We begin our class on African American Cultures Online--- Digital Blackness--- by centering “the breakbeat.” The breakbeat is where Hip Hop begins and it is what shapes the sub-genres of electronic music, including deep house, electro, and drum and bass. The story is now legendary. On August 11, 1973, Clive Campbell (known as Kool Herc) was the DJ for a party for his sister, Cindy, to raise money for back-to-school clothes and supplies. They booked the recreation center in their apartment complex at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx (New York) and charged women 25 cents and men 50 cents. Kool Herc’s DJing at this party with his newly invented double turntables birthed Hip Hop: splicing and extending the instrumental bits of the records that his dancing crowd liked the best, especially the drum breaks. The sample/the remix, the rhythm, and sound of Hip Hop come from this moment and it was a technological breakthrough in its time. Given the culture’s ongoing respect for “digging in the crates” for music at a party and the political need to recover histories/records that have been deliberately kept hidden, it seems most appropriate that we start with the Breakbeat as a model for techno-cultural apparatuses giving Black folx their histories and memories back.
The Breakbeat: A Black Technocultural revolution
Part I: Watch all 3 videos below ( we saw some IN CLASS) to center Kool Herc for January 22.
under 2 minutes
4 minutes
29 minutes (listen to a much as you like)
Part II: Watch all 3 videos below (about 20 minutes total). Follow the assignment on the syllabus for January 22.