This month marks half a century since hip-hop was first born in the Bronx, on the 1973 summer night when Kool Herc threw one of his now-historic parties on Sedgwick Avenue. Using two turntables in a similar style to a disco DJ, he transformed the percussive, funk instrumentals of James Brown’s Give It Up or Turnit a Loose into a beat-heavy, looping epic that laid down the foundations for the entire genre. This August you’ll probably hear a great deal about how Grandmaster Flash’s Cowboy Keef first coined the name hip-hop while taking the mick out of his Army recruit friend having to march in time, or how Sugar Hill Gang were the first to bring it onto the airways with 1979’s Rapper’s Delight. It’s also likely you’ll hear far less noise around that same song’s producer Sylvia Robinson, for instance. The Sugar Hill Records founder, who once hired an early-career Spike Lee to direct Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s White Lines (Don’t Do It) music video, is just one of the many undersung women in hip-hop to feature in Netflix’s new documentary Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop.
