DJ Kool Herc

Clive Campbell (born April 16, 1955), better known by his stage name DJ Kool Herc, is a Jamaican-American DJ who is a pioneer of hip-hop music, where he along with others popularized it in the Bronx, New York City, in 1973. He is often referred to as the founder of hip hop. Nicknamed the Father of Hip-Hop, Campbell began playing hard funk records of the sort typified by James Brown. Campbell isolated the instrumental portion of the record which emphasized the drum beat—the "break"—and switch from one break to another. Using the same two-turntable set-up of disco DJs, he used two copies of the same record to elongate the break. This breakbeat DJing, using funky drum solos, formed the basis of hip hop music. Campbell's announcements and exhortations to dancers helped lead to the syncopated, rhythmically spoken accompaniment now known as rapping. He called the dancers "break-boys" and "break-girls", or simply b-boys and b-girls, terms that continue to be used fifty years later in the sport of breaking. Campbell's DJ style was quickly taken up by figures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. Unlike them, he never made the move into commercially recorded hip hop in its earliest years. On November 3, 2023, Campbell was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Musical Influence Award category.