There’s a huge debate going on regarding the ethnic origins of Hip Hop, mostly driven by an article that appeared in Time magazine many years ago claiming the Latin influences had been ignored, followed by some books and blogs that claim it is solely the creation of Afro-Americans.
A lot of this would not have happened if my book, Hip Hop, the first book on the subject, hadn’t been taken out of print and shredded by the publisher, and had Harry Belafonte not disappeared me off my own film project, which became known as Beat Street.
My book was largely based on hours of taped conversations with Phase 2, who had been in the Ex-Vandals with Kool Herc and Stay High 149. Unlike Africa Bambaataa, none of them were in a gang, so my history of gang influence on hip hop came from Bam, and he wasn’t forthcoming as he left out the Hoe Avenue peace conference that was crucial to changing the vibes. Instead, he veered me toward the killing of a Black Spade called Soulski during a police stop, and this caused the protagonist in my original script Beat Street to be modeled as Soulski’s younger brother.
Had Bambaataa told me about the Ghetto Brothers, that protagonist would likely have been modeled on a young relative of Black Benji, and the film would have opened with Benji’s murder and the subsequent Hoe Avenue peace conference.
So that’s the problem with my early hip hop research: no Benjamin Melendez, founder of the Ghetto Brothers, the person who presided over the peace conference made famous by the 1979 film “The Warriors.” Too bad the film got the story so twisted.
Not known to anyone until decades later, Benji was a crypto-Jew, meaning he descended from Conversos in Spain who had converted to Catholicism in public but remained Jewish in private. Many years after he ended the NYC gang wars, Benji fully embraced that culture.
Benji had powered his peace movement by holding free jams in the parks featuring his band, a Bronx version of Sly and the Family Stone whose performances always included lots of conga drumming. I’m sure they also must have had a deejay when the band wasn’t playing, but I wasn’t there.
If you look at the songs Herc deployed to create the hip hop soundtrack, most feature conga solos. Apache was very popular with street gangs before Herc made it a featured break. But the greatest b-boy anthem was “It’s Just Begun” by Jimmy Castor Bunch featuring Lenny Fridie Jr. on congas.
Castor had his first hit on Smash Records in 1966, “Hey Leroy, Your Mama’s Callin’ You.” The melody was calypso-inflected, the groove was Latin and the liner notes were bilingual. Many of the songs Herc got credit for breaking, including “It’s Just Begun,” had been spun earlier by John Brown at the Plaza Tunnel, a disco that opened two blocks from Yankee Stadium in the biggest tower around.
Herc’s parties were run entirely by blacks, and featured entirely black b-boys, but there was already a Latin influence in the music being played and fifteen percent of NYC Puerto Ricans identify as black. Benji and the Ghetto Brothers were responsible for birthing a new cool that ended the static and got the youth out of fighting and into dancing, but they never capitalized. And very quickly, the disco at the Plaza was closed.
The real West Side Story in the sixties was the conflict between Harlem and Spanish Harlem: Spanish versus Black.
Jerome Robbins visited high school dances at both cultures while working on the musical and he noticed the blacks did a lot of line dancing. That trend started with the Stroll, which appeared in the late 1950s and involved making two lines, one male, one female, and having one from each end form a couple and stroll together down the entire length of the line. Very quickly, a song named “The Stroll” was recorded by the Diamonds to capitalize on the new dance craze. The Stroll seems to have spontaneously erupted on American Bandstand in December 1957, discovered by local Philly teens. The famous scene in American Graffiti used the 1957 hit that had soared to the top of pop and r&b charts. But in Philly, the teens originally had used a different song: C.C. Rider.
C.C. Rider was a traditional 12-bar blues first recorded by Ma Rainey in 1924 that quickly became a standard on the Chitln’ circuit. The version that inspired Philly teens, however, was by Chuck Willis. Soon Link Wray’s Rumble was added to the list of Stroll favorites and that song was also used in American Graffiti, during the dramatic race at the end. The Stroll required a relatively slow beat to achieve maximum impact.
Soul Train debuted in Chicago in 1970, founded by Donald “Don” Cortez Cornelius as the black American Bandstand. In the fifth episode, the stroll was introduced and became a regular feature, although Cornelius changed the name to “Soul Train Line.” He also dropped the coordinated footwork and made the dance more freestyle. The following year, the show went national and instantly began exerting tremendous influence across the nation. The Stroll may have worked its way through the deep south long before reaching American Bandstand.
It’s fascinating the Stroll seems to have originated inTrinidad and Tobago in the 1880s. East Indians represent the largest ethnic group on those islands, followed by Africans and then Europeans. Indian and African dance merged with a European influence, creating the bélé, a fusion of African dance with the French minuet. In the 1980s, the initial footwork used by many b-boys to open their routine bears a strong resemblance to the opening steps of the bélé.
Calypso originated in Trinidad and was introduced to North America in 1910, but did not become popular until Harry Belafonte released “Calypso” in 1956. It is most noted for its syncopated duple meter and improvised vocals.
Robbins didn’t find much line dancing going on at the Spanish Harlem high school dances, however, at least none he wrote about. The stars of the dance on this side of town were males who danced alone using acrobatic moves. This was a competition and may have laid some seeds for what later became known as “battle rock.”
“They do dances that I’ve never seen before, evolving their own style and approach,” Robbins wrote in a letter to Tanaquil Le Clercq, in February 1957. A form of battle rock was also well-known in Trinidad, with male dancers sometimes using wooden knives or sticks as props.
But an even earlier form of battle rock had surfaced in Brazil in 1789. It was eventually known as capoeira and it likely began as a form of martial arts masquerading as a dance. The first mention is a judicial document that describes it as “the gravest of crimes.” There is evidence of a similar dance emerging in Kaduna, Nigeria, in 1959.
Hybrid vigor is used to describe cross breeding in plants, but it also pertains to cross-breeding in culture. It only takes 50 people to create a cultural shift, and if they come from different backgrounds, that shift can be super-charged.
All the kids in NYC were influenced by West Side Story, and they had the real role models to study with. When the second wave appeared at the end of the decade, it was mostly divided on ethnic lines, which forced the sides apart. But eventually, Benji brought all sides together in celebrations that influenced the rise of hip hop. Sadly, Benji never got credit because Bam left him out of the story, maybe because Bam Bam was at the Hoe Ave. peace conference and not him.
Benji had more swagger than anybody else in the city after he began fronting a Latin/funk/garage band. The original line-up included Benji on lead vocals, Benji’s brother Robert on rhythm guitar, Benji’s cousin Victor on bass, Chiqui Concepción on congas, David Silva on lead guitar, Angelo Garcia on bongos, and Franky Valentin on timbales.
Benji was channeling epic vibes and throwing epic free jams where thousands danced all night, super charged by Ghetto Brothers power. Ending the gang wars after the death of his best friend had supercharged Benji. This should be considered the real birth of hip hop. The gangs were still around, and still fighting, robbing and shooting, but after the peace conference, that lifestyle lost its allure and was no longer cool. The gangs began downsizing and dissolving into crews, and the crews began creating hip hop.
Although the Black Spades had been wary of the peace conference, and only sent their warlord Bam Bam, and today Guru feels its importance is overblown, the Spades would soon merge with the Ghetto Brothers. Benji and Guru both fully supported the pivot to legitimate community service, away from gangsterism.
The first element of hip hop to emerge was writing and it was pioneered by a teen of Greek origins, who put his nickname and street number into a “tag.” Taki 183 got fame first but may have been preceded by Julio 204. They were soon followed by Stay High 149 and countless others.
The cultural apartheid approach to history doesn’t work for me and reminds me greatly of Hugo Martinez, the first outsider to attempt to exploit NYC graffiti. Hugo’s United Graffiti Artists involved all races, but he favored the Puerto Ricans and gave them special preference despite Phase and Bama being the most talented. The group broke up largely because of Hugo’s manipulations to push the Spanish kids to the forefront and claim NYC graffiti was largely a Spanish-American thing.
The cultural apartheid approach also explains why after Harry Belafonte requested my original hip hop interviews be given to the Schomberg library, they declined to invite me to a party held for the anniversary of Beat Street, and much later, when I requested the interviews back, their lawyer gaslighted me and claimed they didn’t have any such interviews, although Jeff Chang told me he’d read them at the library.
The Schomberg lawyer also ridiculed my claim that these interviews represent “the holy grail” of early hip hop journalism. The Schomberg treated me savagely, and that was likely at the instigation of Belafonte. I assume this is because I am not black. Cultural apartheid.
The revisionists who claim hip hop was created by blacks and not influenced by any other cultures often pinpoint James Brown as the inspiration for b-boy culture. While it is true that the Twins, two of Herc’s favorite b-boys, had Brown as their primary inspiration, the greatest b-boy at Bronx River, Cholly Rock, cites Fred Astaire and the Latin Hustle as his primary influences.
In order to create primacy in the historical narrative, Bambaataa backdated the origin of his Zulu Nation a year prior to Cindy’s birthday party. Cholly admits that is incorrect. He also admits that the common belief that Bambaataa ended the gang wars is also incorrect. Proper credit for that goes to Black Benji (who died for peace) and Yellow Benji, who organized the Hoe Avenue Peace Conference.
In fact, b-boy culture did start to emerge before Cindy’s birthday party, but it wasn’t at Bronx River or at Sedgewick, it was at the Plaza Tunnel.
Four years later Nick Cohn wrote a New York magazine article on a new dance culture among Italian-Americans in Brooklyn, and a year later that article was enshrined in the film Saturday Night Fever, which caused a million discos to open around the world, sounding a death knell for small live-music venues.
In the early days, the deejay reigned supreme, but quickly, the best dancers took command and held the center of gravity until the solo rappers arrived to secure that spotlight. (Busy Bee was the first rapper who wasn’t also a deejay).
Casanova Fly stood out as the best rapper/deejay. When he discovered there was already a crew of former Black Spades calling themselves the Casanova Crew, he shortened his name to just “Caz.” The Casanovas later provided security for Flash, although it sometimes seemed like Flash and the Furious were intimidated by their security, so perhaps they were really working for Ray Chandler, the promoter who ran the club where Flash built his audience.
Caz could easily win a battle against other deejays as he could out-rap, out-spin, out-mix everyone. It was at a famous battle that someone shouted out, “Grandmaster Caz!” and it stuck.
At the time Beat Street was being made, the Furious had already split up because Flash called out Sylvia Robinson on getting a share of publishing rights. Mel sided with Sylvia so Flash got dumped. In order to mask this transition, Mel changed his name to Grandmaster Melle Mel.
My script for Beat Street had initially been built around the just-released “Message,” which was a re-make of a rap Melle Mel had put on Superrappin’. It was some of the most inspired rap lyrics at the time and began with “a child is born with no state-of-mind, blind to the ways of mankind.” But living in the South Bronx traumatized that child, and eventually led to his being found hanged to death in a prison cell.
In literature, this is known as “naturalism,” and it was pioneered by Emile Zola in 1880, which greatly influenced Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Stephen Crane, Jack London and Clifford Odets.
Chekhov and Odets were two of my biggest influences when I decided to become a playwright while in college.
My script was a re-make of West Side Story, which was a re-make of Romeo and Juliet, and revolved around a group of teens striving to get a record deal. There was beer drinking, weed smoking, teenage sex, random violence, and vandalism in the subway system. The ending involved the protagonist writing “The Message” as an epiphany shortly after his best friend died in a fire in the tunnels, while his other crew member descended into crack addiction and jail.
It was slice-of-life based on months of research and the real events told to me by Caz, Phase, Futura, Cholly, Theodore, Sisco, Willie Will, and many others.
The script was designed not just to introduce America to the splendor of a new youth culture born out of the nation’s most notorious slum, but to warn America of a coming tsunami of crack addiction. It was about the power of creativity to overcome adversity. In that sense it was romantic and not naturalistic.
Imagine my surprise when Belafonte fired me off my own project, and when I saw the film for the first time, all drugs had been removed, every word spoken was phony, not a single voice sounded like someone from the South Bronx, and not a single line I wrote made it into the final cut, just the characters names and some threads of Ali’s accident in the tunnel. I still hold out hope one day the real script will get made. You can read it in my self-published book, Hip Hop: The Complete Archives.
So the cultural apartheid faction can continue their revisionism, but I will always believe hip hop was an expression of hybrid vigor and the gathering of people and ideas from many cultures. And credit does not fall on one person, one deejay or one anything but on all the people who contributed in any way.
What defined hip hop music was complete disregard for the disco and soul hits being played on the radio. In this way, it resembles the origins of punk rock, which lay in the best of the sixties garage bands. In both cases the songs were unknown and never played on radio stations. But they had an intensity and authenticity that surpassed many of the mainstream hits of the day.
The punk rockers and hip hoppers collided in the East Village in the early 1980s and that supercharged everything. We were detested by outsiders and dismissed as fads. And yet, we contained a fire that would surpass the soft mainstream and replace it with something harder and fiercer. Eventually, that trend had to go too far.
Today, it’s all about becoming the most popular with the biggest circle of followers, but in the 80s, it was more about creating something cooler than the mainstream. We became repressed minorities by choice. But once our creation became embraced by the mainstream, everything changed.
Bambaataa also seemed to fail to mention his beats were made by white music composers. Arthur Baker and John Robie I think are relevant in the roots of hip-hop. Under the name C-Bank Robie wrote the first Freestyle hip-hop track that predates Shannon by atleast a year. Or maybe some would call it Electro. The track is called One More Shot. Apparently a bond was formed by Baker and Bambaataa for shared love of the group Kraftwerk which was formed in 1970 I believe. Anyways in the early 1980s a lot of the Latin influences returned to the genre never really went mainstream due to gatekeeping I believe.