As a teenager, Grandmaster Flash was one of the pioneers, in the Bronx of New York, of hip-hop that revolutionized the music industry and the American megalopolis.
Real name Joseph Saddler, the American musician and producer born in Barbados 65 years ago performed on an outdoor stage until late Friday, in the south of this borough of the Bronx, emblematic for African-Americans and rap born in the ghettos just half a century ago.
“It’s not a concert, it’s a party!” the 60-year-old shouted in front of hundreds of ecstatic fans gathered in a park on a hot and humid summer evening.
The 50th anniversary of hip-hop is set for August 11 with a giant concert at Yankee Stadium in New York.
On that day in 1973, on the ground floor of a low-income housing unit at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Bronx, a DJ of Jamaican origin, Clive Campbell, alias DJ Kool Herc, innovated: by spinning the same record on two turntables, he isolates the sequences of rhythms and percussions and makes them last in the speakers, prefiguring the “breakbeat”, an essential component of hip-hop music.
Graffiti or breakdance sessions in libraries, “block parties”, concerts… many other initiatives flourish throughout the summer to celebrate the half-century of a movement born in the Bronx to escape poverty and discrimination against African-Americans and Hispanics, and become a phenomenon brewing billions of dollars, which inspires music, but also sports and fashion.
– “Another era” –
“It was really the music that resonated with the times in New York,” sums up Quentin Morgan, 54, who came to the concert by bike to inhale the atmosphere of commemoration and the scent of nostalgia.
“New York was a rough and gritty city, almost outlawed, another era,” breathes the fifty-year-old.
Grandmaster Flash and the group Furious Five released in 1982 their seminal title “The Message,” whose lyrics and video clip shed new light at the time on the harshness of urban, economic and social life in New York, a city then stricken by poverty and crime.
Friday night, Flash managed to recreate the electric climate of the 1970s and 1980s by inviting on stage the rappers “MC” (“Master of Ceremonies”) Melle Mel (Melvin Glover) and Scorpio (Eddie Morris) members of the Furious Five.
Sha-Rock (Sharon Green), also in her sixties, was also at the party, she who was one of the first female “MCs” of the New York rap scene.
On the sidelines of the concert, AFP met Coke La Rock, 68, who was on the historic day of August 11, 1973 and whom musicologists consider to be the true founder of hip-hop.
– The “children” of rap –
For him, the Bronx and hip-hop are one because he “see
2023-08-05 12:55:06
#Hiphop #turns #York #pioneers #celebrates #Bronx
.jpg "A Shooting in Hell: The Making of Apocalypse Now")
