Hip-hop music’s founding father, Kool DJ Herc, will be among the luminaries to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (RRHOF) at the end of this year, and will also be honored with the Musical Influence Award. The timing is most appropriate, being in sync with hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, which will be commemorated this August 11. Brooklyn’s Barclay Center will host the induction ceremony on Friday, November 3, during Hip-Hop History Month.
“Everything we now recognize as the massive cultural force of hip-hop began 50 years ago in the Bronx with the turntables of DJ Kool Herc,” the RRHOF explained in their statement. “Herc was a founding father of hip-hop music.”
What began as a back-to-school event hosted by Herc’s sister, Cindy Campbell, at the rec room of their building at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue on August 11, 1973, eventually came to be recognized as when hip-hop was birthed. On this day, he planted a seed in the West Bronx that has since sprouted worldwide.
“This was in the Bronx in the ’70s. I moved to the States with my mother and I started to have jams in an old building,” the Jamaican-native Herc recently told the media. “It got very popular and then the American kids got hold of the toasting—that’s the element that they took from us.”
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He used his Jamaican roots and culture-influenced sound system set-up while spinning hard funk and soul records. His “merry-go-round” style of using two turntables to spin records, and a mixer to extend the music without interruptions, had seldom been seen in the U.S., and became the building blocks for hip-hop music. He and his master of ceremonies, Coke La Rock formed the Herculoids, hip-hop’s first music group.
Since then, hip-hop has become a global phenomenon, influencing many aspects of everyday life around the planet and merging many cultures, ethnicities, and languages. Its commercialization reaped billions of dollars for corporate America.
This year’s RRHOF inductees are quite diverse.
“We’re very happy with this year’s class,” said RRHOF CEO and President Joel Peresman to the media. “People always try to pigeonhole what rock and roll is, but our story has always been that it’s a wide tent. It includes all different kinds of genres.
“We think this class really shows the breadth of rock and roll. When you have Missy Elliott, Sheryl Crow, and the Spinners, along with Rage Against the Machine and Willie Nelson, you’re covering a lot of things.”
However, some say that the Bronx-bred culture doesn’t need awards from outside entities to be validated.
“Who should feel more honored, the RRHOF or Herc?” Paradise “The Architect” Gray, the chief curator of the upcoming Universal Hip-Hop Museum, asked rhetorically. “We don’t need them to sanction who our pioneers are. We should be doing that ourselves.”