Hip Hop Is Born in a Bronx Rec Room

On August 11, 1973, Cindy Campbell rented the recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx to raise money for new school clothes, and asked her 18-year-old brother Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, to run the music. Herc set up two turntables, a mixer, and two copies of the same record so he could loop and extend the instrumental drum break, the part of a song the dancers went craziest for, instead of letting the song roll on to the verse. His friend Coke La Rock grabbed the microphone and started talking over the breaks to hype the room, an early seed of rapping. Cindy handled the door and the logistics, charging a quarter for women and fifty cents for men, and by the end of the night the party had pulled in a few hundred dollars and a room full of teenagers who had just heard something nobody had a name for yet. Decades later, historians and Congress itself would point back to that rec room as where hip hop started.