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By Root 550 0

Spades, that still thrives today. The Zulu Nation strove to de-escalate gang violence by creating a hub for the various groups involved in hip-hop. Over the years Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation have become the U.N. of hip-hop, albeit with less red tape and more success stories. The Zulus were the first hip-hop artists to take the music to Europe (in 1981) while Bambaataa, with Soulsonic Force, scored as a recording artist with the 1982 robo-funk opus “Planet Rock,” a genre-smashing classic, as influential for establishing Tommy Boy Records as it is for inspiring British dance DJs such as the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, and the Prodigy more than a decade later.

Grandmaster Wizard Theodore is regarded as the first DJ who scratched a record backward against the needle while cuing up, forever loosing a shrill exclamatory tear into hip-hop’s sonic vocabulary. But Grandmaster Flash, born Joseph Saddler, ran with the scratch. As a performer with the Furious Five, Flash expanded hip-hop’s lyrical legacy of party-up jams into trenchant social commentary in one fell swoop with 1982’s “The Message.” But before that, Flash redefined DJ-ing. He used the electronics training he received at vocational high school to construct a homemade cue mixer, which allowed him to listen to one record while the other was playing. At the time, this was a feature found only on professional nightclub setups. With that advantage and the hand–eye coordination that earned him his DJ handle, Flash dexterously perfected back-spinning: winding back records on alternating turntables to repeat the same musical segment. He also invented punch-phrasing: quickly blasting bits of sound from one record into the mix while the other continues to play. Flash even integrated the original beat box—a customized Vox drum machine—into his performance. He made an acrobatic show out of DJ-ing as Jimi Hendrix had out of guitar-playing: using his elbows to mix and turning his back to his turntables while scratching and back-spinning. Flash was also the man who made MCs the main draw of the evening. Where other DJs had one or two MCs who improvised rhymes to keep spirits high and bodies moving, Flash performed with five. His group elevated the form with bounced rhymes, tandem flows, and back-to-back delivery that came off like one voice. They moved the attention off the recorded music onto the words, from the DJs to the rappers. Flash and the Furious Five were the first hip-hop juggernaut product—they had the skills, the outfits, and the sound, as well as the complete recording and performing package. And they defined the first wave of rap music.

Early hip-hop culture found its visual aesthetic in two nonmusical scenes: graffiti artists and break-dancers. Not all graffiti kids were into hip-hop and not all of them were black (many of the best were Hispanic and some were white). In the Bronx, artists such as Dondi White and Lee Quinones covered the rotting buildings of the ghetto with ornate murals, testifying their tags, or pen names. They painted subway cars and broken walls, displaying the same DIY attitude of the crews throwing park parties. Many, such as the brilliant Jean-Michel Basquiat (who soon evolved beyond graffiti style), ended up selling canvases of graffiti to the downtown art crowd by the early eighties. Graffiti style permeated early hip-hop, from the logos of the groups to the flyers that advertised the shows. It is less revolutionary now; graffiti is hip-hop’s calling card, expected everywhere there is hip-hop culture or the advertising aimed at the broad hip-hop market.

The other group making waves in hip-hop’s early days were break-dancers. The dance style began as a trend among black gangs, devoid of the acrobatic tricks associated with it today. Like any novelty, it passed out of fashion, but when African-Americans moved on, Hispanic teens made it their own. In clubs and on street corners all over the city, “breakers” such as Crazy Legs (Richie Colon) elevated the style, integrating martial arts high kicks and spins. In the early eighties, break dancing