1978, New York City. Dead summer. The city was always public but an inescapable heat sends folks out of their apartments and amplifies the streets' activity. The buzz surrounding hip-hop has already escaped -via mixed tapes aired on boomboxes- to Manhattan's attention. But it is here in its birthplace, the South Bronx, where Afrika Bambaataa and his crew of diasporic black youth known as the Zulu Nation have gathered to celebrate the new sensation. Bambaataa switches from Olatunji's drumming to the Monkees to James Brown in the course of a few songs, ending up on Kraftwerk's electronic epic "Trans-Europe Express". How exactly, did futurist music from Düsseldorf, Germany find its way alongside African drumming, American soul, and British rock into an open-air party held in the economically ravaged Bronx? Hip-hop's logic is complex, irreverent, all its own.

From its inception, hip-hop was plural, defined by an approach to sound and music-making rather than a single stylistic designation. Jazz, soul, funk, rock 'n roll, Nigerian drumming - everything was in the mix. Parties were a cross-cultural barrage of styles chosen and mixed by the disc jockey (DJ). Jamaican-born Bronx resident Kool Herc provided the innovations that elevated DJing to an art form. In 1973 Herc noticed dancers' enthusiasm for the funky drum "break" (percussive solo) portion of a song. He obtained two copies and started doubling these "breakbeats," playing the solo from one record immediately after the other one ended. The angular, acrobatic form known as "breakdancing" evolved in direct response to Herc's extended drum solos. B-boys and b-girls were devotees of the drum break, physical interpreters of the rhythmic challenge brought on by lengthened breakbeats.

Pioneering DJs such as Bambaataa, Flash, DXT, Herc, and others commenced a nonstop quest for fresh beats. Energy was high, and the form grew and mutated with startling quickness. Increasingly skilful ways of manipulating pre-recorded sound with a live artistic interface arose. From scratching the needle on the record, to superimposing records in sync, to cutting swiftly between different pieces of vinyl, everything was used. Grassroots futurism was forged from creative disrespect for technology and musical tradition. The Bronx hip-hoppers transformed the turntable from a static playback machine it into a highly expressive instrument. Vinyl went from consumer product to raw material for an emergent art form. Initially, MCs served to comment on the DJ's skills, but the spoken-word vocalists soon developed their artistry from a long tradition of black "dozens" boasting, metaphoric inventiveness, blues singing, and "scat" vocals. A seminal 1982 single features Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five delivering deft commentary on the psychological impact of their surroundings and the societal mechanisms that gave rise to (and maintain) the urban ghetto. Appropriately, it's entitled "The Message". Hip-hop represented a politically motivated alternative to crime and violence; it was the voice of the voiceless; it was keeping kids on the right path.

As the electronic sampler became available in the '80s, hip-hop as we now know it began to evolve. The sampler allowed any sound to be electronically reproduced and manipulated. Looped drum-breaks and pieces of old records were cut up, edited, and restructured by hip-hop science. Copyright? Throw it out the window. "It has been said so often that the Negro is lacking in originality," wrote novelist-anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston in 1934, "that it has almost become a gospel." Accusations of black culture being inferior, infantile, or derivative remain commonplace today. Hurston nimbly argues against the cherished originality of Shakespeare, citing the many themes and tropes he sampled from progenitors and contemporaries alike. "It is [Shakespeare's] treatment of the borrowed material [that makes him great]" she elaborates, "...the Negro is a very original human being. While he lives and moves in the midst of a white civilization, everything that he touches is re-interpreted for his own use."

Hip-hop epitomizes this reinterpretation. Not only is music fragmented, flipped, and turned into something completely different, but traditional notions of musicality are renovated as well. You'd like a classical violin to accompany the beat? You don't need to know how to play the instrument; you just need good ears and a good record collection so you can locate the perfect violin snippet to sample. Issues of texture, rhythm, structure and melody are vital to hip-hop, but traditional ideas of Western musical mastery are atomized, democratized, and replaced by accessible technology in the hands of youth.

The Jungle Brothers' 1993 album JBeez Wit The Remedy cracks the sampler wide open: "Arrhythmic, asymmetrical, alinear," they proclaim. "...What we've been doing is intentionally derailing your brain." The major-label release has unprecedented amounts of avant-garde weirdness, amusical loops, disorienting effects, and unorthodox rhythmic programming. From the "scratches" transformation of noise into music, to JBeez Wit The Remedy, to the dense political energy of Public Enemy's Fear Of A Black Planet, true hip-hop thrives on bringing the funk out of dysfunction, and making a positive artistic and political statement - that you can dance to.

Amidst the current glut of fiercely individualistic commercial rap, avatars of hip-hop's community emphasis persist. Brooklyn-based Mos Def and Talib Kweli's 1998 Black Star (Rawkus Records) album combines serious hip-hop's radical formal wordplay with consciousness-raising lyrics. It was heralded as one of the best independent releases in 1998, an important alternative to frivolous megastars such as Puff Daddy. The upcoming Isolationist album (Jazz Fudge Records) will pair the afro-futurism of the Anti-Pop Consortium's MCs with Russian-born DJ Vadim's abstract beats. Their collaboration bespeaks hip-hop's international cohesion and ability to translate across cultures.

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