I didn’t realize there was a controversy about the origins of the term “hip hop” in the media until Michael Holman contacted me via Facebook. Holman was part of the original downtown scene that included Jean Michel Basquiat and Fab Five Freddy. He’d just started managing the New York City Breakers when I first met him.
I told Andre Grossmann to take a picture of me with Phase 2 when he appeared at my downtown birthday party at Lucky Strike, miles from the South Bronx where he lived. Holman jumped into the photo.
Stephen Crichlow was there, but didn’t make himself part of the picture. I wanted to get Holman’s crew into my film Beat Street, so I introduced Holman to Harry Belafonte. At that first meeting, Holman made a pitch to be the director of Beat Street. Both Harry and I felt he was too inexperienced for a multi-million dollar project, but Harry liked him and signed him on as an associate producer.
Who knows what might have happened though because the arrival of Andrew Davis as director signaled the demise of my script, although my original story is available in Hip Hop: The Complete Archives so any interested parties can dream about what might have been. I wonder if Holman even ever read it because it was largely a warning about the coming-crack-cocaine epidemic just then emerging in NYC thanks to the CIA’s contra-cocaine-connection. Had my film actually been made, it might have made a dent in the devastation caused by crack, which took down many inside the culture.
I was the first journalist to appreciate the importance of those two words, and initiated the push to change the name of the culture from “rap music” to “hip hop” in order to incorporate all aspects of the culture. Holman was way behind me on that.
And he unfortunately took umbrage and decades after the fact happened to discover the words “hip hop” in a 10,000 word interview with Bambaataa published in the East Village Eye likely without any editing which is why he didn’t realize he’d put the words into print for many decades.
When Holman found the words in an old interview, he contacted me to see if it predated my Bambaataa story in the Voice. Now I am massively dyslexic and can’t do numbers and math so I undoubtedly gave him the wrong date off the top of my head. When I published my hip hop journalism is a matter of public record and easily researched. But Holman chose to paint that as some “gotcha” moment to claim I had no integrity because of my “ego” and owed him an apology, while the publisher began announcing that he had “saved hip hop,” because it might have died without his coverage. That was the most delusional statement of all.
One other detail Holman fails to notice is that the Village Voice sat on my story for over six months before publishing it. And when I later released the first book on hip hop culture, I named it “Hip Hop.”
Meanwhile, Holman was publishing a one-shot comic and working on an MTV show, neither of which used the words “hip hop,” so it took him a while to catch on.
Here’s the facebook post where Holman slags me off for having zero journalistic integrity. I seriously doubt Holman ever digested any of my journalism, else he might respect me more, and not so easily slag me off in a silly meaningless feud, while crowing about something he didn’t figure out for decades. And he wasn’t even the first.
The entire episode reminds me greatly of the Bozo who tried to write me out of 420 history. He also crowed about being the first to put the term into print, but was beaten by months by the San Francisco Chronicle. As with Holman, Bozo’s claim ignored the fact Bozo never used the term while I was spreading it everywhere I went.
Such is the fate of a real counterculture journalist. There don’t seem to be many of us. Back in the 80s artists like Keith and Jean were not sucking up to the establishment but attacking it through humor, The reason Jean put Lee Harvey Oswald in his postcards and SAMO sayings is because he knew the story about Oswald shooting JFK was bullshit. Jean and Keith were more interested in exposing the hypocrisy of the mainstream than selling paintings to rich people to put above couches. But then, money changes everything.
Right before Leonard Abrams sold his archives and had a fatal heart attack, he painted this ridiculous claim as his greatest crowning glory on his career and the media lapped it up. By that time I’d already been disappeared and my books shredded and dumped by St. Martins Press.
From Soren Marc:
Actually, however, the Eye was beaten by Collis Davis of the Amsterdam News. Collis Davis’ article was published January 12, 1980. But nearly a year prior, on February 24, 1979, Robert Flipping Jr. used the term in the New Pittsburgh Courier. His use is a little fuzzy, so one might argue that he’s referring simply to the phrase, not a culture, but he does attribute it to “DJ Starsky [sic].” I “discovered” this in 2020, before finding out that the Oxford English Dictionary already cited it.
This comment was posted after I conceded he put the words into print before me and before I read what he wrote about me—SH
Thank you Steven, this means a lot. Though my “hip hop” article came first, I have always considered you the first Hip Hop journalist! Yes, I wrote some of the first articles about hip hop (along with you) in the E.V.E., Art Forum, etc., but I was only given that opportunity to hip people to this new scene, as an IMPRESARIO. YOU were the real journalist, you were the real writer, communicating what this scene was all about in dramatic, articulate prose that helped really tell the story! You have always been that person to me, more than anyone else, and I and the world thanks you.
Your friend and compatriot,
Michael Holman