>>> Nashville celebrates country music; New York City
needs to celebrate the birth of hip-hop.
♪ I ain't no joke. I used to let the mic smoke now slamming
when I'm gonna make sure it's broke ♪
>>> Hip-hop created a musical landscape in the
’70s and early '80s, by giving New York or the Bronx,
especially the Bronx a musical foundation or a new
start because we were just coming off the ’60s where the
entire city was bankrupt. That environment kind of gave
birth to hip-hop. Hip-hop is a culture based on four
foundational elements DJ’ing, MC’ing or rap, graffiti,
and breakdancing.
>>> People use the terms interchangeably, rap with
hip-hop where it's hip-hop is the bigger culture,
rap is something you do, hip- hop is something to live.
>>> Coming from the Disco era, you know what I mean,
we were inner city kids, we couldn't get into
discos so we had to recreate that disco and
that's what basically hip-hop started out as like the bastard
child of Disco. I mean, it was our rebellion against that and
our recreation of it at the same time.
♪ You see, I am wonder mike and I like to say hello ♪
>>> The turntables became our instruments. Like so, 00:01:37.064,00:01:36.430 a lot of people in the inner cities, they didn't
have money for instruments. So, you had to find those
sound somewhere. So, you dug through your pop’s
crate of records, and you were just listening for these
different instruments and sounds, and then you pulled
from those different sounds and made a total new creation.
People forget that the DJ is the backbone of hip-hop.
That's where it all started, DJ’s spinning at parties.
>>> Kool Herc is actually documented as the father
of hip-hop. When he was playing the type of music
he was playing and maybe the way he was playing it,
it brought out a different type of energy than ever
experienced from that demographic at that time.
>>> And he just started putting one drum break
behind the next drum break, and you just go to
her party, just waiting for those breaks.
>>> B-boying and b-girling come from Kool Herc,
B meaning break. Okay? Break Boy, you dance on the break.
That's it.
>>> All ties into dancing and really going off
during the breakbeat of a song at a party back in the days.
>>> And then it was different parts of the
record where you could talk over it and then the
beat still going, but you don't lose the attention
of the record or the main part of the record.
That evolved to MC’s getting on a mic and just saying
things to keep the party going which evolved into
actually rhyming and rapping because these
different MC’s will have little sayings that they said.
>>> People if you ready to rock, let me hear you scream.
>>> A teenager named Afrika Bambaataa started
the Zulu Nation at the Bronx River Projects.
It was a new type of gang which focusing on
music and dance.
>>> Bambaataa was the first guy to say, hey,
let's all come together. You can all play on my set.
So, he was integral in uniting hip-hop. And in
'82 when Planet Rock came and became a
universal hit that just added to his prominence
and his outreach to the rest of the world.
The connection between hip-hop and graffiti, it's an
urban thing. Though it was here before the actual rest
of the elements of the culture, the people involved in
graffiti were directly involved in hip-hop as well.
♪ Fab Five Freddy told me everybody's fly ♪
♪ DJ spinning - ♪
>>> Fab Five Freddy was the bridge between hip-hop
and graffiti. He brought the South Bronx and the people from
Harlem downtown who were the hipsters, and Keith
Haring and Madonna were hanging out. Before he was a DJ,
he did MTV wraps, he was a graffiti artist.
>>> MTV made hip hop global. It broke it out of
being a niche kind of music or something like
these black kids, or Latin kids are doing in certain
urban areas, to an actually viable genre of
music that reached Middle America and mainstream
America, particularly Walk This Way was the record
that took hip-hop next level on MTV, man.
That collaboration with Run-DMC and Aerosmith was just perfect.
That was really the moment that hip-hop became global
and MTV played a big part in.
U.K., South Africa where
you know, English is one of the major languages.
You see it in Brazil, you see it in Japan, you know,
they're big into the culture, man, and you'll go to a
concert in Japan man, and they're wrapping every word
in English and then they don't speak a word of English.
>>> Hip-hop connected the world and music together.
This is what The Score did; this is what Puffy,
Dr. Dre did some of this stuff too that recognize them
for Shakira. Hello. It's hip-hop in the front right here.
You know what I mean?
>>> I think institutions are trying to preserve
hip-hop when you see places like art galleries.
You see it in fashion. You see it in business.
I think that's preserving hip- hop even when people don't
realize that's actually preserving it.
>>> Brother Hush Tours, the original and the only
hip-hop sightseeing tour on the planet.
>>> Hush Tours is a hip-hop sightseeing tour based
on the culture. It’s guided by the pioneers of hip-hop
and we take people around the city to different places
that were relevant to the development of the culture.
Nashville celebrates country music; New York City
needs to celebrate the birth of hip-hop.
>>> We created something from nothing. And hip-hop
was the first art form that spoke to me, people who look
like me, people I can look up to and where they put
these words together and tell these stories about
places that look like where I live, and that's just like what
hip-hop is all about, it’s just evolving and staying ahead
of the curve and being something aspirational.