"There's scant documentation of Cindy and Herc's parties to help discern the truth. Index cards promoting a few of them survive, but the widely replicated one purporting to plug the Aug. 11 event is now understood to be a reconstruction, not the genuine article. Rob Swift, a renowned DJ who has taught hip-hop at The New School in New York, has been collecting audio and video artifacts of early parties since he was a child. 'I have never seen a video or heard a recording of Herc employing this Merry Go Round technique,' he told me. 'There's no visual proof. There's no audio proof. It's just narratives. It's dogma.' Meanwhile, there's abundant evidence of Flash's work. Says Swift: 'Looping a break…the whole idea of using the turntable like a drummer uses the drum kit, that comes from Flash.' Not to mention that Flash's crew of MCs were among the first to create the more elaborate, tag-team rhyme routines that, along with Flash's turntablism, define the genre."
Dan Charnas at The Wall Street Journal asks, "Was Hip-Hop Really Invented 50 Years Ago?"
No comments:
Post a Comment