Kool Herc

 DJ Kool Herc, whose birth name is Clive Campbell, is a Jamaican-American DJ and is widely considered to be the founder of hip-hop music. He was born on April 16, 1955, in Kingston, Jamaica, and was the first of six children born to Keith and Nettie Campbell.

Herc's family moved to the Bronx in New York City in 1967, where they lived at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. He attended Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx. His height, frame, and demeanor on the basketball court prompted the other kids to nickname him "Hercules." Herc was involved in a physical altercation with school bullies, and the Five Percenters came to his aid, befriended him, and helped "Americanize" him with an education in New York City street culture. He began running with a graffiti crew called the Ex-Vandals, taking the name Kool Herc.

While growing up in Jamaica, Herc was exposed to the sound systems of neighborhood parties called dance halls and the accompanying speech of their DJs, known as toasting. He was inspired by the music and started playing records himself. After moving to New York, Herc brought his knowledge of Jamaican sound systems and toasting to the Bronx.

In August 1973, Herc threw a party with his younger sister, Cindy, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. The party, called a "Back to School Jam," was designed to raise money for back-to-school clothes. Cindy promoted and organized the event and also developed fashion for her brother to wear. Herc played hard funk records of the sort typified by James Brown, but he began to isolate the instrumental portion of the record which emphasized the drum beat—the "break"—and switch from one break to another. Using the same two-turntable set-up of disco DJs, he used two copies of the same record to elongate the break. This breakbeat DJing, using funky drum solos, formed the basis of hip-hop music. Herc's announcements and exhortations to dancers helped lead to the syncopated, rhythmically spoken accompaniment now known as rapping.

He called the dancers "break-boys" and "break-girls," or simply b-boys and b-girls. Herc's DJ style was quickly taken up by figures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. Unlike them, he never made the move into commercially recorded hip-hop in its earliest years. However, his influence on hip-hop culture was significant, and he continued to DJ and perform throughout the years.

Herc's sound system consisted of two turntables connected to two amplifiers and a Shure "Vocal Master" PA system with two speaker columns, on which he played records such as James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose," Jimmy Castor's "It's Just Begun," and Booker T. & the M.G.'s' "Melting Pot." With Bronx clubs struggling with street gangs, uptown DJs catering to an older disco crowd with different aspirations, and commercial radio also catering to a demographic distinct from teenagers in the Bronx, Herc's parties, organized and promoted by his sister Cindy, had a ready-made audience.

Herc's style was the blueprint for hip-hop music, and he used the record to focus on a short, heavily percussive part in it: the "break." Since this part of the record was the one the dancers liked best, Herc isolated the break and prolonged it by changing between two record players. As one record reached the end of the break, he cued a second record back to the beginning of the break, which allowed him to extend a relatively short section of music into "