, his playlist.

What would become known as hip-­hop sprang from a foundation of DJs with powerful sound systems who operated around the same time as DJ Kool Herc in the early 1970s. Disco King Mario, who lived one floor above Paradise Gray, who would himself go on to help create X Clan, in the Bronxdale Houses projects, threw some of hip-­hop’s earliest jams with his Chuck Chuck City crew. Disco King Mario and Afrika Bambaataa were both members of the Black Spades gang, and Mario lent equipment for some of Bambaataa’s earliest sets.

Pete DJ Jones, a transplant from North Carolina, was popular in Manhattan club circles. He was the first DJ who many, including Kurtis Blow, ever witnessed working two turntables and duplicate copies of the same record, which become the foundation for DJing, extending the breaks of funk and soul songs. Pete DJ Jones also served as a mentor to Grandmaster Flash.

Brooklyn’s Grandmaster Flowers is recognized as one of the earliest pioneers of hip-­hop for mixing funk and disco records in sequence and throwing massive block parties. Flowers even opened for James Brown at Yankee Stadium in 1969.

They joined others, like Maboya and DJ Plummer, in laying a blueprint for hip-­hop to emerge, but never reaping the attention, adulation, or financial windfall that followed.

Daddy-­O (artist, producer, Stetsasonic): I think sometimes people think that the first time that equipment came out and people plugged into the streetlamps, it was hip-­hop. That’s not true. The first time you’d seen the sound systems, it was people playing disco: Grandmaster Flowers, my boy Pete DJ Jones. And it was the reggae guys that was playing all the Lone Ranger stuff, the Sly & Robbie stuff, Bob Marley and the Wailers. Those were the first sound systems you saw on the street, was disco and reggae sound systems.

Paradise Gray (manager of the Latin Quarter, X Clan): I call my mother the Mother of Hip-­Hop, because my first crate of records came from my living room. She was the one that introduced me to George Clinton, James Brown, Maceo [Parker], Bootsy [Collins], Sly and the Family Stone. So, a bunch of the breakbeats. When I finally heard Herc and Flowers and Bam and all of these guys playing the breakbeats, I had a whole bunch of those records already.

DJ Mister Cee (producer): That was the time when a lot of DJs was getting into the craft of DJing and buying them big kick-­ass speakers—­and I’m saying “kick-­ass” because there used to be a sticker on the speaker that said “Kick Ass.” That was around that time that DJs would play outside and break into a lamppost. Nowadays, there’s an outlet in there. Back then, we would break into the lamppost and splice the wires up and connect to an extension cord. That’s how we would power up.
Copyright © 2022 by Jonathan Abrams. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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