Yo, Hip Hop History Month community! Let’s get to it and address the ‘History’ part of this challenge. We’re gonna start with the 70s today.

Back in August, plenty of us here at the Avocado came together for a block party of sorts, to celebrate the official ‘birth’ of hip hop. You can have a look back (or look for the first time!) here: https://the-avocado.org/2023/08/11/for-the-culture-hip-hop-at-50-a-celebration/

A lot of soul, funk, jazz, and spoken word performances became not only an important point of departure for the emerging culture of hip-hop, but it was also built right into the music via sampling, scratching, and DJing. While the exact contours of hip hop history and the nature of its origins continue to be explored and discussed, we can point to these previously existing genres of music and the African diaspora in America as primary contributors to early hip hop records.

We’ve already heard some samples from this era during the ‘samples’ and ‘beats’ days of the challenge, but now we’re back for more!

I wrote about Gil Scott Heron in the series I did back in February: http://disq.us/p/2t9ckqu

Now, many of us are not hip hop ‘heads’- we may not know that much about this era of music, or about the songs that may have influenced early hip hop. And that’s ok! If you’d still like to post a song and talk about it, it’s not like you have to be speaking from a place of expertise. I’ve found Okayplayer’s guide to Hip Hop history to be really interesting even though I’m familiar with a lot of what it’s laying out- https://www.okayplayer.com/hiphop50 .

Please, please feel free to check out the Spotify playlists on the Okayplayer site and post something that stands out to you if you’d like to/if you’re not sure what you’d like to post! It’s not cheating or any stupid stuff like that-we’re here to enjoy music and hear new stuff and talk about it, that’s it!

Let’s hear those hip-hop precursors!