MEET YOUR MAKERS.
In 1973, DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican immigrant, hosted the “Back to School Jam,” effectively launching the hip hop movement. He introduced the “breakbeat” method of DJing and the rhythmic spoken delivery found in rap music.
While many individuals are credited with pioneering hip hop, three of the most notable are DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash.
Africa Bambaataa was known for organizing block parties and founding the Universal Zulu Nation, which advocated for peace and rehabilitated the city’s youth through hip hop. Grandmaster Flash was known for his contributions to DJing techniques through scratching and back spinning.
He also organized a group, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, releasing many influential songs; “The Message,” a song about the realities of living in the ghetto, was one of them, and the song that established rap as a genre and brought it into the mainstream.
Notable Influences: Roxanne Shante
Roxanne Shanté Gooden was a teenage rap prodigy from Queensbridge, New York, and one of the first and most influential female MCs and “superstars” in hip-hop history. Roxanne’s fame developed through her participation in the infamous “Roxanne Wars,” the first prolific and documented “rap beef”, a series of diss tracks started by her hit song “Roxanne’s Revenge.”
The Wu-Tang Clan
In 1992, the American hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan was founded in Staten Island, New York City. Its members include RZA, GZA, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Masta Killa, and, until his passing in 2004, Ol’ Dirty Bastard. The group is well-known for its gritty sound, old-school rap influence, and sharp lyrics. They are also regarded as one of the greatest hip-hop groups of all time.
This video is a 1993 debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), that revolutionized hip-hop production and resurrected the East Coast rap aesthetic. By fusing obscure soul loops, kung-fu movie clips, and gritty drum programming, RZA reinvents sampling, producing a dark sound that juxtaposes the polished sound of West Coast G-funk. The album’s intentionally lo-fi quality, with its distorted samples and minimalist approach, became a blueprint for underground hip-hop authenticity. In addition to inventing production techniques that would inspire future generations of beatmakers, Wu-Tang’s musical breakthroughs affected several East Coast classics, like Nas’s Illmatic and Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die. The album solidified Wu-Tang’s position as production pioneers and permanently broadened hip-hop’s vocabulary by rejecting the dominant sound in favor of unadulterated originality.
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