Abstract
This chapter demonstrates that, while the symbolic art of graffiti remains limited by its essentially indirect presentation of freedom, its immediately palpable presentation was created by Hip Hop’s DJs and breakers, whose revolutionary acts of self-governing bodily control and self-discovered feats of skill provided sensible proof of the essential freedom that grounds and guides all artistic creation. By effectively making spirit flesh through the corporeal display of self-mastery in hitherto unimagined feats of skill deployed in “battles”, fought within “cyphers” ritually formed around the performers by their devout audience, Hip Hop’s pioneers created nothing less than what Hegel identifies as a classical “religion of art” that unites aesthetic objects (DJs and dancers) and their adjudicating public (cyphers) into a consciously self-determining, ethical community.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Fricke and Ahearn, 285–295 for the fascinating story of this essential document.
- 2.
1982 which, as we shall see, makes it nearly coincidental with the dissolution of “Classical” Hip Hop culture.
- 3.
As Houlgate puts it, sensuous creation “in which the human spirit is fully revealed in and as bodily form, represents, according to Hegel, the purest aesthetic ideal” (Introduction to Hegel, 221).
- 4.
Compare Etter , “art will exhibit an ideal of freedom that ‘real life’ does not, due to the ‘contamination’ of chance and other exigencies” (45).
- 5.
KRS-One also speaks of graffiti’s “effort to brighten up and electrify one’s environment” as the transformative gesture at Hip Hop’s foundation (Gospel, 442, emphasis added); and Grandmaster Flash speaks of seeing walls where “colors explode, drip, drift, smash, clash, bleed, and crackle with energy fields” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 30, emphasis added).
- 6.
Compare Kaminsky , for whom the classical “Greek artist had to know the kind of human actions and attributes which gave man godlike qualities. The question, therefore, arose: What are those actions and attributes which give godliness to the human form?” (70).
- 7.
Cf. Kool Herc, quoted in Fricke and Ahearn, “Jamaican music was a big influence on me, because there was a lot of big sound systems they used to hook up and play on the weekends. I was a child, ya know, lookin’, seein’ all these things going on, and sneakin’ out of my house and seein’ the big systems” (25). Elsewhere, however, Herc denies this influence, suggesting he was too young to actually attend soundclashes. For general discussions of the relations between soundclash and dub culture and the birth of Hip Hop, see Chang, Can’t Stop, 21–39, or Klive Walker, Dubwise: Reasoning from the Reggae Underground (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2005), 233–256.
- 8.
In my view, the most detailed, expansive and compelling history of DJ culture, especially concerning the varied forms of New York dance music that surrounded Hip Hop, is Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (New York: Grove, 2014). The relationship between the park disco DJs, which emerged from the club scene, and the subsequent Hip Hop culture demands much more historical and musicological research. Bambaataa , for example, was trained as a DJ under his fellow Black Spade member Disco King Mario and—although Bam’s emphasis on a shifting collage of obscure breakbeats certainly marks a strong break from his mentor, and his name would seem to belie the point—cases have been made that Herc’s discovery may have been made, at least in part, by Mario in 1972. While I think the balance of currently available evidence shows that Hip Hop marks a radical shift from a street scene largely continuous with the disco clubs into a self-contained and -determining culture with its own aesthetic style and rules, it would be hard to deny the influence of the former on the latter. For what it’s worth, many of the principal disco DJs, at least from outside the Bronx, give their side of the story in Founding Fathers (2009; directed by Ron Lawrence and Hassan Pore).
- 9.
As he would later put it, while at first he “was into [his] graffiti work, […] that’s where [he] graduated from the walls to the turntables”, quoted in Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, The Record Players: DJ Revolutionaries (New York: Black Cat, 2010), 168.
- 10.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 70.
- 11.
Fricke and Ahearn, 25.
- 12.
KRS-One, Gospel, 99. Compare Toop, “A B boy classic like James Brown’s ‘Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved’ […] is an up-tempo call and response routine between Brown and singer Bobby Byrd. For most whites at the time, this was the most meaningless type of James Brown release, but for those young Blacks still living in areas like the Bronx and Harlem every phrase had a message” (66); and Dan Charnas, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (New York: Penguin, 2010), “Herc began to spin the songs he knew would drive them crazy. They didn’t want to hear the smooth songs […] played in the discos […] They liked funk , music that sounded raw and angry like James Brown” (16).
- 13.
Fricke and Ahearn, 26.
- 14.
George , hip hop america, 15. Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, for example, was released in 1973 and was influential on varied New York dance scenes; but, again, the actual extent of these influences is difficult to determine, save that of James Brown, who is cited by all early breakers as a key precedent. Much of the scholarship concerning the nature of the dance focuses on the second generation of breaking, after 1976, rather than the earliest dancers who attended Herc’s parties. Aprahamian’s current research program should help resolve some of these vital and as-yet underexplored questions.
- 15.
Jorge “Popmaster Fabel” Pabon, “Physical Graffiti: The History of Hip-Hop Dance”, in Forman and Neal, eds. That’s the Joint, 57–61 (59). This is an excellent and concise—if not uncontested—history of breaking from one of the finest practitioners and stewards of the art.
- 16.
Fricke and Ahearn, 41.
- 17.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 79.
- 18.
Fricke and Ahearn, 45.
- 19.
Quoted in Chang, Can’t Stop, 79–80. Elsewhere, he recalls, “Well the break thing happened because I was seeing everybody on the sidelines waiting for particular breaks in the records” (Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 172). Ewoodzie , 17–8, suggests that this transition happened at the very first party, over the course of the evening as he moved away from reggae. Others contest the idea that Herc began with Jamaican music, given that most of his musical education occurred in the Bronx, and hold that his break-based technique developed more gradually over multiple events. As with so much of early Hip Hop culture, further historical work and debate is needed.
- 20.
Ibid., 78. His “big record back then, and nobody had it then, was James Brown, ‘Give it up and Turnit A Loose’ [sic]” (Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 170); the rarity of even quite popular records is an indication of the relative deprivation—economically and otherwise—of the Bronx at the time.
- 21.
Ficke and Ahearn, 96.
- 22.
This involves studying the density of the grooves cut into the vinyl. To watch this process in action, see DJ Z-Trip’s visit to a record store in the documentary Scratch (2001; directed by Doug Pray).
- 23.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 79. Herc did this with different breaks, mixing diverse and often contrasting sequences with each other, although he did (usually unsuccessfully) “try to make it sound like a [single] record” (Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 172); he also only played the breaks a few times in one go before moving back to full records, to please everyone at the party (173). But the breakers, who would soon form the centre of the action, would always wait for the breaks to move, and thus those sections increased as parties inevitably grew. Flash recalls first hearing of Herc through breakers: “‘It’s his records. He breaks ‘em up and takes those motherfuckers apart, piece by piece. My man got everybody out on the dance floor ‘cause he was playing the best parts and movin’ on to the next jam. No even waiting for the first one to end. I got mad tired, I was bustin’ so much movement’ ” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 43).
- 24.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 79. This break-frenzy, catering to this new form of dance, is the true foundation of Hip Hop DJing. DJ Disco Wiz, for example, recalls, “I gravitated to the breakbeats. Being an ex-b-boy, I really embraced that. My sets were pretty intense and violent. It was just one breakbeat after another” (quoted in Katz, 28).
- 25.
Although Herc insists that the “term B-boying came in after I started to play, as I called them the b-boys” (Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 167), there are still controversies as to the true origin and meaning of the term, which some claim actually began in reference to the geographic home of those who danced on the break, that is, “B(ronx)-boys”, cf. Joseph Schloss, Foundation: B-boys, B-girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The placement of the b-boy name and style at this early juncture in the development of the culture has also been (aggressively, as its title suggests) contested by Thomas Guzman-Sanchez, Underground Dance Masters: Final History of a Forgotten Era (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012). Because so much of this history remains somewhat unclear, I stick to the mainstream account, here. I have also opted to primarily use the term “breakers”, both because it coheres with the fact that the dance was primarily called “breaking” during the period in question, and for its gender inclusivity, which reflects the strong and as yet underappreciated presence of women in early Hip Hop dance. Today, in part due to the backlash against the 1980s coinage of “breakdancing” to spur the fad, “b-boying” is by far the preferred term by practitioners, and thus “b-boy” is often (although this is changing) used to refer to both b-boys and b-girls within the contemporary scene. For an account of some possible differences between b-boy and b-girl styles, see Nancy Guevara “Women Writin’ Rappin’ Breakin’”, in W. Perkins, ed. Droppin’ Science’, 49–62 (58), and for a solid primer on the varied gender issues and contestatory feminist discourses in the wider culture, in particular in rap music, see Gwendolyn D. Pough, Elaine Richardson, Aisha Durham and Rachel Raimist, eds. Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (Mira Loma, California: Parker Publishing, 2007). On gender issues in the first decade more broadly, see Ewoodzie, 139–51; and, again, watch out for forthcoming work by Aprahamian .
- 26.
Fricke and Ahearn, 31.
- 27.
Seeing Herc perform, Grandmaster Flash quickly realized “that in his heart he wasn’t about the individual songs. To Herc, a DJ set was one continuous piece of music” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 74).
- 28.
Graffiti writer Phase 2, speaking in the documentary The Freshest Kids (2002; directed by Israel). Originally referring to the sudden eruption of something negative (as in, “Why you breakin’ on me?”), it quickly came to name the explosive moves that went off during the Merry-Go-Round.
- 29.
Schloss, Foundation, 19.
- 30.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 102.
- 31.
Cf., Trac 2, speaking in The Freshest Kids: “All the breaking and stuff was considered underground, until Kool Herc brought everything out into the open, and that was like, say, ’74–75. All the underground stuff, all the in-house, all the hallway dancers, and all the house party dancers were brought out to the street, and the more they took it to the street, the more nationalities got involved in it; it was no longer an Afro-American thing”. Compare Grandmaster Flash’s impressions from his first Herc party: “There must have been a thousand people getting down to his music. Folks from four to forty, sweating and bouncing, breakin’ and popping, doing the pancake and getting buck wild. But every single head was doing the exact same thing—bouncing up and down to this guy’s jams. This cat the scene locked down! Another thing: nobody was fighting. I mean nobody was swinging fists or pulling pistols, and there must have been six different gangs representing that night! […] That’s how it went until six in the morning. No cops breaking it up, no gang fights turning it loose; just everybody doing their thing, having fun, and riding the beat” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 47–9).
- 32.
Speaking in From Mambo to Hip-Hop: A South Bronx Tale (2006; directed by Henry Chalfant). Pioneering MC Melle Mel claims that, even as Hip Hop began to move into nightclubs, “You couldn’t do indoor parties in the summer […] ‘cus no one would come inside” (Ewoodzie, 93)
- 33.
This division is, of course, somewhat too simple, given Hegel’s account of the “inner” contribution involved in hearing, as distinct from, for example, sight. While there isn’t room to rehearse the details, here, I discuss this at length in Hegel’s Philosophy of Language, Ch. 2.
- 34.
Foundation, 19, emphasis added.
- 35.
Ibid., 21. Katz highlights the subjective contribution in the very isolation of the break, “Hip-hop DJs (and the b-boys and b-girls they catered to) did not just hear breaks as tantalizing; they heard them as fundamentally incomplete, as fragments that demanded to be repeated” (16).
- 36.
Schloss, Foundation, 19.
- 37.
Ibid., 21.
- 38.
Ibid., 19.
- 39.
Speaking in Scratch. Robert Farris Thompson, “Hip Hop 101”, in W. Perkins, ed. Droppin’ Science, 211–19, compares breaking to forms of Haitian ritual dance “where cassé (‘break’) stands for the deliberate disruption of the beat of the drums, which throws the dancers into ecstasy” (215).
- 40.
Kaminsky, 74.
- 41.
Frick and Ahearn, 31, emphasis added.
- 42.
Hager, Ch. 3. Grandmaster Flash, for example, describes his first experience with breaking as seeing a friend “shuffling his feet in the strangest way ever, sliding backwards like he’s walking on the surface of the moon” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 38).
- 43.
Thompson, 218. He also takes up the aforementioned trope of the breakers’ “body lightning” (211); many breakers, DJs, and eventually MCs would also refer to their ability to “shock the house”.
- 44.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 118.
- 45.
Schloss, Foundation, 11.
- 46.
This, in fact, was the theme of the earliest Hollywood depictions of Hip Hop, where professional dancers come to learn new modes of movement from “street” performers. See, for example, Flashdance (1983; directed by Adrian Lyne), or Beat Street.
- 47.
Schloss, Foundation, 19.
- 48.
Rutter, 31.
- 49.
William Eric Perkins, “The Rap Attack: An introduction”, in Perkins, ed. Droppin’ Science, 1–45 (14).
- 50.
Katz, 39.
- 51.
Ibid., 16.
- 52.
Ibid., 39.
- 53.
Using different breaks back to back and without headphones to cue them, for example, meant that he rarely kept time. His successor DJ AJ, for example, discusses the “severe” nature of Herc’s beat mixing in the VH1 series And You Don’t Stop: 30 Years of Hip-Hop (2004; directed by Dana Heinz Perry and Richard Lowe), and Herc recreates his early technique in first episode of the documentary series The Hip-Hop Years (1999; directed by David Upshal).
- 54.
Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 177.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 72.
- 57.
Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 177.
- 58.
One technique involved adding a headphone output to the two-turntable set-up, so that the break on one record could be cued back to the start while the other played. These were literally glued onto his rig, to which he eventually added a third turntable and finally a drum machine, from which we get the term “beat box”; all of these, of course, would eventually become standard parts of a DJ rig. Much of his earliest gear, however, was gained by “going into the backyards and looking for electronics stuff, and looking for burned out cars, and looking for capacitor and resistors” and other parts to creatively reassemble (ibid., 178). While most scholars credit Flash with the addition of the cross-fader—and some, most famously KRS-One, have even credited him with inventing it—in recent years participants in the original scene have made the case that this gear was not only available for purchase by DJs at the time, but that it was brought to the Bronx by Kool DJ Dee, whose role in the early development of Hip Hop (as with Disco King Mario) demands more research. Flash did, however, inventively find ways to construct such tools from spare parts.
- 59.
Flash vividly explains his early experiments, reasoning and process in The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 53–81, and there are several excellent DJing tutorials by him circulating on YouTube.
- 60.
Flash also takes, and is often given, credit for the discovery.
- 61.
Edwards, 42.
- 62.
This is pace, for example, Rose : “At a time when budget cuts in school music programs drastically reduced access to traditional forms of instrumentation and composition, inner-city youths increasingly relied on recorded sound” (34). Acquiring, to say nothing of mastering, the stereo equipment necessary to become a DJ in the Bronx was far more difficult than sticking it out in what remained of school music programmes, or playing instruments inherited from relatives; and DJs like Flash recall having to buy records based on covers alone, or other non-musical information, in hope of finding breaks no-one else had discovered yet (cf. The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 65). As Katz notes, there were far “easier ways to get into music” (65), as demonstrated by the fact that “DJs put huge amounts of time and energy into building their sound systems […] scour[ing] the city’s many vacant lots for any bit of abandoned equipment” that could be refurbished, as well as intense effort in learning how to bring them back to life (49), while refusing the remaining traditional instruments on offer to focus on acquiring massive and cumbersome record collections whose tracks would mostly remain un-played, and which would feature many duplicate copies. The prevailing “assumption that necessity was the mother of hip-hop” thus misses the fundamental role played by the essential “creativity [and] agency of individuals”, of which it offers palpable and compelling evidence (65, emphasis added). Roughly the same argument is made throughout both Ewoodzie and Schloss , Making Beats, and The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash provides a stirring first-person account of the intense, self-determined and dedicated work of the early Hip Hop DJ.
- 63.
Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 177. In fact, Flash is explicit that he consciously sought to correct the flaw in Herc’s parties: “I noticed the crowd: if they were into a record they would have to wait until he mixed it, because it was never on time. And I didn’t understand what he was doing, at the point, because I could see the audience in unison, then in disarray, then in unison, then in disarray. I said, ‘I Like what he’s playing, but he’s not playing it right’ […] So the thought was to not have disarray, to have as little disarray as possible” (178). In his memoir, he ties this to his other great love: discerning the inner working of electronic gadgets, claiming he doesn’t “know which sent me higher—the music or the mystery of how it played” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 8). As I discuss more fully in the conclusion, it is indeed curious that the conscious, aesthetically expressed drive for skilled mastery of one’s environment and oneself that is continually both demonstrated and voiced by Hip Hop’s pioneers is so frequently elided by scholarly, as well as popular, discourse on the culture.
- 64.
Ruminations, 89.
- 65.
Mr. Freeze speaking in The Freshest Kids. Compare to Rock Steady Crew leader Crazy Legs, speaking in Bboy: A History of Breaking (2016; directed by Marc-Aurèle Vecchione): “The main thing for a b-boy back then was to practice and battle .”
- 66.
Toop, 60. Flash describes his lamp-jacking technique in The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 61.
- 67.
As Cold Crush Brothers DJ Charlie Chase recalls, “We made a lot of mistakes because we were learning on our own—we didn’t have any teachers. Like everything else in this business of hip-hop, we learned on our own, nobody taught us” (Fricke and Ahearn, 167).
- 68.
Gospel, 499.
- 69.
As b-boy Anthony Colon argues “The main thing is that hip-hop, breaking […] is about the people” (quoted in Schloss, Foundation, 40). Ewoodzie also reminds us “there was no inherent value in the breaks [Herc] played other than that assigned by the audience. In a sense, the audience made Herc special” (48, emphasis added).
- 70.
Ewoodzie , 45.
- 71.
More on this in Chap. 6. Evidently, Herc would eventually also pepper his sets with snippets from groups like the Last Poets, although this may have been due to their driving, polyrhythmic breaks.
- 72.
Ewoodzie, 45.
- 73.
Ruminations, 89. Compare to Westbrook, who defines Hip Hop as “A culture that thrives on [both] creativity and nostalgia” (64). Of course, many of the key breaks (e.g. the “Hip Hop national anthem”, “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band) were drawn from contemporary, rather than older, records. They were almost always, however, sonically similar to the funk music found in the record collections of many parents. Flash’s memoir details the link between growing up around breaks and seeking them in more recent records, and emphasizes the distance between Hip Hop’s soundscape and that of the softer black dance music of the 1970s, disco: “Disco gets that old feeling running through my muscles and nerves again. My head is spinning with the crazy, romantic fantasy of this late-night scene. Everything about it has me spinning except for one thing: the most important thing of all. The Beats. Disco is most definitely not homemade. Disco DJs play the whole song. Disco DJs don’t mess with the beats” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 93).
- 74.
KRS-One, Gospel, 580.
- 75.
As Chang summarizes the thought of Afrika Bambaataa, “Consciousness did not come from the unmasking of social forces, but from having a true reckoning with one’s god within. […] If you are as gods, Bambaataa seemed to say, then it follows that you are just as capable as I am to make this new world.” (Can’t Stop, 106, emphasis added).
- 76.
Ibid., 75. A fuller version of the quote from B-boy MAEZ reads: “Back in the days, you always had a meaning for your name. Like, some kids write a graffiti name, but it has no meaning. For us, we had deep meanings for our names. There was a reason we wrote it. Because of Bruce Lee [and] martial arts, “Master at Eternal Zenith” meant: all the time, you have to be tip-top”.
- 77.
Ibid. As Ewoodzie notes, “Hip-hop performers earned a name based on their role at parties” (137, emphasis added).
- 78.
Compare to the discussion of gold chains in later rap fashion in Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2000), 199.
- 79.
George, hip hop america, 157.
- 80.
Compare the preceding quotes by Hegel to the words of legendary NYC airbrush artist Shirt King Phade, explaining why people gravitated to novel designs by him and other “street entrepreneurs” during the emergence of Hip Hop: “When times are bad, a lot of people tend to gravitate toward art. Art takes your mind to another place”, speaking in Fresh Dressed (2015; directed by Sasha Jenkins).
- 81.
Schloss, Foundation, 78–9. For an example, see Popmaster Fabel’s description of the manufacturing of the “fat laces” for sneakers in Fresh Dressed.
- 82.
Elena Romero, Free Stylin’: How Hip Hop Changed The Fashion Industry (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012), 15. As she writes, fashion in the culture “was like a b-boy battle in the sense that it was a competition to win the title ‘best-dressed’ like best dancer” (14).
- 83.
Compare Hazzard-Donald, for whom modern “African-American popular cultural creation is […] driven by a […] tendency toward embellishment referred to as the ‘will to adorn’” (“Dance in Hip Hop Culture”, 221), grounded in their imposed social location; she also describes some of the fashion shifts in the early culture (227). Perhaps the best visual record of the years of Hip Hop adornment (although it tends towards the latter part of the decade and after) is Jamel Shabazz, Back in the Days (New York: powerHouse Books, 2001).
- 84.
See, for example, Fab 5 Freddy’s comments in The Freshest Kids, or Schloss, Foundation, 115: “The battle aspect of b-boying has its immediate roots in teenagers’ natural competitiveness”.
- 85.
Ewoodzie, 77.
- 86.
Schloss, Foundation, 116.
- 87.
Hager, Ch. 3.
- 88.
Sally Banes, “Physical Graffiti: Breaking is Hard to Do”, in Cepeda, ed., 7–11 (8).
- 89.
Ruminations, 82.
- 90.
Schloss, Foundation, 107. The second quote is from Phantom, a present-day b-boy, but one affiliated with the foundational Zulu Nation (more on them in Chap. 6). Compare with Banes : “Inside the ritual frame, burgeoning adolescent anxieties, hostilities, and powers are symbolically manipulated and controlled” (9), or Gilroy’s discussion of the manner in which Hip Hop’s “vernacular arts precipitate and dramatize intracommunal conflicts over the meanings and forms of identity and freedom” (Against Race, 179).
- 91.
Speaking in Beat This: A Hip-Hop History (1984; directed by Dick Fontaine), emphasis added.
- 92.
Schloss, Foundation, 110.
- 93.
Ibid., 99. There are, of course, various possible antecedents for this, but some recent oral histories available in various forms on YouTube (e.g. those featuring first generation b-boy Cholly Rock) suggest that it may have emerged from the “Spade Dance”, a stomp-based form of dance which either preceded or was renamed up-rocking, and was performed with individuals entering a circle to show their stuff. Its name derives from the fact that it was initially developed by members of Bambaataa’s division of the Black Spades. Then again, in those same oral histories, some people from the Bronxdale projects claim to have been doing backspins and other power moves as early as 1972.
- 94.
Ibid., 99.
- 95.
Perry, 107.
- 96.
Schloss, Foundation, 100.
- 97.
Imani Kai Johnson, “Hip-hop Dance”, in The Cambridge Companion to Hip-hop, ed. Justin A. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 22–31 (24).
- 98.
Schloss, Foundation, 103.
- 99.
Ibid., 78.
- 100.
Ibid., 84.
- 101.
Speaking in Bboy: A History of Breakdance.
- 102.
Schloss, Foundation, 78–9. Compare Kaminsky’s claim that, for Hegel, “great sculpture avoids too much concern with capturing human emotions”, all the better to emphasize “permanent rather than accidental or momentary traits in the human personality” or the “permanent core of man” (72–3).
- 103.
Ewoodzie, 48.
- 104.
Schloss, Foundation, 84.
- 105.
That is, “genuine art, for Hegel, does not present us with things as they are in ordinary experience, it idealizes them by investing their natural form with grace, balance and proportion which are not encountered in such a pure form in nature itself” (Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, 214).
- 106.
Schloss, Foundation, 86, emphasis added.
- 107.
Cf., e.g. Thompson, “the way some spins dissolved into the freeze could be truly magical” (218).
- 108.
Speaking in Bboy: A History of Breakdance.
- 109.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 118 (emphasis added). This is not, of course, to suggest it was the only dance that thematized frozen movement; it does, however, seem to be unique in making it a necessary and consummate aspect of a routine that was necessary to count as an example of the dance. See Hazzard-Donald for discussion of some of its likely historical antecedents.
- 110.
Schloss, Foundation, 74. Thus, the common appellation of breaking as “physical graffiti”, explicitly made, for example, by Banes and Pabon, implied by KRS-One (e.g. Gospel, 114) and reflected in Afrika Bambaataa’s naming of his own form of b-boy fashion “Wild Style”.
- 111.
Rose, 47–8.
- 112.
As an unnamed b-boy puts it in The Freshest Kids, “B-boying is like the ultimate body expression of Hip Hop. Not only do you have your feet moving, your arms moving, every single part of your body, your head, your neck, [but] also your character”.
- 113.
Speaking in Bboy: A History of Breakdance. As Grandmaster Flash puts it, there was a specific personal “attitude you had to have if you called yourself a b-boy. You had to be ready to battle at the drop of a hat, whether you were in the street, in a park, or at a jam, and you had to be on your shit if you dared to compete” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 39). In the conclusion, I discuss some misconceptions about “Hip Hop attitude” that have emerged since the era of recording.
- 114.
Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, 233 (emphasis in original).
- 115.
Banes, 10.
- 116.
Katz, 48.
- 117.
Ibid., 57. Flash recalls “I could do anything once I was in that magical zone. I could spin around, cut with my hands behind my back, hit switches with the top of my head, kick off my shoe and throw the crossfader with my feet” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 110).
- 118.
As a minor but instructive example, see The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 63–4, for a tale of local gangs robbing a downtown disco primarily to get better turntables to donate to their favourite DJ, despite never having met him previously.
- 119.
Rose, 35.
- 120.
As Sal Abbatiello, manager of one of the first nightclubs to host Hip Hop events, remarked regarding his early exposure to the culture, “I’m leaning on the wall, observing the crowd, how the people who weren’t dancing were involved with the music as much as the people who were dancing. It was bringing people together: people were talking to strangers, smiling across the bar at someone, all doing the same thing” (Fricke and Ahearn, 180).
- 121.
Cf. KRS-One, “A Jam was a time to either show-off your own unique talents or watch the unique talents of others. A Jam wasn’t just about a crowd of people listening to a DJ (or, years later, to an MC), a jam was a community event—a social gathering. It was a time and space where the young neighborhood school kids as well as the young outcasts, the outlaws and young revolutionaries would all come together to exchange ideas, street products, plans, gossip and of course talents. [DJs like] Kool Herc […] were [thus] also activists in their community and their free service to their community is what caused Hip Hop to exist” (Gospel, 94–5).
- 122.
Fricke and Ahearn, 339. Compare to Crazy Legs, speaking in Bboy: A History of Breakdancing, “That’s what we live for, man: […] to create, to battle , to get some props”.
- 123.
Quoted in Banes, 11.
- 124.
KRS-One, Gospel, 742. Compare Schloss, Foundation, 117. A longer list of Hip Hop’s ethical rules can be found in Wimsatt , Bomb the Suburbs, 54, although the code, obviously, is internally contested and evolving. Ewoodzie , for example, provides evidence for “the unwritten rule that crews had to play with their own equipment. They could borrow from other crews, but renting professional equipment was out of line” (117); a rule which dropped from the battling tradition once clubs entered the scene.
- 125.
Ruminations, 154.
- 126.
Foundation, 92.
- 127.
Etter, 6.
- 128.
Schloss, Foundation, 18.
- 129.
Rose, 22.
- 130.
Schloss, Foundation, 109.
- 131.
KRS-One, Ruminations, 207.
- 132.
Foundation, 150–1, emphasis added. Compare to his discussion of “breakdancing” vs. the “b-boy lifestyle”, ibid., 61–3. In many ways, the remainder of this book is an effort to account for the tensions described in this passage, as they manifested themselves within the culture as a result of its co-option by mainstream forces; and breaking was certainly the element that suffered the most from becoming a “fad”.
- 133.
Cowboy, from the Furious Five , is now generally credited with originating it, although some still give credit to Lovebug Starski. Many pioneers claim that it was original a derogatory term, meant to emphasize that the party culture was just a “kids’ thing” that was effectively a waste of time, as in “Why are you bothering with that ‘hippity hop stuff’?”
- 134.
Cf., Chang, Can’t Stop, 105. These are also sometimes called the “four core principles” of Hip Hop, alongside its “four core elements” of aesthetic creation.
- 135.
Gospel, 71; 73. As he extends it later, “This is the meaning of our movement. VICTORY OVER THE STREETS! There it is” (529). Compare Asanti, 24–26.
- 136.
Gospel, 70–1.
- 137.
Hager , Ch. 3, citing the fact that Caz was the first to master all four elements, in most of which he also paved new ground.
- 138.
Fricke and Ahearn, 337–40.
- 139.
Ibid., 109.
- 140.
Ibid., 340.
- 141.
Ruminations and the Gospel, passim.
- 142.
Speaking in The Freshest Kids.
- 143.
Ruminations, 204.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vernon, J. (2018). DJing and Breaking, or the Classical Stage of Art. In: Hip Hop, Hegel, and the Art of Emancipation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91304-9_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91304-9_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91303-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91304-9
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)