![]() ![]() “Coming up from North, you always had a hustle,” Holiday remembers. Frank started working to get money early on, but at home, the power of art, music and the spoken word would offer him a brief glimpse at his future. Growing up around 15th and Lehigh, Holiday’s childhood neighborhood was full of music and people trying to make it. With Disco Rat and Captain Boogie | courtesy of Frank Holiday Speaking with WXPN for this piece, Holiday’s power of recollection is sharp and encompassing as he gave vivid details about this crucial era in which hip-hop culture in Philadelphia was born. North Philly-born MC / radio host Frank Holiday was there in those early days, rolling with Philly pioneers like Strike Force, Disco Rat and Captain Boogie. By the end of 1979, when rap music was still alien to most of the country, Philadelphia had established a vibrant local scene and produced no less than three regional rap hits: Jocko Henderson’s “Rhythm Talk” and “Rocket Ship,” as well as Lady B’s “To The Beat Y’all.” While much of Philly’s early hip-hop history has been criminally under-documented, we do have one vital source to utilize when piecing together the story: memory. Blessed with existent rhyming, DJing, graffiti and dance cultures prior to Herc’s breakthrough in 1973, Philadelphia was ripe territory for hip-hop to take root and blossom locally. Located roughly 100 miles south of the Bronx, it would not be a stretch to say that the city of Philadelphia was hip-hop’s first major stronghold outside of New York. People had been rhyming over music, DJing, dancing and writing on walls forever, but hip-hop codified these disparate elements into something new, and rap music became the vehicle to deliver hip-hop to the rest of the world. When the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” became a smash hit in 1979, the metaphorical genie had been let out the bottle. With its heavy focus on big songs released by major label acts and easy-to-digest narratives, these celebrations have felt good, but ultimately lack the complexity and rigor that the culture deserves.įollowing hip-hop’s emergence in the Bronx, there was a significant incubation period between the culture’s birth in the summer of 1973 and when rap music started showing up on records in 1979. Charge it to the culture’s to symbiotic relationship to the music industry or not, the fact remains that the story being told as part of hip-hop’s 50th has been incomplete at best. While all the ceremony, performances, documentaries, and celebrations honoring the culture’s pioneers have been truly lovely to see, the fact remains that the 50th anniversary has inevitably flattened the story of hip-hop’s birth and subsequent journey toward becoming a global culture. With this summer marking the 50th anniversary of DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell’s seminal party at 1520 Sedgewick avenue in the Bronx, New York, there’s been an unprecedented interest in the history of hip-hop. Through the magic of DJing and sampling, hip-hop music not only acknowledges the artifacts and sounds of the past, it uses them as raw material to build something new. ![]() By nature of the music that it produces, hip-hop is a culture that is constantly engaging its own history.
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