Hip-Hop Turns 50, Good Morning America Helps Celebrate

As part of Good Morning America’s celebration of hip-hop turning 50 and their summer concert series, Fat Joe, Remy Ma, Busta Rhymes, and BIA put on a performance live from Central Park on August 11. Fashion, which has often evolved alongside hip-hop artists like Lil Kim, Missy Elliott and pioneers like Grandmaster Flash was also well represented. According to Billboard, Bustle Digital Group’s Senior Vice-President of Fashion Tiffany Reed and stylist Joe Zee hosted a fashion show spotlighting some of hip-hop’s notable contributions to fashion. The two discussed contributions from Busta Rhymes, Lil Kim, Missy Elliott, and others that created a marriage between the streets and the world of high fashion.

Later that night, there were more festivities planned at Yankee Stadium. As Billboard reported, Hip-Hop 50 Live featured a who’s-who list spanning the history of hip-hop: Run DMC, Ice Cube, Lil Wayne, and Snoop Dogg were among those slated to share the spotlight celebrating hip-hop’s 50th birthday. The event also featured sets designed to honor the Queens of HIp-Hop and Pillars of Hip-Hop. Co-produced by Live Nation, Mass Appeal, and the New York Yankees and presented by Google Pixel and Ciroc, Hip-Hop 50 Live’s impressive list of corporate sponsors shows just how far the genre has come from its early beginnings in the Bronx.

An official start date for hip-hop is just about impossible to ascertain, but most oral legend places the start on August 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc was responsible for spinning records at a party in The Bronx. Herc’s sister Cindy threw the party along with DJ Herc, and after the party spilled over into nearby Cedar Playground Park, hip hop was born. Originally, the party was a back-to-school party thrown at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue in the Rec Room of his family’s project tenement building. As XXL reports, Herc debuted a technique known as “the break” which is where the term “break-dancing” originated from. The break consists of a DJ isolating and looping a part of a track with heavy percussion that would have the effect of getting people out on the dance floor.

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The fact that Cindy helped throw the party is not a footnote, but her role in the story has often been left on the cutting floor when the origins of hip-hop are discussed. Washington Post writer Helena Andrews-Dyer briefly notes this in a piece centering on director dream hampton and her view of how hip-hop has historically treated women. Hampton notes that the women of hip-hop are in a much better position to succeed today because they are largely independent of the kinds of co-signs that a female artist would have needed in the past. “But I will say that there’s never been a more exciting time for women in hip-hop than right now. That whole one at a time thing, the idea that you had to be embedded in a crew or had to be co-signed by a man? All of that is gone.”