An American show. Friday, in New York, in the Bronx district, for the 50 years of hip-hop, thousands of people danced and sang with the pillars of this music, such as Run-DMC, Nas or Snoop Dogg, in a Yankee White-hot stadium.
For more than eight hours, New Yorkers and tourists celebrated with demonstrative joy five decades of music born on August 11, 1973. “I had no idea how monumental it was going to be when it started,” confided in the mythical stadium of the 46,000-seat baseball team Kiesha Astwood, 50, born as hip-hop in 1973 and on Sedgwick Avenue, in the Bronx.
This is where, on the ground floor of a public housing building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in one of New York’s five boroughs, a DJ of Jamaican origin, Clive Campbell, alias DJ Kool Herc, innovates: by spinning the same record on two turntables, he isolates the sequences of rhythms and percussion and makes them last in the speakers, prefiguring the “breakbeat”, an essential component of hip-hop. “It’s super invigorating,” enthuses Kiesha Astwood to AFP when Kool Herc receives accolades on stage for his key role. “We are here fifty years later”.
“Hip-hop gave a voice to those who had none”
During this marathon concert which started after 1 a.m., the stars of the genre followed one another to chain hits like Run-DMC and its It’s Tricky, collecting the screams of an audience overwhelmed with happiness. Another veteran, Nas played him a series of titles from his founding album Illmaticincluding “The World Is Yours” and “NY State of Mind”.
A roar rose from the crowd when the New York icon closed her set by inviting Lauryn Hill on stage to sing the track they collaborated on “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)” as well as her own single “Doo Wop (That Thing)” and his rendition of “Killing Me Softly”, originally sung with the Fugees.
Snoop Dogg has chosen songs from among his fans’ favorites, such as “The Next Episode”, “Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang” and “Gin And Juice”.
Lil Wayne, The Sugarhill Gang, members of the Wu-Tang Clan and Ice Cube, were also part of the show, all Melle Mel or Scorpio with Grandmaster Caz.
“I think hip-hop has really given a voice to people who didn’t have a voice at the start,” summarized Antoine Crossley, who came specially from Chicago.
“It’s our love, our lineage”
This concert was the culmination of a series of events. New York has given rise to a number of cultural initiatives all summer long: graffiti or breakdance sessions, “block parties”, concerts… For some critics and fans, giving an official date to the birth of a style of music, which in fact already existed before August 11, 1973, seems a bit arbitrary.
But perhaps no other type of music deserved to celebrate its birth. For decades, hip-hop has been maligned, ignored and censored by an industry it has helped to profoundly shape, in a country where rappers have produced massive hits and had a huge impact on everything from music fashion, through language and dance.
When life was harsh and violent in New York, the first “block parties”, celebrations, offered young African-Americans an escape from poverty and discrimination. Hip-hop then spread to the four corners of the planet and most countries now have their own scene.
In the audience, from children to grandparents danced, sang, and made the night sparkle in the light of their cell phones. But as the hours passed, some joked that they were aging like hip-hop itself. “All the people sitting are over 30, we have a little sore knees here,” admitted one of them.
Fans who had the stamina to stick around to the end got to see Nas bring DJ Kool Herc back on stage for another round of thanks. “It’s our love, our lineage,” he said. “Hip-hop was born for you and me, and we are where we need to be. At New York “.