Today is Hip-Hop’s 50th birthday…or is it?  Facts disputing when the genre was actually “born”

(August 11, 2023). Today (finally) marks the long-awaited 50th birthday of Hip-Hop. Nearly eight months of celebration, including trade publication feature stories, awards show extravaganzas, curated playlists, commentary from the genre’s most important progeny, and, of course, the parties—all centered around the hashtag #hiphop50–have culminated in today’s monumental occasion: the 50th anniversary of its birth.

Or is it really?

All of this year’s celebrations have been premised on one date—August 11, 1973–the night when legendary DJ Kool Herc lit up a “back to school” party in the Bronx with two turntables playing the same record (a novel idea then), a technique he used to extend the break beats of some of the era’s funkiest jams (any doubt James Brown records were a part of that party’s set list?), thereby unleashing a cultural phenomenon that would later lead to rap and, by extension, “hip-hop.”

But, as with any entity, the question of its birth has to be tracked to its parentage—precisely who (or what) they were—and when they conceived the child in question, in this case hip-hop.

With any form of music, there have always been disputes about when the style was born. For example, the rock-and-roll “era” is widely believed to have started in 1955 when the song “Rock Around The Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets began a cultural explosion for the genre and topped the American charts for months.

But its founding could be traced back to 1951, when Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed first began calling his rhythm and blues radio show “Moondog’s Rock and Roll Party,” which featured many of the popular Black R&B musicians of the day, including Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and others. It’s largely why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is located in Cleveland today (and why many of those Black musicians laid claim to being the actual progenitors of rock and roll music).

Even R&B itself has dubious beginnings, with the music style mostly evolving over time from the jazz and blues of the early 20th century to the more swinging sound of the 1940s. The genre of R&B is said to have originated in the 1940s—no specific date, however—when artists like Louis Jordan (and his band the Tympany Five), the Orioles, Joe Turner, and LaVern Baker made it big, although, clearly, other artists like the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers had earlier laid the groundwork.

It was in 1948 when RCA Victor began marketing its Black music under the name “Blues and Rhythm,” and a year later when Billboard began calling its Black music charts “Rhythm and Blues” (formerly known as “race records” and the “Harlem Hit Parade”). The chart has undergone many name changes since then (now known as “Hot R&B/Hip-Hop” for its main genre-related singles and album lists).

Hip-hop is certainly no exception to this kind of nebulousness. In fact, it may be the only genre that actually purports to tie its creation to a singular date in history (quick, name another genre’s birthdate…or try to even find it in a search engine).

But what makes hip-hop just like every other genre is that there are multiple claims to when it was actually “started,” and those claims are as fundamental as determining who the actual “father” (or “mother”) of hip-hop really was.

If you believe the father of hip-hop is indeed DJ Kool Herc, then it makes sense to go with August 11, 1973, as the venerable genre’s birthdate.

But another famous “father” of hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa, now 66, is said to have begun hosting parties similar to that of DJ Herc as early as 1970, when he would have been around 13 years old. (Herc, who was born in April 1955, would have been a more believable 18 when he hosted the 1973 event that would be tied by most historians to hip-hop’s birth.)

And it’s worth noting that Billboard magazine, which has often been accused of being late to hip-hop’s party (for reasons that are unclear, especially after researching this article), gave some legitimacy to the argument for Herc by first documenting his pioneering deejaying techniques as early as July 1, 1978 (before its fifth “birthday,” and before anyone outside of the Bronx had ever heard of “rap music” as it’s known today).

In that July 1 issue of Billboard, an article called “B Beats Bombarding Bronx” by the late disco and hip-hop journalist Robert Ford, Jr. described “Cool (sic) Herc” as the “mobile DJ” who started the phenomenon of taking the break beats of songs (mainly the highly percussive sections sans other instruments) and extending them with the two turntables.

Ford attributed Herc’s unique deejaying style to his fascination with one record in particular, The Incredible Bongo Band’s “Bongo Rock” on Pride Records. That song, with a heavy opening and middle percussion section but only 2:38 in length, was deemed too short by Herc, who was also said to have been dissatisfied with having to suffer through all of the strings and horns and other elements of the popular disco records of the day.

So, the Jamaican-born DJ pleased himself and partygoers by extending the beats of “Bongo Rock” and other similar records, including Dennis Coffey’s “Son of Scorpio,” and Jeannie Reynold’s “Fruit Song,” which he’d speed up (from 33-1/3 to 45 rpms) given that song’s medium tempo.

This was more than a year before the release of the song often associated with hip-hop’s mainstream introduction, the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979).

While rapping is but one key element of hip-hop culture (it also had other earlier cultural elements like graffiti art, breakdancing and Herc’s style of deejaying–specifically, the cutting, scratching and mixing of disco records’ instrumental breaks–but now includes language, fashion, and other aspects of daily life), rapping is indeed the element that is largely credited with bringing hip-hop to the forefront.

It clearly wouldn’t be where it is today without the success of “Rapper’s Delight” and other early rap records by the likes of Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Kurtis Blow, and even the Fatback Band, whose “King Tim III” predated “Rapper’s Delight” on the Billboard Soul Singles chart (another of its many names) by one week.

In fact, the early records by Sugar Hill Gang, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, and Sequence–the first female hip-hop group on record–were the mastermind of the late singer/songwriter/producer/entrepreneur Sylvia Robinson and her son, the late Joseph “Joey” Robinson, Jr.

It was on their Sugar Hill Records label that those groups recorded their earliest rap hits, primarily between 1979 and 1984, as rap began to permeate Black music radio before eventually making its way to the pop charts.

As a result of this association, Sylvia “Pillow Talk” Robinson has often been referred to as the “Mother of Hip-Hop,” an honor that landed her in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year (just in time for hip-hop’s 50th?) with the Ahmet Erugan award for being a “major influence” on hip-hop, an honor Herc received a year later (May 2023).

With rap music not coming out of the South Bronx and into wider consciousness until late 1979, music historians for years have been reconciling the six-year gap between hip-hop’s “birth” and Robinson’s pioneering efforts to get the music on wax and in record stores (and eventually the radio).

With the music being the biggest and most inextricable aspect of hip-hop culture, it’s hard for some not to lean into its debut on the national charts as the true birth of hip-hop, or, at least, rap. (Be honest, how many of us who were old enough in the late 1970s really knew that 2023 was hip-hop’s 50th before the turn of the calendar earlier this year?)

Then there’s the issue of the terminology “hip-hop.” Specifically, when it was coined and who coined it.

While Robert Keith Wiggins, a.k.a. “Cowboy” of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, is credited with naming “hip-hop,” the term was first used in print–in this context–in a February 1979 article in the New Pittsburgh Courier (I could not access the article to confirm) by another Robert, journalist Robert Flipping, Jr. This predated the first occurrences of the term in songs like “Rapper’s Delight” months later.

Bambaataa is credited with first applying the term to the broader culture of hip-hop (in an interview he gave to the East Village Eye journalist Michael Holman) in January 1982, just months before he released his seminal recording “Planet Rock.”

With rock-and-roll and other genres, their beginnings are often associated with the coining of their names (see the above discussions about Alan Freed, etc.). So, one could legitimately make the argument that “hip-hop” didn’t start until after 1973, say either 1979 when it first appeared in print and on wax, or three years later when it was first applied to the culture by Bambaataa, purportedly.

Which leads to the most dubious aspect of celebrating hip-hop’s 50th birthday this year: the fact that its earlier milestones were somehow missed altogether.

When hip-hop turned five in 1978–just a month after that Billboard article documented one of its key elements—rap music hadn’t even charted, so no one had it in their consciousness that hip-hop was even a thing.

In 1983, on its tenth birthday, many of us early hip-hop heads were just beginning to expand our palettes beyond the Sugar Hill Records’ cadre of artists, and none of us were even fathoming that we were embarking on the tenth anniversary of the genre or the culture.

What about hip-hop’s 20th (in 1993) or 25th five years later? You’d think a silver anniversary would never have gone by without major commemoration. Google “25th hip-hop anniversary” and the only hits you’ll get are 25th birthday celebrations of specific landmark albums or artists’ careers.

Think the BET Awards, which began in 2001, or any other major awards show for that matter, celebrated hip-hop’s 30th (2003) or 40th (2013) birthdays during those respective years?

Think again.

The BET Awards did pay a touching tribute to long-time R&B legend Charlie Wilson in 2013. It wasn’t hip-hop, but it was touching.

Of course, who’s a blogger like me to question what hundreds of historians, artists, record executives, and publications have been convincing us of for years, and what the industry as a whole has spent millions of dollars (and earned billions more from) marketing as this year’s milestone anniversary?

Of course, we could look at it as being similar to one of those situations where someone discovers their true lineage on one of those ancestry sites after tracing their DNA. The new information serves as the basis for how you proceed going forward.

Whatever the rationale is behind the industry’s apparent consensus on the DOB being August 11, 1973, that date seems to be about as good as any.

Happy Birthday hip-hop…however old you are!

DJRob

DJRob (he/him/his), whose first rap record was “Rapper’s Delight,” is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, pop, rock and (sometimes) country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff!  You can follow him on Twitter at @djrobblog and on Meta’s Threads.

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