The Birth of Hip-Hop | Generation X

My name's DJ Cool. The music spun by Herc is different from the stuff most DJ's are playing. He would take two records and spin back and forth from the same spot to just prolong the breakbeat. Herc's style catches on, and not just with b-boys but with emcees who use the break to pick up the mic.

He talks now with the rhythm; he rhymes a little bit here and there. You see the development start now. He kind of wants you to give him a story, and the next thing you know, all of these people are actually rapping. People went there to dance, and then it became something where people had to listen.

They were partying their pain away; they were speaking their pain away. They were using music to be an escape from the oppression that they were undergoing, and that's what hip-hop was born out of—hip hop, the phoenix rising out of the city's ashes.

You would go into some very rough neighborhoods, but the energy was amazing. You felt something that you couldn't feel anywhere else. So this began to replicate itself and got bigger and bigger. A musical revolution is brewing in these Bronx basements, and it's about to explode.