Original subtitles

This program me contains some strong language and discriminatory language.

I watched a white officer assassinate a black man,

and I know that tore your heart out.

Ancl I know it's crippling

and I have nothing positive to say in this moment...

...cos I don't want to be here.

But I'm responsible to be here because it wasn't just Dr King

and people dressed nicely who marched and protested

to progress this city and so many other cities,

it was people like my grandmother, people like my aunts and uncles,

so I am duty-bound to be here to simply say

now is the time to plot, plan, strategise,

organise and mobilise.

# I feel so blue

# And I feel... #

2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests wouldn't have happened

if it wasn't for hip-hop.

# What am I living for? #

The culture informed and brought together generations of people

from different backgrounds for this moment.

# My baby... #

Rappers have tried to highlight injustice in their art

since clay one.

CHANTING

We need justice!

2020 is very much a reflection of hip-hop

because hip-hop had been that CNN.

These are the issues, these are the problems.

# Yeah, yeah, come on, baby... #

Hip-hop is a part of a movement of black music that started in slavery.

# Yeah... #

There's always been some kind of protest music.

This music, this culture, it would not look, sound, taste,

smell like it does today were it not for history.

Hip-hop was created by the oppression

because it was our arts that defended us against the oppression.

CHEERING

It has been a broadcast culture for us to speak truth to power.

There is the President.

Hip-hop has saved lives.

If you think the world is crazy now,

imagine what it would be like if there wasn't no hip-hop.

# Yeah, yeah, come on, baby... #

Black Lives Matter, people protesting,

this is all, like, stuff Chuck and Flav was talking about

back in the '80s, early '90s. Like, fight the power.

Playback!

# Come on and get down

# Come on and get down

# Come on and get down

# Come on and get down

# Fight the power Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Fight the power Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Fight the power Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Fight the power Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Fight the power Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Fight the power Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Fight the power Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Fight the power

# We've got to fight the powers that be. #

SIREN

MUSIC: It's just Begun by The jimmy Castor Bunch

1520 Sedgewick Avenue is where Kool DJ Herc

is asked by his sister, Cindy,

to come out and play music for her jam, for her party.

Some say it was a back-to-school jam,

some say it was a birthday party,

Cindy says it was a back-to-school jam.

This is the beginning of hip-hop.

The beginning of hip-hop is a back-to-school jam.

# Day or night, black or white

# That's the scene... #

The ingenuity of DJ Kool Herc was the spark

that ignited this beautiful art form called hip-hop.

# Dynamite

# We had fun... #

When I say hip-hop, I'm talking about the DJ, the MC,

the graffiti artist and the b-boy.

MUSIC STOPS

To understand how this movement emerged from the poorest,

most depressed borough in New York City,

you need to go back to the beginning.

The spirit of hip-hop was born in the 1960s.

That was the decade I was born in.

The air of resistance and turbulence helped create hip-hop.

If a negro baby is born, and this is true also of Puerto Ricans

and Mexicans, in some of our cities, he has about one half as much chance

to get through high school as a white baby.

I think we can do better.

I don't want the talents of any Americans to go to waste.

I was raised to be an artist from ground zero, 1960.

Your existence around you grooms you, trains you, teaches you.

CHEERING

My earliest memory growing up is when

President john F Kennedy was assassinated.

I remember laying underneath the ironing board

when my mother used to be ironing clothes

and it just stuck in my head - the funeral, the whole procession.

A few years later, his brother, Robert Kennedy, was shot and killed.

Malcolm X was shot and killed.

Ancl then Martin Luther King was shot and killed.

I can remember Dr Martin Luther King had got assassinated

and that was the first time that I seen my father, he actually cried.

That was the beginning of me just understanding

black people's role in society.

EXPLOSION

The assassinations, the Vietnam War,

knowing family members that were going off to the Vietnam War,

being drafted in front of our own eyes.

ARTILLERY FIRE

My mother would say at an early age, you know,

"This war is going on so I think, you know,

"you should be a conscientious objector."

Can you tell us, champ, why in your view

you deserve to be exempted from military service?

No. I have nothing to say.

Everything that's been said is in the newspapers.

I was privy to all those things that were going on in the 1960s.

Ancl they had a profound effect not only on me

but our community that we lived in.

SIREN

REPORTER: Poverty, unemployment and frustration

led to four days of rioting, burning, looting and killing

that had never been seen before in America.

There were riots almost every single summer in the '60s

and it was because the social and justice system

was just as bad then as it is now.

Ancl we were trying to get our rights, we were trying to live

in spite of all the madness that was taking place within our communities.

People are just getting tired of being pushed around

by you white people, that's all.

SIREN

What happened is just a prologue

because whites still don't believe that black people mean it

when they say that we want power,

we want black power.

MUSIC: Time To Make A Change by Lewen, Wikstrom and Blaize

The civil rights movement was killed when they killed Dr King.

The only movement now that was available

was the Black Power movement.

This country has never cared about black people. That's right.

They don't give two damns about us and all of us always turn around

worrying about what's good for America, what's good...

Later for America. What's good for black people?!

That's what we want to know. CHEERING

# It's time to make a change

# Time to make a new beginning... #

The whole thing was, before we can talk about making a change

in the outer world, we've got to clean up our world,

and so that was the mission.

# Time to make a change... #

I remember the Black Panther Party would go to Manhattan

and was serving lunches to kids in the summertime.

# We can't go on like this any more... #

Later on, the Nation of Islam were having their movements in Harlem

and around the New York City area.

# The men with the power

# A dreary chosen few... #

You had the Nation of Islam backing you,

you had Minister Louis Farrakhan teaching you about yourself.

Allahu Akbar!

You had real Christian ministers had you believe Jesus was a black man.

All the Bible characters were African.

# What have we become? #

The roles of our black political leaders and religious leaders

played a role in the consciousness of hip-hop.

That knowledge of self, pro-black message.

I am! CROWD: I am!

Somebody! CROWD: Somebody!

Right on! CHEERING

# Time to make a new beginning... #

This was a period where we were breaking out of that shell

and we were coming forth and we were seeking power

and we really felt that we had the system on its heels.

Violence is a part of America's culture.

When the revolution comes. When the revolution comes.

When the revolution comes...

As that consciousness was raised with people saying,

"Well, we're asking questions that ain't getting answered

"by the society, at least we need the music to say something."

When the revolution comes. Revolution.

When the revolution comes. When the revolution comes!

So it was a snowball effect.

Black snowball effect in our neighbourhood especially,

so obviously it bled to the music and it reciprocated back and forth.

Ancl blood will run through the streets of Harlem

drowning anything without substance when the revolution comes,

when the revolution comes, when the revolution comes.

When the revolution comes!

One of my most famous poems was When The Revolution Comes.

I didn't make that line-up, that was a line that a lot of folks

were using as a preface to something we were hoping was going to come,

so I took that line and blew it up and just talked about

a bunch of things that should take place when the revolution comes.

Speak not of revolution until you are willing to eat rats to survive.

When the revolution comes.

When the revolution comes! When the revolution comes.

When the revolution comes, guns and rifles will be taking the place

of poems and essays.

I noticed that when you hit people with thoughts they've already had,

they will gravitate to you that much more.

When the revolution comes!

The Last Poets were like your uncles

who definitely laid out the groundwork.

Poets were always going to give you the dirty, dirty on everything.

The truth. That is very important not only in the realm of hip-hop

but in the realm of artistry.

When the revolution comes, Jesus Christ is going to be standing

on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street.

The whole environment in black music, '69, '68 maybe, to '74,

is amazing.

And all these things are connected to social commentary.

You've got kids that can't eat and they're robbing and stealing

and doing what they have to do and if you don't do something about it,

we're going to lose the country. There's a new survey out today...

We don't want a survey. The survey is out there in the street.

APPLAUSE

African Americans are able to turn on the radio or put on a record

and listen to Marvin Gaye,

listen to Stevie Wonder talking about living in a city

and what is it like,

and deal with these issues of a new kind of discrimination and decay.

# Time is truly wastin'

# There's no guarantee, yeah

# Smile is in the makin'

# We've got to fight the powers that be... #

For those artists - Marvin, Stevie, people like that -

it's like, "We can party and we can sing and dance and whoop it up."

You know what I mean? "But we have to address what the fuck is going on

"around us at some point if you have any consciousness inside you."

# And when I rolled with the punches I got knocked on the ground

# By all this bullshit going down, hey... #

The lsley Brothers make a record called Fight The Power.

That record as a growing teenager, me looking around,

reading around, seeing around, whatever, coming up,

that stuck with me.

It not only stuck with me, it stuck with everybody.

# Fight it, fight the power.

# Ha, fight it

# Fight the baby, baby, baby, baby... #

Fight The Power is already...

It's in our skin, it's in our psyche.

# Fight the power... #

We're all being influenced by the music of the time.

It's the template for you to voice your struggle,

for you to voice your oppression, to voice what's not right.

# Fight it, fight the power... #

For me, soul music was cool, R&B was cool,

but rock music was like the Incredible Hulk.

"Boof, ba-ba, ba-rargh!"

It had this powerful attraction and, as a kid,

I was looking for anything that can make me feel stronger

than my environment.

By the time you get to the 1970s,

you still have organising by explicitly political organisations.

The Panthers are still in operation,

the Young Lords - a Puerto Rican nationalist organisation

rooted in the Bronx.

But they're also being targeted by the FBI.

Do you feel the nation is in trouble?

I think very definitely it is.

What is the answer?

The answer is vigorous law enforcement.

That's the only answer? That's the only answer.

How about justice?

J Edgar Hoover is the Director of the FBI

and he has an enormous amount of power.

But perhaps the most notorious efforts of Hoover

is something called Cointelpro.

It's essentially a counterintelligence organisation

designed to engage in surveillance.

Now, it just so happens, the most well-known target of Cointelpro

is all of the groups that fall under the umbrella

of the Black Power movement. Namely, the Black Panther Party.

They want to get rid of me because I'm saying something that might

wake up some other exploited people and some other oppressed people,

and if all these people ever get together,

then these pigs that are exploiting us will run into the lake.

That's why they want to get rid of us.

Cointelpro's first tenet was to destroy

what they called the "black Messiah."

Ancl the one that they saw the most dangerous was Fred Hampton Jr,

because Fred, when he started talking about

bringing folks together, that's when the state was like,

"Yo, this dude's got to go."

Anyone who went through that apartment

could come to only one conclusion,

and that is that Fred Hampton

was murdered in his bed, probably as he lay asleep.

I knew that there were two things waiting for me -

either a bullet or prison.

I never had any fear, man.

To be honest, I felt like a fraud because I hadn't killed nobody,

I hadn't shot no-one, I hadn't choked anybody.

I had clone nothing but sit down with my pen and paper

and write some poetry.

There were so many other people who had clone work,

who had clone things and got blown away.

Cointelpro was incredibly effective at hastening or speeding up

the process of these various Black Power groups falling apart.

Without that leadership,

without that fight and that push that the Panthers demanded,

going into the '70s, there were a lot of unknowns.

What Cointelpro is not successful at doing

is really stemming the tide of rising black consciousness.

So you've got to look at stuff like the Black ls Beautiful movement.

It's incredibly effective at highlighting

the beauty of blackness.

All of these things that had been seen as negative before.

# Let the sunshine

# Let... #

At that particular time,

5th Dimension made a song, Aquarius - Let The Sunshine In.

We were all asking for it.

# Let the sunshine

# Let... #

Black was beautiful, and Afro picks and dashikis and stuff

came up out of it seemed like nowhere.

# Let the sunshine Oh, let it shine

# Let the sunshine

Having parents who were both from Harlem,

I was becoming conscious of things like, "What are we?

"Are we negro or are we coloured?"

And I remember us seeing black people on TV...

...and my family would say, "There's some coloured people on TV.

"Coloured people." So all of a sudden, we were coloured.

# Let the sunshine Hey, let it shine

# Let the sunshine in

# Open up your heart, and let it shine on me... #

I remember having a summer school class and this teacher,

it was a very cool brother, "Yeah, man, come on in.

"Come on, young bloods,"

and he would give us books on Africa.

That's not something that was normally given to kids

in American schools.

# Let the sunshine You've got to feel it... #

There was something that was very empowering about that period.

# Let it shine on you

# Let me tell you one thing Let the sunshine... #

I'm representing the freedom of black people in America.

If I win, we're free.

I'm not Foreman, you know that?

I don't see a black man, I see you. I see the White House.

LAUGHTER

I'm not the White House either.

I see something white.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE

I stand before you today...

...as a candidate for the Democratic nomination

for the presidency of the United States of America.

APPLAUSE

Shirley Chisholm was my congresswoman.

I'm from Brownsville and her office was on Eastern Parkway.

She was very inspirational,

in the sense that she became an embodiment

of this black consciousness mood.

It was very palpable.

No-one thought she could win,

but the fact that she was able to be on a platform

and articulate for black people in that space was quite powerful.

Join me in an effort to reshape our society

and regain control of our destiny.

The attention that she generated was extraordinary.

CHEERING

I remember thinking, you didn't really see black people on TV

who weren't singing.

She's also representative of the fact that in New York

in the '70s, there was a huge influx of Caribbean folks.

TRAIN HORN HONKS

REPORTER: In the past 15 years, two million middle class

have fled New York and set up home in the suburbs.

Two million poor have flooded in.

During the '705,

the financial woes of the city led to people leaving,

so with that exodus came the influx of black,

Hispanic and other ethnicities to the city.

We'd have Trinies,

Bajans, Jamaicans,

all coming in as a wave, really.

REPORTER: They came in search of the prizes promised

in the American dream.

Instead, they and their families inherited

this devastated piece of the Earth.

All the tenements were stacked and packed

with so many people coming through,

coexistence was a little difficult because of the way

we were fed all these, like, negative, um...

...attitudes.

I was 160 pounds of curious,

anxious Puerto Rican

so going out into the streets was real tough.

REPORTER: There is a crime of violence committed in New York City

every four minutes.

Last year alone, there were more than 1,500 murders.

SIREN

It was a time when the violence through gangs in New York

was at its zenith.

You had thousands of gangs and they fought over territory,

and it was violent and it was destructive.

I remember a time visiting New York in '74

and seeing these gangs very much dressed like...

Almost like the Warriors gear.

But the Warriors was kind of silly, it was a goofy thing.

These were the real Warriors.

Ancl it was intimidating, it was frightening.

There's an expression they say,

it's a terrible blow but that's how it go. So you see somebody get hurt

and they go, "Eh, it's a terrible blow but that's how it go."

You didn't have a fear of death because death was always around you.

SIREN

Growing up in the Bronx mid-'70s,

I was in the middle of the heroin epidemic.

You'd see a lot of empty hypodermic needles

and people nodding all over the place.

They'll knock on your door and want to get some water

so that they can mix up their little dope.

# But I'm feelin' all right... #

Not really good for kids to be raised up in.

As I talk to the people from New York State,

I realise the need for money to deal with this problem.

I am glad that, in this administration,

we have increased the amount of money

for handling the problem of dangerous drugs sevenfold.

The policies that come out of the Nixon administration,

particularly those policies that are focused

on the war on drugs, on crime,

are actually designed to punish black people.

We have an accounting of this.

The war on drugs was some bullshit.

But the knowledge of how we were being manipulated

through these different things we learned later on.

Back then, I was an ignorant kid.

There's a philosophy by Daniel Patrick Moynihan,

who ultimately ends up being New York's Senator.

In this memo, he says, "I think these black communities

"would benefit from a period of benign neglect."

It accurately captures the attitude

that administrations have towards these areas

that are disproportionately black.

REPORTER: In a city where there are four murders a clay,

they're now thinking of the unthinkable - laying off policemen.

We knew that the situation was clire and stressed.

We saw the heroin addicts,

we saw the institutions around us crumbling.

We saw this at ten years old. It was obvious.

But we didn't see our environment

for what mainstream may have seen the Bronx as.

We saw the Bronx not according to the environment,

but according to who we were in it.

MUSIC: It's just Beginning by The jimmy Castor Bunch

DOG BARKS

Growing up in that New York, the police were not as attentive.

There was a lot of sense of, like, "I can get away with a lot.

"If no-one stops me, I can get away with a lot of shit."

# Watch me now

# Feel the groove

# Into something

# Gonna make you move... #

I remember at one point there was two guys

stopping graffiti in New York.

Two guys.

In the '70s? Come on!

These are about the best cans of paint on the market

and this is what they invariably will go out and steal.

They never pay for their paint, they'll steal it.

You'd be on the subway and you wouldn't know what stop you...

I mean, cos everything was painted - all the windows were covered

with graffiti, and the insides of the train as well.

# You've got to do your thing, you've got to do your thing... #

So it was a free rein.

The most amazing thing in the hood is to go to the train yards

and put your name up on the side of a train

and then watch the train go by the next clay.

This is it!

Here we go! Here we go!

WOO!

This is it!

This is what we was doing in the hood. We was having fun.

# It's just begun... #

Those trains were going from the outer reaches of East New York

burnt to the ground, crisped to the ground,

and ending up in the Bronx,

but in between going through the heartland of Manhattan.

You reached at that point 4.5 million people in one day.

That's more than some people can do today with social media.

Graffiti art is probably the biggest revolutionary tool we have.

It's the propaganda of the movement, it's the visual of it.

Hip-hop-aganda.

HE LAUGHS

I understood how cars move in and out of sight,

that kinetic motion creates for a very mysterious "Whoomph!"

A flash of colour, it's exciting, it's rebellious, it's, like...

HE GASPS

It was agitation, frustration,

in a system that was totally in disarray, in pieces.

# It's just begun, it's just begun

# It's just begun, it's just begun... #

People use that phrase, the bad old days...

...but in a sense, the creativity that made graffiti

is possible because the city itself is not being taken care of

in a certain way. There's a certain kind of,

"Let them do what they want to do, we don't give a fuck."

# It's just begun, it's just begun... #

In the Bronx, all you did was go to a house party or basement parties,

so my cousins would take me and we did everything together

and we were a large group.

# It's just begun... #

None of what people say the Bronx is is what I experienced.

I mean, I just played outside with my cousins, you know?

Ancl it was family.

You know, I think they just saw and continue to see

the entire narrative.

# It's just begun, it's just begun-gun-gun-gun-gun. #

The Bronx doesn't have to be chaotic,

it doesn't have to be bombed out, poverty ridden.

The Bronx is the Bronx

because of very conscious and calculated decisions.

REPORTER: For nearly half a century,

this man has pushed people around New York.

Robert Moses managed to establish himself as a force in the state,

where he controlled the Parks Department

and the bridges and tunnels.

He was very interested in developing the suburbs

and wasn't that interested in protecting the city.

REPORTER: Our city, under the urgent direction

of our able planner of chaos, Mr Robert Moses,

has not merely permitted but encouraged municipal mayhem.

One of the most destructive things he did

was build Cross Bronx Expressway.

It goes right across the middle of the Bronx.

It tore through five or six different neighbourhoods...

...and the chaos that created and the flight that created

is one of the major reasons why the Bronx suffered so much

subsequently in the '70s.

Out of all the boroughs in New York City,

the Bronx was probably the poorest borough,

and the city itself was on the verge of bankruptcy.

REPORTER: As inner-city areas become progressively less pleasant

to live in, those that can afford to, move out to live in the suburbs.

A lot of local taxation revenue moves out with them

and the city has therefore fewer and fewer resources

to deal with an increasingly poor population.

New York is struggling through this massive budget crisis

and they reach out to the federal government.

They're like, "Look, we need help. Save us."

I do not think it's a healthy thing

for the federal government to bail out a city.

The city has to lay off

and stop hiring

a number of employees

and so they get rid of

a bunch of Fire Departments.

New York is working

to move out of this crisis by sacrificing its residents.

If you want to stay in town, sit in a chair,

hold on to your buttocks, pray to God,

and then wait for the Holocaust.

Fire! Fire! Fire!

SIRENS

SCREAMING

When slumlords and landlords start burning down their buildings

in order to collect insurance money,

one of the things that we see is that there are no

social protective services that can shut these fires down.

The building just has to burn out.

Policies shape what is happening in African-American lives

and communities at this time.

SIRENS

The system started cracking at the school level

because the resources that normally would go into schools

were stripped, were taken away. The city didn't have it in the budget.

Our music programmes in schools went by the wayside.

We didn't have instruments to practise in schools any more

so, to quote Lord Jamar from Brand Nubian,

we took the only thing in our house that made music -

a turntable.

MUSIC: Everybody Dance by Chic

The soundtrack to the city of New York in the late '70s,

when I first came here to live,

was still held over from what was going on

in the mid-'70s, which was disco.

Disco led to hip-hop

because hip-hop is like the bastard child of disco.

Our version of a disco.

Every time you looked in the media,

they were always talking about this place called Studio 54. Why?

It was women and money and the rich people

and the athletes and the CEOs and all the movie stars.

# Everybody dance Do, do, do, do, do, do... #

So everyb0dy's perception was New York City is epic.

# Everybody dance Do, do, do, do, do, do

# Clap your hands, clap your hands... #

The Bronx was burning, Bed Stuy Do Or Die was a war zone,

Harlem was Harlem. Hell up in Harlem.

So when we saw disco...

...we did disco in the streets of New York.

Playing music, come dance, we're doin' it ourselves,

we ain't got money but, listen, for those three or four hours

it was beautiful.

We couldn't get into a disco.

We didn't want to wear the pointy shoes and the suits

and dance like this, OK?

No. So we created our version of a disco...

...and danced the way we want to the music that we want

and dressed the way we want.

# Everybody dance Do, do, do, do, do, do... #

You'd have people who were abused at home,

parents abused them, alcoholics, drugs,

and that was their escape to get away from that,

to come to this place which was sort of like a safe haven

to just express yourself with dance and put everything behind you.

That was a way of expressing pain.

# Dancing helps relieve the pain

# Soothes your mind, makes you happy again... #

As much as many people

actually discount it, the disco era was a beautiful moment

because it brought people out of the woodwork to want to dance.

# Everybody dance Do, do, do, do, do, do... #

That led to a lot of, like, proudness on that dance floor

and it was basically the humble beginnings

of break dancing as we know it.

# Everybody dance Do, do, do, do, do, do

# Clap your hands, clap your hands... #

DJ Kool Herc was an innovator.

A Caribbean immigrant like so many of the communities

in the Bronx at that time.

He revolutionised how the music was played.

Ancl that inventiveness comes out of

being able to have that sound system and play that for the people.

Herc had the sound system because his father was in ajamaican band.

He used his system.

Herc would take this music and what he called it, he says,

"I go to the best part of the record to give it you."

He called it, "I go to the yolk of the egg.

"I go to the yolk. I get the yolk out. That's all you really want."

DJ Kool Herc, he didn't just play the whole record,

he played the section -

the section of the record that really got the energy in it -

the drumbeat. The drum breakdowns.

And those breaks eventually led to the dance.

MUSIC: Galaxy by War

When Kool Herc was bringing this out into the park,

me and my little brother, Kenny, was there.

I was eight years old.

So I grew up listening to break beats in the park

from about eight years old. We were b-boys and b-girls.

The records that I heard on the radio

were now being manipulated with two turntables.

There was a song I liked,

Galaxy by the group War,

that had a 15-second intro,

and they stretched it to, like, four minutes,

and I was just floored.

MUSIC CONTINUES

I felt that we were saving ourselves through that beat.

In other words, extend the beat on the turntable,

make it longer than three, four, five, six seconds,

make it into a minute.

A minute is a long time in the ghetto.

And a minute of that beat that makes you feel uplifted,

giving you a self-therapeutic power...

...you want to extend that

because you want to live through that movement of that music.

You go like this. It's called the hump.

It's called the hump.

The first tracks are old funk and soul classics.

Babe Ruth does a song called The Mexican

that, for some odd reason, appeals directly to b-boys.

MUSIC: The Mexican by Babe Ruth

it just has just the right energy. I call it, like, this galloping.

Like William Tell's Overture or Wagner's Ride Of The Valkyries.

It's kind of music that screams, "Get up! Move! Do something!"

And the first thing you think of doing is to dance.

Herc didn't allow any gang activity.

Nobody could wear colours in there, so you didn't have to worry

about being a Spade or a Savage Skull,

and now the battle was on the dance floor,

it was no longer, "Knuckle up. Let's see what you got."

And you'd get into that circle and it was sort of like gladiators.

You know, two people go in, one person comes out.

Breaking wasn't one style, it was all the different styles together.

You could take anything and put it into your dance.

This is the beginning that intrigued me

because it didn't seem to have any constraints on it.

It was all, like, a pot of cultural get-down.

You have poverty alongside ready-made tools.

Those ready-made tools were those turntables, those records.

We made something happen with nothing,

and that's the beauty of it.

CHEERING

You had entrepreneurial Djs

putting on parties in the summer in the parks

and they knew that there was this whole audience in the Bronx

who couldn't go to the discos downtown

because, A, they were too young, they didn't have the money,

they didn't have the right gear,

so it was a built-in audience.

The block party scene, it was like it was supposed to happen

because all of the things that would stop it from happening

didn't happen.

I'll give you a perfect example. There's a park jam.

There's over 500, 600 kids out there.

Ancl the police drive by.

POLICE RADIO CHATTER

You know what the police saw when they saw that?

They saw 500 kids in one place that we know where they are.

They're not running around the streets,

they're not in the shopping districts

where we've got to look for people robbing shit.

So it worked for the police and it worked for us.

Djs initially are like band leaders, right?

They were like Count Basie.

And then the same way in bebop

that people started singing to those riffs,

how the vocalist became front and centre

and how Count Basie moved a little bit to the background,

that's kind of the same thing

that happened with the Djs and the MCs.

You know, history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes.

Kool Herc had a tight squad.

Coke La Rock was the first guy to actually rock the mic

and that was who everybody wanted to emulate.

Who am I? Who are you? Who am I? Who are you?

Who am I? I'm Caz!

ALL: So what? What do that mean?

I'm the baddest MC lover on the hip-hop scene.

Early rap and rhyming was about yourself. It was braggadocious.

"I'm this, I'm that, I can do this and that,

"I've got this many this, this girl love me."

You might write some rhymes and make people dance.

Of course, you had crowd response - throw your hands in the air,

wave 'em like you just don't care, just to get the people motivated.

Everybody, everybody, say ho! CROWD: Ho!

Ho! Ho! CROWD: Ho! Ho!

# Well, I'm the master rhymer with the bass in my voice

# I'll talk to you, girl, until your body get moist

# It's just me on the mic, I'm doing my job

# And like Pretty Boy, you know I'm down with the mob. #

# I'm Prince, you know, they call... #

The pioneers in the beginning, they could have easily rapped about

the real things that's right in front of them -

guns, drugs infiltrating New York City in '78, '79.

# We only came here to settle the score

# So let's give everybody... #

Ancl they said, "You know what?

"There's no way that's going to be popular.

"We want to keep the party going."

# Here's a little story that must be told

# About two cool brothers that were put on hold

# They tried to hold us back from fortune and fame

# They destroyed the crew and they killed our name

# They tried to step on our ego... #

Initially it's about putting on a party.

But within that, of course, you are going to

inevitably be making political statements

because you're engaging with people who are struggling.

Ancl their struggle is inevitably going to come up against

the powers that be - the establishment.

# I'm KK Rockwell, the girls call me fly... #

"Let's party together" -

that's a threat to the establishment, believe it or not.

# Double Trouble is in the house

# Don't you know, Double Trouble gonna turn it out, y'all... #

REP '

rhythmically rhyming in spoken word,

breaking,

graffiti art, aerosol art,

and Djing were four distinct cultures,

four distinct communities.

Kool Herc came and brought all that together into one place.

Some years later, Love bug Starski and Chief Rocker Busy Bee

started calling it hip-hop.

Hip-hop was a movement

created by, populated by

and spoke to working-class kids.

These were the kids that had an attitude about themselves.

Hip-hop is coming from within us.

We were never not hip-hop.

We were always this from the time we were born. We were always this.

It was the most important thing in my life.

It was the first time that I heard, you know,

black men sound empowered, express their imagination,

express their creativity in a way that made us all dream more.

It was important.

That was a shock to a nerdy, geeky kid, but hip-hop empowered me.

"Oh, I can use this to not be afraid to tell the world who I am."

Hip-hop is the creativity and activity

that comes out of the black neighbourhood

when everything has been stripped away.

Mr President, did you hear the people yelling

"We need some money" when you passed through?

Yes.

REPORTER: jimmy Carter came to see urban decay at its worst

and he predicted federal aid to end more than a decade of devastation

in the South Bronx.

A couple of years after jimmy Carter shows up at the South Bronx,

Ronald Reagan, on his presidential campaign,

goes to the exact same spot.

Help! Help!

SHOUTING

Please help us!

Ronald Reagan wants to take advantage of the fact

that his political opponent, President jimmy Carter...

...has failed to enact his promises.

So it is a moment of pure exploitation.

Today, the President blames the mayor of the city and others...

What are you going to do? What are you going to do for us?

I'm trying to tell you!

What can you? What can you? Tell us what you are capable...

I am trying to tell you!

What I'm trying to tell you is,

I can't do a damn thing for you if I don't get elected.

CHEERING

When Reagan comes in,

whatever programmes helped working-class people,

that stuff, like, went out the door.

REPORTER: President Reagan, in his televised speech on the economy,

proposed 83 major program me cuts.

It was another blow to the South Bronx.

Reagan creates an atmosphere that exacerbates

these pre-existing problems.

Under Reagan, as a borough, we're more abandoned

and there were definitely a lot of gangs flooding our community.

Seven homicides...

REPORTER: It's hard to imagine the situation could deteriorate further.

The unemployment rate among black adults

is double the average and climbing.

In many places, desperation has turned to hopelessness.

The nation as a whole goes into a deep recession in the early 1980s.

People across the nation are feeling the pain.

They want two Americas - they want the rich

and then they want the slaves, and that's us.

We're not going backwards!

CHEERING

Ronald Reagan absolutely taps into racism

to explain the economic problems

that white Americans are facing in the nation.

It's because of the lawlessness, it's black criminality...

...it's drugs, eventually, and that has to be cracked down on.

Retribution must be swift and sure

for those who decide to make a career of preying on the innocent.

It's a really twisted way of explaining the economic problems

born not of what black people are doing

but born of what capitalists are doing.

Get back!

No!

SCREAMING

From the minute Ronald Reagan was elected,

the United States was a bad situation.

GUNFIRE

It becomes, in its way, as turbulent as the 1960s

that I was born in.

The black community was being attacked.

We get this massive escalation

in the hyper-militarisation of the police

and the assault on African-American youth

in a way that we hadn't seen before.

Growing up, I watched the cops lock up my father.

My father was a hard-working man,

never been into crime.

As he was talking to the officers, he was like, "I don't..."

Ancl they was like, "English! English!"

My father is from Cuba.

Ancl I watched them put the handcuffs on my father

and he's not tough, he started crying in front of me.

I'll never forget that image.

I didn't know systemic racism,

I didn't know everything that was happening to me.

Somebody had really planned this out.

When we talk about African-American frustration

with the American political system,

they are frustrated because it is a system that, at every single turn,

has neglected them...

...and so we see this expressed

through an outpouring of various symptoms, right?

Crime, violence, gangs, things like that.

But we also see it expressed in an outpouring of cultural production.

MUSIC: The Message by Grandmaster Flash 8; The Furious Five

I remember I was at Billboard magazine when The Message came out

and we had a little room which you could play records in.

And, you know, I put it on...

Wow.

# It's like a jungle sometimes

# It makes me wonder how I keep from going under... #

The minute you heard The Message, you knew it was an important record.

Gil Scott-Heron-level stuff, but by a hip-hop artist.

It was such a profound record.

# Broken glass everywhere

# People pissing on the stairs, you know, they just don't care

# I can't take the smell, can take the noise

# Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice

# Rats in the front room, roaches in the back

#junkies in the alley with a baseball bat... #

The way that he saw broken glass everywhere, you know,

people pissing on his staircase who don't care, I mean,

especially if you lived in the projects,

I mean, like, that's what you smelt every clay -

someday peed in the elevator,

you know, there WAS broken glass everywhere,

so, you know, the song spoke to what we were seeing.

# Watchin' all the cars go by, roaring as the breezes blow

# A crazy lady living in a bag

# Eating out of garbage pails, used to be a fag hag

# Said she danced the tango... #

The Message was really the culmination of the last 25 years

that was thrust upon black folks.

# The bill collectors, they ring my phone

# Ancl scare my wife when I'm not home

# Got a bum education, double-digit inflation

# Can't take the train to the job, there's a strike at the station... #

My group wasn't the Happy Five,

it was the Furious Five,

so I've always been a high-strung, angry-type individual.

# Don't push me cos I'm close to the edge

# I'm trying not to lose my head, ha-ha-ha-ha... #

When The Message came out,

that gave hip-hop a voice and it actually grew up.

That was when it went from the infantile stage

to a young adult stage.

# Cos it's all about money, ain't a damn thing funny

# You got to have a con in this land of milk and honey... #

The Message actually talked about something.

It had, you know, the same feeling of a Bob Dylan record

or a Marvin Gaye record.

A record with an actual subject matter that meant something,

that people related to, like, in their lives.

# I feel like an outlaw, broke my last glass jar

# Hear them say, "You want some more?"

# Living on a seesaw... #

The verse is "a child is born with no state of mind,"

so that was inspired by the Stevie Wonder song Living For The City -

"a boy is born in hard-time Mississippi",

so this is my version.

# A child is born with no state of mind

# Blind to the ways of mankind

# God is smiling on you, but he's frowning too

# Because only God knows what you go through

# You'll grow in the ghetto, living second-rate

# And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate... #

When I first heard that song, I thought, for the first time,

"Wow, here's somebody who's speaking what I feel.

"I can't get that on any TV network.

"I'm not getting this in the widespread medium."

You're hearing this voice of somebody talking about

our experiences, like I was with Melle Mel.

# Smugglers, scramblers, burglars, gamblers,

# Pickpockets, peddlers and even panhandlers

# You say, "I'm cool, I'm no fool"

# But then you wind up

# Dropping out of high school

# Now you're unemployed

# All null and void... #

The Message was, like, going viral now,

so every floor you went down in the projects was playing it,

every single floor.

You might get an occasional Spanish Gran Combo

and then you get The Message.

When you went outside, every single car was playing The Message.

You know, you would go to the party,

they would play that record 30, 40 times.

# I'm trying not to lose my head, ha-ha-ha-ha... #

It was like a frenzy.

It was just like the snowball effect, like, coming down,

getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

There was nothing like it.

The Message, a hard-edged anthem of the urban ghetto.

Flash and Five proved it just wasn't party music,

but could be used to get across a serious message.

The Message was the song that took me over the threshold

from "let's have fun with this"

to "let's challenge ourselves with the art form".

What The Message did

for me and my experience, it can't be overstated.

# Here it is, bam!

# And you say, goddamn

# This is the dope jam

# But let's define the term called dope

And you think it mean funky now, no... #

Everything that Public Enemy was doing at that time

was so important and so vital.

Black people as a nation is asleep.

Public Enemy is an alarm clock rap group.

# Please don't confuse this with the sound

# I'm talking about bass... #

What you're about to see and hear may not be suitable for children.

It was a misconception that NWA

came out to sell gangster records to white kids.

# One, two, three, four, five, six... #

They was just trying to tell the truth

to what they was in the middle of

for that authenticity.

# And everybody know another kilo

# From a corner from a brother, keep another below... #

George Bush calls him sick.

Police groups want his album banned.

The man they're all talking about is American rap singer Ice-T.

The press says gangster rap.

OK, gangster rap.

Ancl I'm the original gangster.

15-year-old Latasha Harlins, shot in the back of the head

following a scuffle with this Korean liquor store owner.

The police get there an hour-and-a-half later.

He walks over Latasha's body,

took tea into the person that killed her.

That's why the city mad.

# Yo, listen, I see it on their faces

# First come, first serve basis

# Standin' in line, checkin' the time

# Homeboys playin' the kerb

# The same ones that used to do herb Yo, herb

# Now they're gone

# Passin' it on, poison attack

# The black word bond

# My man, Daddy-O, once said to me

# He knew a brother that stayed all day in his jeep

# And at night, he went to sleep

# And in the mornin', all he had was sneakers on his feet

# The culprit used to jam and rock the mic

# Yo, he stripped the jeep to fill his pipe... #