Week 11 (11.01-17.01.2016) Hip Hop is 40!

Imagine living in Bronx, New York. The year is 1973. There are countless, violent gangs, blood spill everywhere and the situation is getting so bad the police are afraid to intervene. There is a man known as Afrika Bambaataa – he is the leader of one of the most fearsome and brutal gangs, an organization called the Black Spades.

He’s one of the most influential people responsible for the music as we know it today. He is also the one who managed to unite black communities and found a way to stop mindless violence, giving people the possibility to express themselves freely and showing them how to turn their emotions into art. How is that possible? It all began on August 11, 1973 at a block party he rocked with his buddy, a DJ known as Kool Herc.

(source: bbc.com)

They wanted to try something fresh and new. Instead of playing full tracks, DJ Kool Herc was playing just the instrumental “breaks” – he did that by using the same record on both turntables at the same time, and looping those short parts in various songs which always made people go crazy. Doing exactly that, he started something even his enemies didn’t want to stop. And this is how hip hop was born.


There’s one item it’s hard to imagine urban music without. It’s the one and only Technics SL-1200 MK2 turntable.

(source: djworx.com)

Tom Terrel, a respectable journalist from the National Public Radio in the States, in the mid-2000s called the 1200 “the most important musical instrument of the last two-and-a-half decades”. (source: djrankings.com) You heard it right – not Fender Stratocaster, neither any of Les Paul guitars - but the 1200 itself, a turntable – something that wasn’t even designed as an instrument in the first place. A few years later the Rolling Stone magazine mentioned the same thing. This is how influential the MK2 was.

Nowadays 1200s can be found in each and every single night club all over the world, and there’s even one SL-1210 on display at London Science Museum, as as one of the pieces of technology that’s shaped the world we live in. And although the production has been discontinued in 2010 due to market conditions, there are already plans of bringing it back on the shelves later this year. For more than quadruple of the original price, mind you.

Hip Hop is 40 live at IDA World DJ Championships from DJ Woody on Vimeo.

One last thing I want to show you is a recording from this year’s IDA World Championship hosted in Cracow a month ago. I highly recommend watching the video and listening to Woody’s set even if you are not a fan of hip hop music – this is a prime example of one of the world’s best turntablists performing at the highest level. Also the story he tells during the performance serves a great educational value as well. The interesting and unique thing about this live act is that it’s also a visual experience – he is mixing both music and video clips at the same time, using nothing but 2 turntables and a digital mixer. He’s one of the first (and still very few) performers to do that – but who knows, this might be just the future of DJing. See for yourself what it’s all about in the video above.

And why am I telling you all this stuff? Next time you hear somebody talking bad things about hip-hop music and saying that it’s nothing but mindless spitting about easy chicks and being flat out drunk, or alternatively about shooting, killing and blowing stuff up - you can be sure they haven’t got a slightest idea what they are talking about. There are 4 core elements of Hip Hop as culture movement – breakdancing, graffiti, DJing and MCing. KRS-One, a famous old school rapper known also as “The Teacha” says that those are all about peace, love, unity and having fun. That’s also to make you aware of the fact that today’s so called “hip hop” as we know it has pretty much nothing to do with real hip hop – and I’m not trying to say it’s bad and we shouldn’t listen to it or anything like that - we just should be aware of the difference.