Our review of the history of Hip-Hop has been a real walk down memory lane for me. I was 8 years old when I first heard “Rapper’s Delight” played on the radio the Winter of 1979 and it was so memorable, I remember exactly where I was…waiting for a bus with my mom, brother, aunt and 6 kids (we were returning from a Christmas party…it was also the first time I ever got to ride in a limousine, but that’s beside the point). When the tune came on, us kids just looked at each other in awe and bopped our heads to the beat stunned that the music we were so used to hearing around Gun Hill Projects was on the radio being broadcast to the world (or so we thought). Soon after “Delight” came out, hip-hop albums started pouring into NYCers’ everyday lives; Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks”, The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Apache” and Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” went into heavy radio rotation. Giant beat (radio) boxes that took a massive amount of D-cell batteries to power, were seen at almost every park bench broadcasted to everyone playing hopscotch or jumping double dutch (another big thing during the dawn of the hip-hop going mainstream). 

In our review, we also covered something else that was vital to the make-up of my Gun Hill Projects community in the mid to late 80s; breakdancing! The many crew battles I’ve witnessed, particularly between the GHP crew and another complex, Edenwald Projects, were how fights were played out until someone got their feelings hurt and all guys participating would throw blows. Le sigh, things were so much simpler then…