ern's: It's payback time for DJ Kool Herc

Few artists are true architects of their genre ? but DJ Kool Herc has that distinction. It's time for hip-hop to pay him back

It's hardly a surprise that Clive "Kool Herc" Campbell is struggling to pay medical bills after an undisclosed condition required his hospitalisation. In the past year alone, Them Crooked Vultures played an extra gig on their UK tour to raise money to pay for cancer treatment for their friend Brian O'Connor, bassist with Eagles of Death Metal; jazz musicians Eddie Gale and Calvin Keys staged a festival in California to raise money for musicians with healthcare needs; three drummers formed a coalition to raise money to pay for Clyde Stubblefield, the man who played on James Brown's oft-sampled Funky Drummer, to have kidney surgery; and after Alex Chilton's death last April, his wife told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that, although unwell, he had not sought medical help partly because he did not have insurance. In a country with no free-at-point-of-delivery health service, those with unpredictable incomes will often consider health insurance an expense they cannot afford, and costly illness a risk they are forced to take. But there is something different about Herc's situation.

There are few pioneers of any musical form who could truly be considered the master architect of a genre ? but Herc has that distinction. Hip-hop doesn't just have a family tree, it has a birth certificate: the hand-drawn flyer for the party Herc threw in the basement of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx on 13 August 1973, which so many people turned up to, they had to move it outside, to the nearby Cedar Park. His "merry-go-round" approach ? extending the percussion break by playing a second copy of the same record on one turntable as soon as the break had finished on the other deck ? gave the world the concept of the breakbeat. Breakdancing, rapping over breakbeats, sampling and loop-based dance music all began that night. Although he is generally seen alongside Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash as one third of hip-hop's founding "holy trinity", Herc is first among equals. While Bam was the "Master of Records", his encyclopaedic knowledge of different music adding to the emerging genre's stylistic and sonic palette, and Flash was the innovator whose aptitude for electronics enabled his invention of cutting, cueing and (perhaps: his protege Grand Wizard Theodore claims the invention, though Flash demurs) scratching, Herc was the one who laid the foundations on which they built.

Yet unlike practically everyone who followed him, Herc did not manage to monetise his innovations. Bam and Flash both formed groups with rappers, got signed to key independent labels, and made worldwide hit records. By contrast, Herc was more about the size of the sound system and the atmosphere of the parties he threw, neither of which were things he could duplicate and sell. He stayed in the rec rooms and parks, rocking the beats for the people of hip-hop's epicentre, paying little attention to DJ innovators or the politics of the record industry. Maybe he paid the price for not trying to forever stay on the cutting edge of the genre he accidentally founded: but if you were putting it in the sort of language rappers have tended to use down the years, he never sold out, and he kept it real. His prize for this was a ton of respect, but virtually no cash.

I first met Herc in New York some time in the mid-90s. He was irascible to start with, and it didn't take long to find out why. Just that morning he'd popped in to the offices of Hot 97, the New York radio station that claimed it was the biggest outlet for hip-hop in the US, to speak to his friend, Kool DJ Red Alert, whom he'd known since the early days of the Bronx block parties. But instead of the respect that ought to be afforded someone of Herc's stature, he'd been made to sit in reception while staff tried, not terribly hard, to find Red Alert. At the time, the station's slogan was "Where Hip-Hop Lives", and this had just infuriated Herc all the more. "They say that's where hip-hop lives," he complained, "but I built their house ? and they won't even let me through the door."

He had plans, but they never came to fruition. In interview, he wouldn't speak about the incident in which he was stabbed during one of his parties, or his subsequent relocation to Jamaica, right at the point when hip-hop started to become a business ? he was saving that for an autobiography, which still hasn't materialised. He gave me a cassette of a half-hour breakbeat mix he'd made, which was supposed to be released by a German label called Public Attack, but never came out. He appeared on a 1994 LP by Public Enemy DJ Terminator X, and there was talk of a stint in A&R ? but his highest-profile work since the block party era remains his collaboration with the Chemical Brothers, who also brought him and Theodore over to the UK to support them on tour. He has some involvement in the merchandise company Sedgwick & Cedar, named after the location of that epochal 1973 party, but it would take more than royalties from T-shirt sales to pay for comprehensive health insurance.

With the honourable exceptions of Public Enemy and the Chemical Brothers, it looks like pretty much anyone involved in the business of hip-hop, breakbeats or sample-based music owes Herc big time. Jay-Z once rapped that his approach to the industry was to make it pay for the way it mistreated hip-hop's innovators ("I'm overchargin' niggas for what they did to the Cold Crush," he wrote in Izzo, referring to the Cold Crush Brothers, whose leader, Grand Master Caz, had his rhymes used by the Sugar Hill Gang on the first ever rap single) ? but words only go so far.

If rap icons wanted to have a greater and more lasting impact, there's a quick and easy way: when Herc is over his present bout of illness, take a leaf out of the Chemicals' and PE's books, and book him to DJ on tour, have him appear on records, pay him to make a cameo appearance in a video. And the radio stations, magazines, record labels and management outfits that deal exclusively in the music he created ought to be looking at both donations and consultancy roles too. Even the labels whose funk back catalogues have been revitalised in the marketplace by sampling, hip-hop and breakbeat DJ-ing owe Herc a debt. Entrepreneurialism is important, and Herc hasn't been the most adept at that part of life in the era he helped shape: but without him, none of these people would have had an arena in which to build a career. The hip-hop industry needs to realise that their debt to him goes beyond thanks and kudos: it should also be paid in billable currency.

Donations can be sent to: Kool Herc Productions, PO Box 20472, Huntington Station, New York, NY 11746.

Angus Batey

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