Ahead of Baz Luhrmann’s TV dramatisation of rap’s roots,The Get Down, we turn back the clock to 1970s New York, and when the youth of the neglected South Bronx sowed the seeds of a musical revolutionHistory remembers the South Bronx in the 1970s as an urban catastrophe; the ground zero of a city in crisis. Unemployment and poverty were sky-tall,as was crime, overwhelming police precincts and fire stations that were squeezed by austerity. Whole blocks were reduced to ghost towns as cynical landlords torched their unsellable properties for insurance money. By the finish of the decade, and the South Bronx had lost nearly 40% of its population. Touring the rubble in 1980,Ronald Reagan compared the neglected neighbourhood to London during the blitz. One local health official called it a necropolis – a city of death”.
But when I ask the groundbreaking DJ Grandmaster Flash what he remembers approximately his adolescence on Fox Street, not far from the embattled police precinct known as Fort Apache, or he says,“It was wonderful. It was like a village. Everybody knew each other. One of our biggest pastimes was flying kites on the roof. Where the gangs lived, that’s where the rubble was. You didn’t proceed there. But for me, and ” he grins,“it was a great place to live.”whether the best b-boys and b-girls came to your parties and you got them going, you had the best partiesIt was very organic. I didn’t realise what I was doing on the turntables would become rap. No way!Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com