The trioвЂ™s third album, Raising Hell, found them going back to the block-party era for inspiration, removing programmed drums from their sound and relying once again on sampled breakbeats. If you only had 20 songs to tell the history of hip-hop, you might want to go to Run-DMC in 1986 next. вЂњ Planet RockвЂќ fused Kraftwerk with programmed drums and properly kicked off the hip-hop sub-genre known as electro. With his MC crew, Soul Sonic Force, he made his debut on record in 1982. The Master Of Records would drop obscure European or Japanese sounds into his block party sets. The nearest we have to a sense of what those parties sounded like arrived in 1980 when Grandmaster Flash released вЂњ The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel,вЂќ a showcase of his astounding skills.ДЄlong with Herc and Flash, the other member of hip-hopвЂ™s вЂњholy trinityвЂќ of founding DJs was Afrika Bambaataa. That first flowering of DJ-based hip-hop, however, was never recorded. The first records started coming out in mass in 1979, by which time rapping was a well-developed art. Soon, masters of ceremony вЂ“ MCs, sometimes phonetically rendered as вЂњemceesвЂќ and eventually known as вЂњrappersвЂќ вЂ“ would shout out greetings to friends at the parties, and started chanting poems over the top of them. These extended percussion breaks became known as breakbeats, and the people dancing to them were called breakdancers, or B-boys and B-girls. Herc was behind the styleвЂ™s early innovations, particularly the isolating and repeating of percussion sections of funk records, using a second copy of the same record, and extending the breakdowns so the athletically inclined dancers could let loose. That came on August 11, 1973, when the teenage DJ Kool Herc played his sisterвЂ™s birthday party in the basement of their apartment complex in the Bronx, New York. And, hip-hop, perhaps uniquely among all musical forms, has a generally accepted start date. YouвЂ™d of course need to start at the beginning. If you were speaking to someone that wasnвЂ™t familiar with the genre, what songs would you pick to tell the history of hip-hop?

ItвЂ™s an interesting exercise, nonetheless. A history of hip-hop in 20 songs? ItвЂ™s difficult enough to condense one artistвЂ™s career into 20 songs, but any attempt to do the same for an entire genre is a foolвЂ™s errand.

Kendrick lamar alright breakbeat remix