On 11 August 1973, at an apartment block in the Bronx, an 18-year-old DJ called Kool Herc – short for Hercules, a nod to his considerable stature – put on some funk records at a dance party, turned up the beats and rapped along to the music. His performance is broadly agreed to have birthed a new style that would come to dominate popular music.
In Hip-hop Is History, the drummer, producer, film-maker and co-founder of Philadelphia rap crew the Roots, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, celebrates 50 years of hip-hop in a work that is part memoir – the author’s musical obsession began when he heard Rapper’s Delight on the radio aged eight – and part chronological history of a genre that yielded “decades of innovation, achievement, energy, artistry and history – meaning decades of life”.
