through the morning of July 14, virtually the entire city was without electricity. On July 13, 1977, New York City went dark. His deal with Mercury made him the first rapper signed to a major label, and “ The Breaks” is recorded rap’s first masterpiece: tragic and comic, its grievances alternatingly petty and gothic. Years later Caz would recall saying, upon hearing the song that cribbed from his notebook: “Who the fuck is they?” Kurtis Blow (1980)Īfter studying the proto-rapping of pioneers like DJ Hollywood, Harlem’s Kurtis Blow fused hip-hop’s disco roots with street-level reportage. So when their manager, Big Bank Hank, passed Caz’s lyrics off as his own on the Sugarhill Gang’s “ Rapper’s Delight,” there was as much confusion as outrage about the commercial breakthrough by a group of unknowns. While he and the other Cold Crush Brothers were in demand as performers-and the Bronx-bred Caz in particular was widely recognized as one of the premier rappers of the moment, with his metronomic, quickly paced rhymes presaging the more complex internal patterns that rappers like Rakim would later perfect-they were ambivalent about cutting records. It was Grandmaster Caz who first rapped and DJed simultaneously, practically serving as a one-man transitional phase for the genre as its focal point moved out from behind the decks. But tracking this speaks directly to one of rap’s most romantic appeals: the ability to capture, on record and for posterity, the fits of inspiration that once were the ephemeral draws of house parties and park jams. At times, there is no king or queen of New York-other times two, three, or five people might have credible claims on the title.
What it does is trace the chain of custody, like a title belt in boxing, of that elusive thing that DMX had in 1998. A critical reader might have questions like “How could this model be tweaked to reflect the contributions of someone like Kool Keith?” Or “Where the fuck is Prodigy?!” But this project is not aiming for a universal lens-instead it’s trying to identify those moments when a rapper’s supremacy becomes unquestionable. Sometimes two deserving artists reach the height of their powers at the same time sometimes, as with Ghostface (and debatably with Cam’ron), a rapper’s time on the throne does not align with his or her creative peak. It naturally does not document any of the underground movements that, collectively, come to be just as crucial as any single star. This exercise is not perfect and does not provide a holistic view of rap in New York in any given year. Some reigns are years long and others last a handful of weeks all had a creative and cultural impact that helped shape a genre and a city. So we looked back and forward from that midpoint-from recorded rap’s beginnings in the late 1970s all the way through the present-to pinpoint who, at any moment, was the king or queen of New York rap. While record sales are one thing-and those videos of him controlling thousands of fans like a marionette are another-it’s difficult to quantify just how monstrous his impact was in 1998, the year he dropped two chart-topping albums and knocked hip-hop, and the industry around it, off its axis.
To coincide with the release of DMX: Don’t Try to Understand, we set out to give the proper context for where X fits in the annals of New York rap. Today, we’re looking into the lineage of the kings and queens of New York rap, a title DMX held in 1998 and burnished like no one before him or since.
Over the next few days, we’re chronicling the rapper’s rise and place in hip-hop history. On Thursday, Ringer Films will debut the latest installment of its HBO Music Box series, DMX: Don’t Try to Understand.
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