“A history of hip-hop in 20 songs? It’s difficult enough to condense one artist’s career into 20 songs, but any attempt to do the same for an entire genre is a fool’s errand. It’s an interesting exercise, nonetheless. If you were speaking to someone that wasn’t familiar with the genre, what songs would you pick to tell the history of hip-hop? You’d of course need to start at the beginning. And, hip-hop, perhaps uniquely among all musical forms, has a generally accepted start date. That came on August 11, 1973, when the teenage DJ Kool Herc played his sister’s birthday party in the basement of their apartment complex in the Bronx, New York. Herc was behind the style’s early innovations, particularly the isolating and repeating of percussion sections of funk records, using a second copy of the same record, and extending the breakdowns so the athletically inclined dancers could let loose. ...”
