“Fifty years ago, in New York City, a Jamaican-American teenager named Cindy Campbell asked her older brother to DJ at the block party she was hosting to raise money for a new back-to-school wardrobe. She made and distributed flyers inviting people to the recreation room of their West Bronx apartment building, promoting her brother by his new stage name: DJ Kool Herc. It was August of 1973, New York City was bankrupt and the Bronx was burning as landlords torched their own buildings for insurance money, and there, at that party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, many say that hip-hop was born. In the decades since, the Black and Latinx youth culture movement that blossomed during a period of immense economic and political distress in the city—when unemployment hit a record high and thousands were displaced from their homes—has transformed into one of the biggest global phenomenons of the last century.”
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