On 11 August 1973, at an apartment block in the Bronx, an 18-year-old DJ called Kool Herc – short for Hercules, a nod to his considerable stature – put on some funk records at a dance party, turned up the beats and rapped along to the music. His performance is broadly agreed to have birthed a new style that would come to dominate popular music.
In Hip-hop Is History, the drummer, producer, film-maker and co-founder of Philadelphia rap crew the Roots, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, celebrates 50 years of hip-hop in a work that is part memoir – the author’s musical obsession began when he heard Rapper’s Delight on the radio aged eight – and part chronological history of a genre that yielded “decades of innovation, achievement, energy, artistry and history – meaning decades of life”.
On occasion, Questlove – who co-wrote the book with Ben Greenman – is a direct witness to that history, such as when the Roots attended the 1995 Source awards. Here, rap’s east coast and west coast factions taunting one another; those tensions would quickly escalate, culminating in the deaths of two of hip-hop’s brightest stars, Tupac Shakur and the Notorious BIG. Elsewhere, he pores over rap’s trailblazers, from Dr Dre and De La Soul to Kendrick Lamar, pointing to the genre’s repeated cycle of growth, implosion and rebirth.
As narrator, Questlove radiates passion, knowledge, wit and profundity as he reflects on this ever-evolving art form. His book is, he notes, “an attempt to explain the amazing, beautiful, chaotic genre that has given me everything and taken almost as much”.
• Available via White Rabbit, 11hr 20min
Further listening
Dr No
Percival Everett, Tantor Audio, 6hr 22min
Amir Abdullah narrates this oddball crime caper, told from the perspective of Wala Kitu, a mathematician whose specialist subject is “nothing”.
Eighteen
Alice Loxton, Macmillan, 9hr 26min
The author and historian reads her history of Britain, told through the lives of luminaries in their 18th year, from Empress Matilda and Elizabeth Tudor to Richard Burton and Vivienne Westwood.
