Sometime in the summer of 2023, the musical genre and lifestyle known as hip-hop will officially hit the half-century mark.
It's hard to believe nearly 50 summers have passed since Clive Campbell, then an 18-year-old Jamaican-born American known as DJ Kool Herc, threw a house party in the South Bronx that changed the course of popular music while also challenging the idea of what constitutes American music.
Even as he thrilled party guests with unprecedented turntable artistry, no one, including Kool Herc himself, could have imagined that isolating and elongating beats using two turntables would become the foundation for an art form that would, within a generation, become the biggest and most profitable musical genre in the world.
