![]() ![]() This month, in celebration of this important milestone (hip-hop, not me getting the LL Cool J CD) the Criterion Channel has released a series of films both about, and influenced by, hip-hop culture, ranging from the earliest known example ( Wild Style from 1982), through the 90s and into the 21st century. The author with the aforementioned greatest hits. If you want to see me perform every line to “ Mama Said Knock You Out,” I gotchu. Almost thirty years later, I still have it in my collection, and while it’s not my favourite album of all time, it just might be the most important. ![]() Eventually, when I’d saved up enough cash to buy my first CD, we went to HMV in Square One, a mall conveniently located across the street from our apartment building, and with my own money, I bought LL Cool J’s All World: Greatest Hits. But over the next few months, I began discovering more and more artists through MuchMusic, which my parents very graciously let me watch. Imagine that being your first exposure to hip-hop! I couldn’t find the CD single for the track (remember those?), and the album that “California Love (Remix)” was on was way too expensive (why so many pricey double albums, Pac?). So we did what any self-respecting kids did in the 90s in Canada: we sat in their cavernous living room that only had a couch and a big screen TV and watched MuchMusic (for any of our international friends, that’s the equivalent of MTV, back when it still played music videos).Īnd then, it happened, the catalyst for my lifelong infatuation with hip-hop culture: on tv, unfolding before me, in all its raging, Mad Max-themed glory, was the video for “ California Love”. My parents’ friends had a son who was a few years older than me, and he was forced to hang out with this scrawny, curly haired little dweeb. I was around 7 years old and we were at a family friend’s house deep in the heart of Mississauga, Ontario. Rap was so formative for me that I can clearly remember the exact moment I first heard it. It made it so that “home” was not an abstract, unattainable concept: it was five feet away on my CD racks. It gave me a sense of community, of place, even though I’d never been to New York, LA, Atlanta, Detroit, or any of the regions that my favourite MCs cited. While the genre and culture developed slowly throughout the 70s, Kool Herc’s August 11 th performance is often considered the pivotal moments in its foundation.īuilt on pillars known as the Four Elements of Hip-Hop-MCing/rapping, DJing/turntablism, Graffiti, and Breakdancing, with Knowledge often considered the fifth element-hip-hop went on to become…oh what the fuck am I talking about, you know what hip-hop became, what it is, and how it is, without a reasonable doubt, one of contemporary culture’s most important artforms.įor me, writing this article and celebrating this moment was both very important, and very personal: as an immigrant kid from a war-torn country that literally no longer exists, hip-hop became my first musical love, a beacon towards understanding what it meant to be from somewhere, of somewhere. And thus hip-hop, for all intents and purposes, was born. Someone (was it Theodore Puccio? Coke La Rock? Sources vary, ok?) got on the mic and began calling out people’s names in the crowd and performing rhymes, ergo, rapping. He used two turntables and a mixer to extend the drum-heavy “breaks” in certain songs, allowing attendees to dance over isolated percussive interludes. DJ Kool Herc, deejayed his sister’s back-to-school party in the recreation centre of 1520 Sedgwick Ave. ![]() On August 11 th, 1973 (it was 50 years ago today…), Clive Campbell, aka. ![]()
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