Hip hop officially began on Sunday November 12th 1974. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? How can a scene, an artform, a whole culture be said to have begun on a specific date – exactly forty years ago this Wednesday? Well we believe it, because Afrika Bambaataa says so.
Now aged 57, Bambaataa’s life story is as extraordinary as it is uncelebrated. Born Kevin Donovan in the Bronx in late 1950s, he won a UNICEF essay writing contest at school that earned him a trip to Africa. It changed his life. Seeing, as he put it ‘black people controlling their own destiny’ made him vow to end the destructive gang violence in the Bronx and use the city’s nascent hip hop scene as a force for change.
This may all have been a pipe dream, were it not for Bambaataa’s magnetic ability as a DJ. He brought people together by having the best, rarest, most unusual and funky records in the entire state. The random, disparate tunes that Bambaataa discovered became the building blocks of what’s now a billion-dollar industry. The philosophy behind hip hop could even be said to have done more for black America than Barack Obama. All this happened, incidentally, before Jay Z could count to 99 or K-anye had tasted his first croissant.
Today, two remarkable things are happening to Afrika Bambaataa’s record collection. One is that Cornell University are turning it into an archive and slowly digitising all 40,000 items of vinyl. The second is that DJ Shadow and Jurassic 5’s Cut Chemist – two masters of turntablism with an eye for concept – have been loaned a sizeable stack of those original records to create a DJ show called Renegades of Rhythm, which will be coming to The Forum in 2015. Our sources Stateside that have seen the show describe it as a dazzling and unconventional tribute to the ‘anything goes’ spirit of Bambaataa’s sets – where records by Kraftwerk or The Clash, sit against James Brown or Rick James.
Though Bambaataa isn’t part of the show, he will be in town at a discussion at the BFI on December 1. You might not see any ‘Happy Birthday Hip Hop’ cards in WH Smith this week, but thankfully there are still some ways to celebrate one of the more unusual birthdays in the cultural calendar.