Break Beats in the Bronx: Rediscovering Hip-Hop's Early Years

by Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr.

The origin story of hip-hop--one that involves Kool Herc DJing a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx--has become received wisdom. But Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. argues that the full story remains to be told. In vibrant prose, he combines never-before-used archival material with searching questions about the symbolic boundaries that have divided our understanding of the music. In Break Beats in the Bronx, Ewoodzie portrays the creative process that brought about what we now know as hip-hop and shows that the art form was a result of serendipitous events, accidents, calculated successes, and failures that, almost magically, came together. In doing so, he questions the unexamined assumptions about hip-hop's beginnings, including why there are just four traditional elements--DJing, MCing, breaking, and graffiti writing--and not others, why the South Bronx and not any other borough or city is considered the cradle of the form, and which artists besides Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash founded the genre. Ewoodzie answers these and many other questions about hip-hop's beginnings. Unearthing new evidence, he shows what occurred during the crucial but surprisingly underexamined years between 1975 and 1979 and argues that it was during this period that the internal logic and conventions of the scene were formed.

Genres: Music, Hip Hop, African American

256 pages, Paperback

Published September 5, 2017

Reviews

[Chi Chi · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://scratchedvinyl.com/?q=node/3274

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second in my current jag of reading hip hop history. This is a super interesting book. It's a scholarly monograph, from UNC Press, which gives is a little different tone than some... he stops talking about DJ Cool Herc and suddenly goes off about Pierre Bourdieu in a couple of places. This book is, apparently, about the third generation of scholarly history on hip hop... this is heavily cited and footnoted. Ewoodzie's quest is not to tell the history, as that's been done copiously already, but to ask why things worked out the way they did and not somehow differently... how, for instance, in the mid 70s, there was a vastly different musical culture in the South Bronx than in Harlem, just on the other side of the river. His answer delves minutely into the social fabric of the tragically bombed-out Bronx neighbourhoods of the time. Very in-depth, very interesting and full of fascinating details. A little heavier read than most, though.

[Cindy Einhouse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I never appreciated rap music in the past, this book brought a much greater understanding of its importance to bringing people together in a very positive way.

[Shauna · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.0