Hip hop, a rapping style of music, originated 45 years ago, on August 11, 1973, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the South Bronx. It was a simple back to school party thrown by a girl and her brother, Kool Herc, was the DJ of the party. Kool Herc, whose real name was Clive Campbell, was an 18-year-old Jamaican-American DJ. He decided to try something new and instead of playing an entire song, he only played the instrumental sections. This, combined with the fact that his friend Coke LaRock cheered the crowd on with his microphone, sent the crowd into a frenzy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Another person who contributed to hip hop was the DJ known as Grandmaster Flash. It would also host block parties that would become world famous. He was the first DJ to actually touch records and move them back and forth as they played on the turntable. He also wrote on records with crayons and grease pencils. This was known as the rapid mix theory. This is what laid the foundation for DJs and what they can do with a record instead of just letting it play. Conditions in the South Bronx in the summer of 1973 were dismal if not catastrophic. The construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway in the 1960s literally cut a line through New York, displacing thousands of people from their homes. Property values ​​plummeted to the worst the Bronx had ever seen, unemployment skyrocketed as the city slashed spending, and buildings sat empty, occupied only by squatters, drug addicts, and the mentally ill. Anyone who could afford to leave sold their house and left, leaving only the poorest behind. Factories left for the suburbs, taking all the jobs with them. Store owners moved their stores because no one could afford to buy from them. The owners were not receiving any rent from their tenants, so they began burning down the apartment building so they could collect the insurance money. Police agencies and fire departments were overwhelmed and understaffed. The major ethnic groups living in the South Bronx before World War II were Jews, Italians, Irish, and Germans. The South Bronx was once called the Jewish Borough, and 49 percent of the people living there were Jewish, peaking in 1930. In contrast, after World War II, the population went from two-thirds non-Hispanic to two-thirds non-Hispanic black or Puerto Rican in the early 1960s. Racial tension also played a role in middle-class families abandoning the South Bronx neighborhood. As a result of a new policy requiring children to be bused to other school districts, for racial equality, parents worried about their children and moved to the suburbs. All of these conditions contributed to the rise of gangs in the South Bronx. The poor economy, coupled with high unemployment, created a strong attraction for street gangs who supported themselves by selling drugs on a large scale. Gangs were also attractive to young people because they meant power and protection for them. But the gangs weren't all bad. They began to help within the community, for example by volunteering in soup kitchens. They also kept their neighborhoods safer and sought the need to make their voices heard against the brutal system of oppression. It was these gangs that helped birth hip hop in the South Bronx. The gangs grew large and, of course, began to fight among themselves. They finally got to a point in.