Hip-hop began in 1973 in a small community room in the Bronx, where a teenager threw a party to pay for school clothes and her brother played the records. These stories follow what grew from that night: the DJs, rappers, dancers and graffiti writers who built the culture, the records and machines behind its sound, and the moments it reached the Grammys, the Pulitzers, the Olympics and even deep space.
Every tile in a Hip-Hop game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Pioneers
nine stories
1A party to pay for school clothes
On the tile: Cindy Campbell1973
In August 1973, 16-year-old Cindy Campbell wanted new clothes for the coming school year, so she threw a party. She rented the community room on the first floor of her apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx, charged 25 cents for girls and 50 cents for boys, and asked her 18-year-old brother Clive to play the records. He called himself Kool Herc. The room was small, maybe 30 feet square, with a low ceiling. Her party on August 11 is the moment most people point to as the birth of hip-hop.
Clive Campbell came to New York from Jamaica at 13 and, as a teenager, learned to DJ under the name Kool Herc. He noticed that dancers went wild during the breaks, the short percussive stretches of funk records such as the Jimmy Castor Bunch's "It's Just Begun." So he skipped the rest. "I'd go right to the yolk," he told NPR. Switching between two turntables, he played one break after another, and with two copies of the same record he could loop a single break again and again. He named that trick the merry-go-round.
Theodore Livingston was a Bronx boy of about 12, practicing in his bedroom, when his mother came to the doorway to complain that the music was too loud. By his own account, his earphones were still on and his hand kept moving the record back and forth while she scolded him. When she left, he wondered what that sound was. He worked on it until it became a technique, the scratch, and he performed as Grand Wizzard Theodore. Asked whether his mom had invented scratching, he said yes, and asked God to bless her.
Joseph Saddler was born in Barbados and grew up in the Bronx, exploring electronics and mechanics from an early age. As a DJ he became Grandmaster Flash, and the "Flash" came from his quick hands. He worked out techniques such as his quick mix theory. In 2007 his group, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, became the first rap group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2019 King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden presented him the Polar Music Prize, whose citation called him "a scientist and a virtuoso."
In 1979 Henry Jackson, who managed the Bronx rapper Grandmaster Caz, joined a new group, the Sugarhill Gang, as Big Bank Hank. For "Rapper's Delight," Hank used rhymes from Caz's personal notebook, including a line in which he spells out Caz's own stage name at the time, Casanova Fly. Caz later told NY1 that he wrote all of Hank's lyrics on the record, though he had not written them for Hank. The single climbed to No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Dutch Top 40.
Long before hip-hop, Sylvia Robinson was a hit singer. As half of Mickey & Sylvia she topped the R&B chart in 1957 with "Love Is Strange," and in 1973 she took "Pillow Talk," a song Al Green had turned down, to No. 1 on Billboard's Black singles chart. With her husband, Joe, she ran Sugar Hill Records, and in 1979 she went looking for rappers. She cued each member of the Sugarhill Gang by pointing, they cut "Rapper's Delight" in one uninterrupted 14-minute take, and she mailed copies to radio stations herself.
On Valentine's Day 1981, Blondie singer Debbie Harry hosted Saturday Night Live and invited a Bronx group, the Funky Four Plus One, as a second musical guest. The "plus one" was MC Sha-Rock, the group's only woman. With DJ Breakout scratching at the front of the stage, they performed "That's the Joint" and became the first rap group to perform on SNL and on national television. Sha-Rock recalled that they never got to rehearse. "Debbie Harry fought for us," she said in NBC's documentary about 50 years of SNL music.
Fab 5 Freddy was a well-known New York graffiti writer before he became a TV host. On August 6, 1988, MTV premiered its first big effort to put rap videos on the air, a show with Freddy as host. It began on weekends and did so well that MTV added a weekday edition the next year. The show carried rap videos far beyond New York. Freddy later recalled meeting a woman from Russia whose relatives elsewhere in Europe taped his show and mailed the VHS tapes to Russia, where her whole neighborhood gathered to watch.
In 1979, at 20, Kurtis Blow signed with Mercury Records, making him the first rapper signed to a major label. His first single for Mercury was a holiday record, "Christmas Rappin'," which sold more than 400,000 copies, and his follow-up, "The Breaks," went gold. The Christmas song had a second life: its music was sampled for Next's "Too Close," which spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1998. Decades later Blow became a licensed minister and helped found the Hip Hop Church.
Run-DMC wrote "My Adidas" about shoes they already loved, and nobody paid them for it. Released in the spring of 1986, it reached No. 5 on Billboard's R&B chart. On July 19, at Madison Square Garden, the trio asked the crowd to hold up their Adidas while an Adidas executive, invited by co-manager Lyor Cohen, watched the sneakers rise. A video followed in which they asked the company for a million dollars. The result was an endorsement deal worth at least $1 million, which Guinness World Records calls the first sneaker deal for anyone outside sport.
2The first rapper to receive Kennedy Center Honors
On the tile: LL Cool J2017
James Todd Smith of St. Albans, Queens, made his first record, "I Need a Beat," at 16, after his demo tape reached Def Jam's Rick Rubin. As LL Cool J he went on to score an early hit rap ballad, "I Need Love." In 2017 he became the first hip-hop artist chosen for the Kennedy Center Honors and, at 49, the youngest honoree since Stevie Wonder. He credited his late grandmother, who inspired "Mama Said Knock You Out," and her advice: "Be thy labor great or small, do it well or not at all."
Beastie Boys started out as a hardcore punk band in lower Manhattan before they turned to rap. Their debut album, Licensed to Ill, made with producer Rick Rubin, reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 on March 7, 1987, the first rap album ever to top that chart, and it stayed there for seven straight weeks. Their rock roots still showed. On "No Sleep Till Brooklyn," the guitar riffs and solo were played by Kerry King of the heavy metal band Slayer.
As a boy in Oakland, Stanley Burrell caught the eye of A's owner Charlie Finley, who put him to work at the ballpark. Players nicknamed him Hammer, saying he looked like "Hammerin'" Hank Aaron. When Finley was in Chicago, the boy phoned him long distance from the owner's box with the play-by-play. Finley once had him call the game on the team's radio station, until radio executives pulled him off after half an inning. Years later, A's outfielders Dwayne Murphy and Mike Davis each gave him $20,000 to start his record label.
Dana Owens released her debut album as Queen Latifah, All Hail the Queen, in 1989, then branched into acting and singing, even recording a jazzy album of classics named for her birth name, The Dana Owens Album. In 2006 she became the first hip-hop artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the sidewalk's 2,298th. "I think the reason I am here is to inspire African-American women who are rappers, full-figured women to know that they can do it, too," she said at the unveiling.
On July 12, 2024, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory beamed lyrics from Missy Elliott's 1997 debut solo single, "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)," toward Venus, her favorite planet, about 158 million miles away. The signal left a 34-meter dish near Barstow, California, that happens to be nicknamed Venus, and it took nearly 14 minutes to arrive. NASA called the transmission a first for hip-hop and for the agency. "I chose Venus because it symbolizes strength, beauty, and empowerment," Elliott said.
At the 1995 Source Awards in New York, the Atlanta duo OutKast won Best New Rap Group and walked onstage into loud, continuous booing from a mostly New York audience. André, later known as André 3000, answered with a line that Southern rappers took as a rallying cry: "The South got something to say." Nine years later, the duo's double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below won the Grammy for Album of the Year, the first time that award went to a rap group.
As a child in Compton, California, Kendrick Lamar watched Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre film the video for "California Love" in his neighborhood. In April 2018 his album DAMN. won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first time the prize went to a work outside classical music and jazz. The board called it "a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism." Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy said the decision was unanimous and called it a big moment for hip-hop and for the Pulitzers.
Chance the Rapper was an independent artist who gave his music away free. His mixtape Coloring Book came out only on streaming services, and the Recording Academy had just revised its rules so that streaming-only releases could compete, though it insisted the change was not made for him. In February 2017 Coloring Book won Best Rap Album, the first streaming-only album to win a Grammy. Chance also took Best New Artist that night. "I didn't think we were going to get this one," he said while accepting.
At Kool Herc's Bronx parties, dancers waited on the sidelines for the breaks in the records, then cut loose. "People were dancing, but they weren't calling it b-boying," Herc recalled in a 1998 interview. "My terms came in after I started to play – I called them b-boys." The dance borrowed from everything around it. Michael Holman, who left a Wall Street career to promote breaking, described dancers mixing kung fu moves with the African cakewalk and Puerto Rican gymnastics, all to old James Brown records on Jamaican-style sound systems.
Marley Marl was working as an engineer at a studio called Unique, trying to sample a sound off a record, when a snare drum slipped into the sample by accident. Played against the track, his sampled snare sounded better than the one already there. The other engineer told him he had simply made a mistake. Marley saw it differently. "This means I can take any drum sound from any pre-existing record," he recalled telling him. Sampling was expensive then, so producers grabbed tiny slices, about a second and a half long.
Roland's engineers wanted the TR-808, launched in 1980, to sound like real drums. Memory chips that could play back recorded drums were too expensive, so they built the sounds with analog circuits, using transistors that had been rejected as out of specification. The result sounded nothing like a real drum kit. Around 12,000 were made, and it was not a commercial success. When one tiny transistor ran out, production stopped, and used 808s turned up in secondhand shops for young producers. Its booming synthetic drums became a backbone of hip-hop.
Technics designed its direct-drive turntables for audiophiles chasing a more beautiful sound, and its team in Japan assumed that was who bought the SL-1200. Then market research in the United States showed them something unexpected: in dark, deafening clubs, DJs were spinning records backward. In 1979 Technics released the SL-1200MK2, which it calls its first turntable made specifically for discos. Pairs of these decks and a mixer became the standard tool of hip-hop and club DJs through the 1980s and 1990s, and the series passed two million sold.
James Yancey, known as J Dilla, made beats in a basement studio in his mother's house in Detroit's Conant Gardens neighborhood, and went on to work with Erykah Badu, Common, The Roots and A Tribe Called Quest. After he died in 2006, his reputation kept growing. In 2014 his mother, Maureen "Ma Dukes" Yancey, donated his Akai MPC 3000 beat machine and his custom-made Minimoog Voyager synthesizer to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. His friend DJ J. Rocc said Dilla used that synthesizer "in probably everything he was making."
Martha Cooper was a newspaper photographer in New York when a young graffiti writer showed her how he was designing his name to put on a wall. "I understood there was a culture behind it," she said. With photographer Henry Chalfant she documented the painted subway trains, and their book Subway Art came out in 1984. Its publisher calls it the bible of the street-art movement. Chalfant claimed another honor: it was the most stolen book, he said, certainly in England, and a London Times article ranked his 1987 book, Spray Can Art, second.
A popular story of how hip-hop got its name goes like this. At a farewell party for a friend who was going into the military, Keith "Cowboy" Wiggins of Grandmaster Flash's Furious Five and DJ Lovebug Starski playfully imitated a drill sergeant calling out marching orders, trading the words "hip" and "hop." Starski, who told the story, said he then used the phrase to rock the parties he played. Others share the credit, so it remains a legend. What is certain is that by 1979 the words had turned up in "Rapper's Delight."
Douglas Davis was born in Barbados and raised by his mother and grandfather in Harlem, where he fell for the music of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. At Charles Evans Hughes High School he impressed classmates at lunch with his rhyming and beatboxing, making drum sounds with his mouth, and that is where he met DJ Chill Will. As Doug E. Fresh, the Human Beat Box, he released "The Show" in 1985 with MC Ricky D, later known as Slick Rick. The track mixed his beatbox with bits of the Inspector Gadget cartoon theme.
In Houston in the 1980s and 1990s, Robert Davis Jr., known as DJ Screw, made mixtapes with a sound all his own. He slowed the music way down and repeated beats, words and phrases, a style that became known as chopped and screwed. Other Houston artists picked it up, and some began releasing each album twice, once regular and once chopped and screwed. His father later donated the vinyl records his son had used for the tapes to the University of Houston Libraries, and ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons named the Houston style as an inspiration.
"Rapper's Delight" is often called the first rap record, but it had company. Shortly before it, in 1979, the Fatback Band released "King Tim III (Personality Jock)" as the B-side of a disco song, "You're My Candy Sweet." Bandleader Bill Curtis said he could not hear a hit single on their new album, so his partner Jerry Thomas brought in a friend who rapped, Timothy Washington. Even Curtis said Fatback did not invent rap. Rappers in the Bronx, he said, had been doing it for a while.
Blondie's Debbie Harry and Chris Stein got to know Fab 5 Freddy, who took them to a rap show in the Bronx, and they were fascinated. Their song "Rapture" included a rap section in which Harry name-checks Fab 5 Freddy and Grandmaster Flash. In 1981 it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, widely regarded as the chart's first No. 1 to feature rap, and MTV chose it as the first rap video to air on the new channel. Not everyone calls it rap: Stereogum's chart historian hears Harry's part as deadpan spoken word.
"The Message" is credited to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, but Flash himself had nothing to do with the track. It was conceived and largely performed by Ed "Duke Bootee" Fletcher, with the group's Melle Mel as co-writer and rapper. Flash and the others objected to the demo, worried that clubgoers would not want a slow beat and serious lyrics. It came out in 1982 only because label head Sylvia Robinson insisted. In 2002 it was among the first 50 recordings chosen for the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry.
Before rap records were common, Run-DMC rhymed over beats from other records, and a favorite was Aerosmith's "Walk This Way." DMC admits they did not even know the band. They called it "Toys in the Attic," after the album cover, until producer Rick Rubin set them straight and suggested a remake. DMC feared it would ruin them. Instead the 1986 version, with Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, reached No. 4 on the U.S. singles chart, and in the video Tyler smashes a hole through the wall between the two bands.
In 1989 the Grammys presented a Best Rap Performance award for the first time, but only during the untelevised part of the show. DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, the Philadelphia duo of Jeff Townes and a young Will Smith, won for "Parents Just Don't Understand" and were not there to accept. They had joined a boycott led by Def Jam executives, along with Salt-N-Pepa, Public Enemy and others. Smith called the off-air award "a slap in the face," and the boycotters held their own party on the night of the broadcast.
In 2003 Eminem's "Lose Yourself," from the film 8 Mile, became the first rap song to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song. He was not there. He had never thought he could win, and he was at home with his daughter, asleep, because she had to be at school early the next morning. His keyboard player, Luis Resto, accepted the Oscar from Barbra Streisand and then kept phoning until Eminem woke up. Seventeen years later, at the 2020 Oscars, he made a surprise appearance and finally performed the song.
On February 13, 2022, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, Dr. Dre led a 12-minute Super Bowl halftime show with Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar and 50 Cent, running through hits such as "California Love" and "Still D.R.E." That September it won the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special (Live). It was the first time a Super Bowl halftime show had won that category, and the first time hip-hop had won it. In the 2010s the award had mostly gone to Tony Awards telecasts and live musicals.
On August 9, 2024, breaking, the dance born at Bronx parties, made its Olympic debut at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Seventeen B-Girls went head to head in battles set to hip-hop grooves. Japan's Ami Yuasa, known as B-Girl Ami, swept the reigning world champion, Nicka, 3-0 to become the first women's breaking champion in Olympic history. "It still hasn't sunk in yet but I'm over the moon," she said afterward. Her title may stay rare: breaking had already been left off the program for the Los Angeles 2028 Games.
In May 2009 Lin-Manuel Miranda was invited to an evening of poetry, music and the spoken word at the White House, where he was expected to perform from his Broadway musical In the Heights. Instead he announced a concept album about someone he thought embodied hip-hop: Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. The audience laughed. He told them it was true anyway, and his performance drew a standing ovation. The idea grew into Hamilton, the hip-hop musical that went on to win Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize.