Hip-hop celebrates 50 years of history, from Bronx beginnings to global glory

By Karu F. Daniels and Leonard Greene, New York Daily News

Remember Rappin’ Duke? duh-ha, duh-ha

You never thought that hip hop would take it this far

— Notorious B.I.G.

It was simple, really. Take a drum-laden beat, say, James Brown’s “Soul Power,” or Chic’s “Good Times,” lace it with some clever, rhyming lyrics — Mercedes, young ladies ― blend the track, smoothly, into itself over and over again through speakers the size of a small refrigerator, and there you have it, the beginnings of hip hop.

It was complex, really. Take a frustrated, unheard generation of young people, a post-’60s culture of poverty and police brutality, mix in creativity and untapped potential, color it with edgy fashion and impossible dance moves, place it under a banner of subway train graffiti, and there you have it, the beginnings of hip hop.

It was all those things: a feeling, a sound, a culture, a movement, a memory, a dream, a time. It made you think, it made you cry, it made you dance, it made you high, it made you clever with rhyming puns, you picked up a Bible, you picked up a gun.

Whatever it was, whatever it is, we know we can’t label it or put it in a box. It’s as big as rock ‘n’ roll and as smooth as a jazz ensemble, and it has been around for 50 years.

Oh, there are some who might dispute the number, say it happened in a different time or a different place.

But the universal consensus is that five decades ago, in the rec room of an apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx, 18-year-old disc jockey Clive Campbell threw a back-to-school party on Aug. 11, 1973 with his younger sister, Cindy, who wanted to earn extra cash for back-to-school clothes.

Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, kept the music flowing with vinyl records on not one, but two turntables, which wasn’t so unusual at the time in the disco era of continuous music where songs flowed from one tune to another.

But this was something different, revolutionary, even. Herc had two turntables, but they both had the same record. He looped the percussion portions back into each other to keep the beat alive.

Minds blown.

“They were all from the hood. They were regular people,” said Bronx native Peter Pankey, who scored rap hits as Peter Gunz. “But they were stars to be.”

Gunz became a star himself on the success of the Bronx anthem “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)” with rap partner Lord Tariq, and later for appearances on the VH1 reality series “Love & Hip-Hop: New York.”

Gunz remembers the baby steps of the movement, when hip hop was in its infancy, before the record deals and radio play. It was block parties and basements, and milk crates filled with 12-inch records in the trunk of someone’s car.

Gunz calls himself a disciple of an early rapper, Curtis Brown, better known as Grandmaster Caz, who met Kool Herc at a block party in 1974. Both a DJ and a rapper, Caz has admitted that he stole new music equipment during the New York City blackout of 1977.

Caz also played a controversial role in a seminal hip hop turning point. In 1979, hip hop group The Sugar Hill Gang broke through with rap’s first official record, “Rapper’s Delight,” backed by a sample from Chic’s disco hit “Good Times.”

According to hip hop lore, one of the three rappers had lifted his rhymes from Caz, but Caz never got credit — or paid. Still, the record, and the genre, took off.

“It makes me proud,” Gunz said, reflecting on the history. “My mother thought it was a passing fad. I played instruments as a kid. When I started rapping, she thought it was going backwards. It was mumbo jumbo, mumbo jumbo. But their music wasn’t always saying s–t either.”

Just like a slick verse needs a dope beat to build on, hip hop itself needed a foundation on which to break ground. That, too, happened in the Bronx, in 1971, when gang leader and Ghetto Brothers co-founder Cornell Benjamin, 25, — Black Benjie to everyone but his mother — was brutally beaten to death with a pipe while he was on his way to negotiate a peace deal between two street gangs.

His death was expected to escalate tensions between warring factions, but instead it led to the historic Hoe Avenue Peace Treaty summit, and an important truce among dozens of gangs that lasted more than a decade until the crack epidemic.

By permitting rivals to travel between neighborhoods without fear of reprisals for crossing gang boundaries, the truce helped set the stage for the development of hip hop — a creative movement that developed into the worldwide phenomenon.

Gunz remembered hip hop’s early days, but he reminds celebrants that the movement was about much more than the music.

Whether it was Public Enemy saying “Fight the Power,” or N.W.A. saying “F–k tha Police,” hip hop had a way of holding up a mirror to America.

And, if what Public Enemy rapper Chuck D said was true, that hip hop was “the CNN of the ghetto,” then its earliest correspondents were Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Flash, another Herc disciple, assembled a rap quintet which set the social commentary stage with “The Message,” a song replete with lyrics about pimps, panhandlers and “junkies in the alley with a baseball bat.”

“When ‘The Message’ came out, it was like, we made it,” Gunz said.

So, what is hip hop?

“That depends who you ask,” said media executive Chuck Creekmur. “Hip hop is the elements, not just rap, but breakdancing graffiti, deejaying. The music is the most profitable part of all those elements.”

Creekmur, the CEO of AllHipHop.com, a self-described child of the ‘80s, watched from the front row as the industry took off.

“It felt like there were no limits to what we could accomplish, even in fighting racism,” Creekmur said “By the ‘90s, hip hop was all-powerful. It was great. hip hop was so new and so innovative and so unconventional that you really didn’t know what to expect.”

But the profits came at a cost. Instead of taking on the establishment, rappers started taking on each other, instigated by industry execs who raked in money off various diss tracks.

The bottom fell out in the mid-’90s, when a war between east and west coast rap rivals claimed the lives of hip hop’s two biggest stars, Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., at the height of the industry’s gangster rap phase.

There were other violent and deadly setbacks along the way. In 2000, rapper 50 Cent was nearly killed when he took nine bullets in a drive-by shooting in front of his grandmother’s house in South Jamaica, Queens.

Run-DMC deejay Jam Master Jay was killed two years later in his Queens recording studio after cutting several drug dealers out of a cocaine transaction, prosecutors said.

And in 2019, rapper Nipsey Hussle, 33, was gunned down outside his South Los Angeles clothing store after a beef with a former friend.

Hussle had just released his major-label debut album, “Victory Lap,” and was nominated for his first Grammy Award for best rap album before he was killed.

Still, hip hop has endured.

“Well, I think the reason why is because it’s always been the music of the youth,” said pioneering rap star Roxanne Shante, who, at 14, blazed a trail for women like Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Salt-N-Pepa and Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott.

“There’s always a younger fan and always another fan that’s coming, that’s just being born. So because hip hop has always been the soundtrack of the youth, hip hop will never age,” Shante said. “It’s going to always be around as long as someone is being born. As long as we create life, we create hip hop.”

Shante, 53, born Lolita Shante Gooden, is among the stars on the lineup of hip hop 50 Live at Yankee Stadium on Friday, Aug. 11. In hip hop’s birthplace, the genre’s biggest names will come together for a legendary, celebratory concert.

A “Queens of hip hop” set will feature Eve, Lil Kim, Remy Ma and Trina, and additional performers will include: T.I., Fat Joe, Common, A$AP Ferg, EPMD, Ghostface Killah, Lupe Fiasco and Slick Rick.

A “Pillars of hip hop” set will feature Kool Herc & Cindy Campbell, Grandmaster Caz, Kurtis Blow, Melle Mel, Roxanne Shante, Scorpio and The Sugar Hill Gang.

Peter Gunz will be there, too.

“Who would have thought a kid from the Bronx would be on stage in Yankee Stadium performing my songs,” Gunz said. “It gives me chills. It still hasn’t hit me yet.”

Creekmur said he’s still living the dream.

“The universal belief was that it was a fad and wouldn’t last this long,” Creekmur said.

“Nobody thought it would. I never thought it wouldn’t. I poured my life into hip hop. I never ever saw it ending.”