The New York that spawned hip-hop spit me out, too. I came of age in the ’70s, attending high school and college in the city’s outer boroughs, and have many great memories of the era. But I’d be lying if I told you the ’70s were a time of triumph in Nueva York. Quite the contrary. It was, at times, a frightful experience to walk the streets, ride the subways, or contemplate the future. A sense of despair and decay emanated from a poorly run City Hall, strike and corruption wracked municipal services, and the city was pervaded by the sense that it (and perhaps all big Northeastern cities) was essentially unlivable.

But in chaos there is often opportunity, in pain a measure of pleasure, and joy is just a stroke or two away from pain. The aesthetic industry now known internationally as hip-hop is a product of these blighted times, a child that walked, talked, and partied amid negativity. In Ishmael Reed’s brilliant 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, he writes of an African-inspired rhythmic virus that rises to battle the rigid forces of Western orthodoxy. Unknown to all but a small percentage of New Yorkers, hip-hop "jes grew" in the damaged, insecure city of my youth, and neither poverty nor indifference nor racism could stop it. In fact, to some degree all those things helped it grow.

The twenty-first-century New York of martyrdom, national acclaim, and heroic local leadership has nothing to do with the city that nurtured hip-hop. That metropolis was an embattled, tough, cynical town that for many symbolized America’s bitter rejection of the urban experience. The Republicans became the nation’s majority party by railing against the excesses of welfare mothers, liberal spending, and the ills of identity politics—all of which were identified with this melting pot. Moreover, the rise of the Sunbelt states, places increasingly populated by big-city refugees, fueled an intense hostility toward New York and the snowbelt in general. The apex of this disdain came in 1975 when President Gerald Ford, who’d replaced the disgraced Richard Nixon, refused a cash-strapped city some key financial support. The once feisty (now moribund) Daily News proclaimed, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." The headline perfectly captured the attitude of so many Americans toward their biggest city.

The Bronx, the only one of the five boroughs physically connected to the U.S. mainland, became the symbol of all that ailed us. A brief survey of statistics from the southern end of the borough in the ’70s tells a horrific tale. The median family income in New York was $9,682; in the South Bronx it was $5,200. The area suffered one-quarter of all the city’s reported cases of malnutrition. The infant mortality rate was 29 in 1,000 births. There were 6,000 abandoned buildings there. In the pivotal year of 1975, there were 13,000 fires in a twelve-square-mile radius that left more than 10,000 people homeless and earned landlords $10 million in insurance settlements.

Heroin was a plague that devastated the Bronx and Harlem, yet due to the city’s fiscal ills, the budget for the office of the special narcotics prosecutor plummeted from $2.4 million in 1975 to $1.1 in 1977. The trafficking was aided greatly by rampant police corruption. The Knapp Commission, whose investigation into police malfeasance was sparked by the testimony of officer Frank Serpico, issued a report in December 1972 that stated that the "problem was an extensive, department-wide phenomenon that included cops selling heroin, ratting on informants to the mob, and riding shotgun on drug deals." In February 1973 it was discovered that heroin and cocaine valued at $73 million had been stolen from the police property clerk’s office.

This combination of police impotence, urban misery, and highly organized drug distribution led to the rise of Nicky Barnes, aka Mr. Untouchable, a black drug kingpin who dominated Harlem and the Bronx. Throughout the ’70s, the specter of Barnes and his council of death merchants dominated crime in his communities as Reggie Jackson dominated coverage of the Yankees after his 1976 arrival in pinstripes.

While all this (and more) was happening in the streets, mayors John Lindsay and Abe Beame were indulging in accounting tricks that ballooned the city’s short-term debt from $4.4 million in 1970 to $7.3 million in 1974, setting the stage for its near bankruptcy mid-decade. From the late 1970s into the ’80s, a financial control board oversaw New York’s budget as transit fares soared, the city’s infrastructure crumbled, and white flight eroded its tax base. The South Bronx, home to Yankee Stadium, wide boulevards, and miles of burnt-out buildings, became a national symbol visited by grandstanding politicians (like future president Ronald Reagan), ridiculed in Johnny Carson’s nightly Tonight Show monologues, and depicted in grim Hollywood flicks like Fort Apache—The Bronx.

All of this raises the question, Could hip-hop have been born in the tightly policed, gentrified, self-congratulatory Big Apple of the ’90s? My guess is no. The very lack of civil control (and concern) that marked New York in the 1970s aided the culture’s incubation. The sound-system battles in city parks and school yards would have been impossible in a city that strictly enforced "quality of life" crimes against loud music and after-dark use of public space. It’s hard to imagine Rudy Giuliani allowing the easy entry to the subway yards that made possible the amazing train-long graffiti tags that are now celebrated on web sites and in magazines all over the world. A great many of the discos that supported hip-hop parties in the Bronx and Harlem were owned and operated by drug-related businessmen; trafficking in heroin, coke, and angel dust was both public and widespread. It’s hard to imagine the casual illegality of these ’70s clubs surviving the targeted, computer-driven police tactics of recent times.

The lack of employment for minority youth made gang culture and, later, hip-hop posses (where kids could be MCs, DJs, dancers, graffiti artists, or security guards) quite attractive. Much as the lawlessness of the Prohibition era aided the development of jazz, the lackadaisical criminal enforcement policies of the ’70s encouraged the experimentation that was eventually organized into the hip-hop industry.

The flip side of all the grim stats of the ’70s and early ’80s was that none of this drama inhibited the spirit of the people. What you’ll find in the personal observations, photos, and posters of hip-hop’s early days that make up this book is what Hemingway termed "grace under pressure"—a will to survive through strength, self-expression, and plain old fun. Unlike hip-hop’s ’80s heroes (many of whom emerged from middle-class environments), the early pioneers and their audience came from housing projects, tenements, and rough areas—and didn’t let any of that stifle their desire for pleasure. The will to joy proved as powerful as any of the socioeconomic forces aligned against them.

Well into the ’80s, hip-hop gatherings had an edge, a balance between pain and the celebration of music and movement. Later the culture would lose that edge, would tip so that pain, as fact and subject, overwhelmed its joy. But for the people you’ll meet in the following pages, that balancing act was in the party’s background. In the foreground was self-expression, creativity, and love (as corny as it sounds). No one was getting rich. Most of the people in those pre-Run-DMC years made, at best, tens of thousands creating hip-hop, not hundreds of thousands and certainly not millions.

It may be cold comfort to the survivors of hip-hop’s original school, but their style, taste, and culture still resonate decades later. The way they dressed, danced, spoke, and painted are still with us, sometimes submerged in commercial products, sometimes in things as obvious as the Technics turntables that have remained icons three decades later. Now remixed and recycled, their ways of hearing and seeing once represented the potent and tangible shock of the new.

At least that’s how it felt to me hearing black DJs rock Kraftwerk’s "Trans Europe Express" in Brooklyn playgrounds, marveling at breakers spinning on cardboard under Times Square’s neon, seeing painter’s caps and shell-toe Adidas emerge as high-profile fashion on Harlem streets. A shift was occurring, and you either were drawn to it or feared it. There was very little middle ground. That fear actually strengthened hip-hop. It meant parents, authority figures, and uptight people of all colors weeded themselves out from those who understood. It was a badge of honor or bad taste, depending on who was doing the pinning.

Now everyone has access. It’s great business, but bad for creativity, innovation, and that intangible magic that surrounds a movement in motion. Twenty-first-century hip-hop is an industry with institutions, orthodoxies, and dogmas. That’s cool. That’s evolution. That’s life. But this document you’re holding isn’t about any of that. It isn’t about hip-hop today or New York today or any of that stuff. It’s about a time and a place and a people that you should know about and that I, happily, cannot forget.

Nelson George
Brooklyn, 2002