On this date in 1973, a fellow named Clive Campbell threw a back-to-school party for his sister. For admission, he charged female guests 25 cents and 50 cents for males. The money went for his sister's new clothes and supplies.
Such a party would have been like many others except for one thing. You see, he was a DJ with an interesting background and unique set of skills and ideas.
Six years earlier, when he was 12, he and his family emigrated from Kingston, Jamaica to Bronx, New York. In addition to his talents as a musician and host, he brought with him the memory of music from a dancehall near his old home--and a tradition of "toasting," or talking over the music.
He would "toast" over the records he played--as he extended their beats--"breaking" or "scratching"--to give guests more time to dance to them.
Now, many have argued--plausibly--that other artists and performers were "breaking," "scratching" and "toasting" years before Clive Campbell's party. But that party is cited as the "birth" of what we now call "hip-hop" because it's the first recorded instance of those elements coming together to create, not just a musical style, but an artistic movement in which "toasting" came to be known as "rapping" and would include "break" dancing and the kind of graffiti that pulses like the waves of urban life across subway cars.
So what does the "50th anniversary of hip-hop" have to do with bicycling?
Well, the music, art and dance I've described are part of a response--and a way of coping--with the conditions--including poverty and violence as well as extraordinary diversity-- of life in the Bronx and other urban areas of the 1970s and 1980s. Soon, people in conditions and places far removed from those of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue--where Clive Campbell, whom the world would come to know as DJ Kool Herc threw that party--would see the music he pioneered, and the lyrics he, and others would "rap" over it--expressed something they were feeling or, at least, that it was fresh in a way that the popular music of the time wasn't.
In other words, hip hop filed, and continues to fill, a void. So does cycling. Shaka Pitts understands as much. He co-founded the Baltimore advocacy group Black People Ride Bikes--and Pits Fights Battle League, one of the city's longest-running hip-hop events. He says he's "doing the same thing" in the cycling and hip-hop worlds: "I bring in other people. I lateral things off." That is how he fills the void--and helps people to cope with, and express the realities, of their lives.
