Coke La Rock

 Coke La Rock is an old-school rapper from New York City who is credited as being one of the first MCs in the history of hip-hop. He was born in The Bronx, New York City on April 24, 1955, with family roots going back to North Carolina. He was a friend and musical partner of DJ Kool Herc, who is generally considered to have laid down the foundation for hip-hop music starting in 1973. La Rock was an original member of Herc's MC crew, The Herculoids.

Coke La Rock's raps were always purely improvisational, unlike those of later 70s-era rap groups, such as the Furious Five and Cold Crush Brothers, who wrote down and rehearsed their rhymes and created elaborate routines. Nonetheless, La Rock's raps would serve as a basic model for other hip-hop artists that would come onto the Bronx music scene by the end of the decade.

After Kool Herc was stabbed at a party, La Rock decided to step away from hip-hop and let the younger generation move in. In contrast to other early Bronx hip-hop artists like Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, Coke La Rock—like his partner Kool Herc—never achieved any recording success (indeed he did not record at all). However, late 2008 saw the release of what was deemed the first ever recording featuring La Rock, a song titled "Hello – Merry Christmas Baby!" which was released by Sedgwick & Cedar as part of a special holiday compilation to pay homage to the birthplace of hip-hop.

Coke La Rock's place in hip-hop history was arguably immortalized in the legendary 1986 Boogie Down Productions song "South Bronx" wherein KRS-One raps about the early days of hip-hop with Coke La Rock, Kool Herc, and Bam. In 2021, after years of being absent from the hip hop scene, Coke La Rock returned to the microphone with a verse on the DJ Kay Slay posse track "Rolling 110 Deep".