How New York City’s Radical Social Movements Gave Rise to Hip-Hop

About two and a half miles north of the new Lincoln Hospital you will find the cradle of hip-hop. Rarely is it possible to pinpoint the genesis of a culture to an address and moment, but on August 11, 1973, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Morris Heights neighborhood, DJ Kool Herc unveiled his two turntables and mixer at a back-to-school party in the building’s rec center. His new technique used a couple of copies of the same record to extend the instrumental break as friend Coke La Rock (no relation to Scott) jumped on the mic to work up the crowd. And with that, hip-hop was born. From these humble origins would grow a global behe­moth, one of America’s two biggest cultural achievements, along­side jazz.

Hip-hop created billionaires but was born in poverty. It was a youth movement that began with zero mainstream interest and few commercial concerns. Nascent emcees loved to rap about two things above all else: partying and how good they were at rapping. But a lot of them sounded off about the struggle too, penning lyrics that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Black Panther newspa­per once hawked by the party’s rank-and-file members. From the earliest recordings, rap and radical politics intertwined. The music became a soapbox for the marginalized and oppressed to deliver dispatches from the urban decay they lived in. To tell the story of Tupac Shakur, hip-hop’s greatest radical, we must consider the rad­ical origins of hip-hop.

It had to happen in the beautiful Bronx, a fiefdom of socialist thought, Marxist organization, and anti-establishment resistance since long before the Panthers or Young Lords showed up. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917, New York’s Red faction toasted the news. They were not an insignificant pocket of the city’s population—Riga-born social­ist leader Morris Hillquit ran for mayor that same year and won more than a fifth of the votes cast. The Communist Party USA was established in the city soon after, its membership mostly made up of poor Jewish immigrants who’d come off boats through Ellis Island. As late as 1931, four-fifths of the communists living in the city were foreign-born.