Music, songs and sounds that breakers break to.

"You've got to ride the music. If you're a b-boy—you're a break boy—you're riding that break. If you're not on beat to the break, you're not doing what we do." – Ken Swift

"G MAN – PARK JAM IN THE BRONX" (1985) by Henry Chalfant .

The original breakers chose particular songs, or parts of songs, to break to—often a short percussive section of a record called the break. DJ Kool Herc recalled that some people at his parties would wait for the break to dance , which in turn led to his idea of playing breaks back to back. This technique was later refined by Grandmaster Flash. Herc used "black soul and white rock records with an uptempo, often Afro-Latinized backbeat" , according to Chang, who, citing Afrika Bambaataa's contributions, emphasized the diversity of the sources of music. At the same time, the influence of funk can be heard in the majority of breaks chosen by the early DJs.

DJs proceeded to augment the music with turntablism, MCing, and beatboxing, creating music later termed hip hop. Unlike extending the break, these other innovations were not done for the dancers, necessarily. Indeed, hip hop music evolved away from breaking in the late 1970s, concurrent with the dance's waning popularity.

v. Break (music)

Breaks, or breakbeats, beats, b-beats, percussive, often instrumental, songs or parts of songs conducive to dancing. DJ Kool Herc's selection of music, and his decision to repeat particular parts of records, informed the original formulation of breaks (and hip hop music). Afrika Bambaataa observed that "Herc was the first to push it in the culture, but breakbeats had been around since disco, since James Brown, all the little breaks between records" .

Break DJ Leacy .

Work in progress

Turntablism

Work in progress

(Left to right) Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and Kool Herc on the cover of Source, 1993 .

cf. Hip hop (culture)

Hip hop or hip hop music, music with stylistic similarities or a historical connection to the music associated with hip hop culture. Herc, Flash, and Bambaataa discussed hip hop in 1993:

THE SOURCE: What do you think now when people say that there's a certain style of music that's considered hip-hop, and a certain style that's not considered hip-hop? Claims that some records are fake hip-hop records and some are real?
BAM: They're ignorant. They don't know the true forms of hip-hop. Just like I tell 'em, you got all styles of hip-hop, you gotta take hip-hop for what it is. You got your hard beats, you got your gangsta rap, you got your electro-funk sound which came from the party rock sound, you got your Miami bass, you got the go-go from DC. We was playin' go-go years ago. If you really with Teddy Riley, he came to Bronx River parties and heard go-go music and just flipped it up and now you got new jack swing. All of this was all part of hip-hop.
FLASH: It's all about different tastes. It could be hard drums like a Billy Squire record. It could be the bass hitting and drums soft like "Seven Minutes of Funk." It could have the hallway echo effect of "Apache."
HERC: We can't let the media define this for us. Someone says it's got hardcore beats and talkin' about bitches sucking dick, that's hardcore. That same person says that Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince are soft, it's not hip-hop. It is hip-hop. It's just another form. It's about experimenting and being open.
BAM: Different generations have lost the true meaning. We were teaching the public when we did parties in the park.

MCing

MC Guru (left) and DJ Premier (right) of hip hop duo Gang Starr (1999) .

Work in progress

Beatboxing

Beatboxing, form of vocal percussion. It is sometimes called hip hop's "Fifth Element" .

Doug E Fresh claimed, "I'm the inventor. I am the originator" . Fresh developed beatboxing gradually, imitating songs (including hip hop tracks) he heard from the record store he passed on his way to and from school. He would later beatbox during performances while DJ Barry B changed records, and began to feature it more prominently at Barry's urging . Other influential beatboxers from the 1980s included Darren "Buffy" Robinson and Biz Markie .

While many traditions of vocal percussion exist, it is unclear which, if any, influenced the creation of beatboxing. For example, James Brown's vocals often functioned percussively, while earlier, jazz musicians sometimes imitated drums while scatting.² TyTe and Defenicial explored several forms of vocal percussion as part of their "pre-history of beatboxing" .

The etymology of beatboxing extends into the mid-1970s, where the term "beatbox" initially referred to a drum machine. According to Flash, "the beatbox is a manually operated drumbox that I used to play while I was Djing. It was a machine made in England by Vox. It had a bass drum key, snare, hi hats and hand claps. I used to play this like a typewriter almost. The phrase beat box was coined by me, but it didn't reach the masses. Well it went to sleep and reemerged with people doing it with their mouths. So the human beatbox is these guys emulating something that I created [...] My neighbor was a drummer who used it to keep his fingers nimble. Whenever he couldn't set up his drums he used this. He lived in the projects – 149th & Jackson Ave. I begged him to sell it to me, he sold it to me for $125.00" .³ Hager's 1982 article in The Village Voice also mentioned Flash's "electronic percussion machine called 'the beat box'" . Flash explained his motivation, "the beat box was an attempt to come up with something other than the techniques I created on the turntables to please the crowd" . Park et al. have claimed that "beat box" was a colloquialism for drum machines in the 1970s and possibly earlier, though a drum machine incorporating the term appeared only with the "ELI CompuRhythm CR-7030 Beat Box" in 1979 .

Funk, dance-oriented music, characterized by syncopation and layered rhythms, generally in 4/4 time with accents on beats 2 and 4, and tempo typically between 90 and 130 beats per minute. It is common to refer to a funk rhythm or funk groove, a percussive musical figure with funk characteristics, which constitute breaks.

Funk's first expression was in James Brown's band in the 1960s. Brown claimed, in regard to "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (1965), "I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm. I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums. [...] Later on they said it was the beginning of funk. I just thought of it as where my music was going" . Fred Wesley speculated, "maybe that's why it made you dance, because these [different instrumental] parts were bouncing off each other. It was just one of those things that all fit together perfectly [...] I'm sure it didn't happen intentionally but it laid a foundation for things to come after it" .

A breakbeat feel may extend through an entire funk song (e.g. "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose," "It's Just Begun," "Yellow Sunshine") or be limited to the break (e.g. "Get Into Something," "Corazon"). Other songs may lack any breakbeat-like component, and may inspire different ways of dancing, including the West Coast funk styles.

Disco, dance-oriented music, usually associated with a distinctive drum pattern (four-on-the-floor bass drum, snare backbeat, offbeat hi-hat), funky bass and guitar, use of orchestral strings, and soul vocals.

"To most music historians, disco begins in Philadelphia. And if one song sums up classic disco it is, with little doubt, 'Love Is The Message' by MFSB on the Philadelphia International label. Originally a B-side to the hit 'TSOP' (which also became the theme for TV's Soul Train), 'Love Is The Message' became the era's keynote record, the one which all disc jockeys claimed as their own." – Brewster & Broughton

"We set out to do funky dance records. We didn't set out to do disco records. But disco pretty much is just dance records." – Kenny Gamble

"In Paris [...] It was here that the very first discotheques emerged [...] The generic term disco would not be coined until September 1973 when Vince Aletti wrote the article "Discotheque Rock Paaaaarty" for Rolling Stone magazine." – Martin James

A common disco beat.

"The beat that we came up with was sort of like a gospel kind of blues, jazz feel with the sock cymbal and the 4/4 feeling on the drum" – Leon Huff

"I was playing that groove before disco even was thought about. It's like the 4/4 on the bass drum and that's about all disco, that's all disco really is [...] as long as you have the 2-4 [snare backbeat, hi-hat eighths]." – Earl Young

"Earl Young was responsible for the disco sound more than anyone else." – Nicky Siano

"Disco, it was like formulated funk. It was simple to do [...] All you needed was the simple disco formula which was a song, a beat, and some flowery strings and horns, and you had disco. [...]
The Gamble and Huff style put a bow tie on the funk, you know, it made it elegant." – Fred Wesley

"Interviewer: Speaking of funk, where does funk fit in to your music?
Huff: Somewhere down there amongst those basses and drums."

"By the middle of 1975 disco had broken big. Disco is a simplification of a lot of what I was doing, of what they thought I was doing. Disco is a very small part of funk. It's the end of the song, the repetitious part, like a vamp. The difference is that in funk you dig into a groove, you don't stay on the surface. Disco stayed on the surface." – James Brown

"We called it Disco at the time but it pretty much was dance music. Now you had a lot of the Philadelphia stuff that was coming of age at that time. People were doing the hustle dance. Flowers had a broad range of stuff but he played a lot more funk and rock than anybody else. I played predominately hustle. Although I mixed in James Brown, Cameo, Gap band and lot of music similar to that kind of stuff. But I mainly stuck to a lot of the Philadelphia stuff in the beginning." – DJ Plummer

"Unfortunately, the most distinctive elements of the Philly Sound and [Barry] White's hits gave way to a redundant blend of hi-hat drum patterns, swirling string arrangements, Latin percussion breaks, and moronic lyrics that crystallized negatively in the public consciousness as "disco." [...] All this horrible music inspired the phrase "Disco sucks" and, sadly, it was often used in ignorant attacks against black artists in general." – Nelson George

"Philly Soul" or "Hustle," which have actual historical and musicological features, at least help uncover the heterogeneity of disco. Compared to the assembly-line products, there is more to "Love Is The Message" or "Spanish Hustle"; "Disco Inferno", "Got To Be Real", "I Will Survive." Disco can be understood as a phase of musical development—not free of growing pains—which witnessed in funk the aging of the new music. As funk honed itself into bare drums, disco took up every available technique, preempting electronic music's struggle of having every possible sound. At the same time, disco was a look back—or at least sideways, at Motown—returning to the New Orleans backbeat, gospel singing, orchestral instruments, and traditional musical form and melody. Funk's problem was always song structure, the relation of chorus, verse, bridge, and break—a problem cleverly solved later on by DJs and remixers, who revealed that the "leveling out of song form that was to come with funk" was only partial. Disco's inaugural discovery was that demoting the groove in favor of traditional development could give the groove new life. Its "elegance" was a consequence of its focus on integration—in business terms, crossover—which undoubtedly included simplification versus funk's complexity. In fact, the "simplified" drum pattern, at least for the early Philadelphia musicians, was the musical result of composing dance music that could respond to vocal melody. The attempts at musical integration were never guaranteed success, however, and finally, precisely when the idiom crystallized, every convergence of voice with "the" disco beat became a mash-up. The success or failure of disco cannot be declared unilaterally, but only in each song according to its force, the degree to which the content of the resurrected material shines through.

"As disco stretched out, however, its DJs became less attuned to the mood on the floor, its clubs more oriented towards looking rather than listening, and its music more geological (structured according to the hardened co-ordinates of the classic pop song in which the lead vocalist and lead guitarist are dominant within a set verse-chorus structure) than aquatic (built around unpredictable structures and fluid non-hierarchical layers of textural sound)." – Tim Lawrence

According to Rose, disco lacked "the rupture in rhythmic continuity as it was highlighted in the musical break" .

"Herc thinks the popularity of B-beats stems from the kids' dissatisfaction with much of today's disco product. 'On most records, people have to wait through a lot of strings and singing to get to the good part of the record,' Herc believes. 'But I give it to them all up front.'" – Robert Ford Jr., 1978

"If you wanted to B-Boy you had to go Downtown....to the Hevalo or the Executive Playhouse...so that's how that was. Uptown (Northeast Bronx) didn't have any clubs..they had clubs but they were not catering to B-Boys... they played disco type stuff. It's before the T-Connection had opened. So that's why we went to Kool Herc parties." – Cholly Rock

Troy L.: Was there any other type of music being played at Bronx River like Disco or something?
Pow Wow: Just stone-cold hip hop. Disco was not cutting it there. Not for nothing but same thing at Flash parties.

The revolt against disco was in part a reaction to the pallid new offerings of its music and the desperate exclusion of its spaces—felt acutely by the early breakers. Yet it should be noted that criticism of disco's artificiality and superficiality also fit easily with the perennial condemnation of perceived cultural degeneracy. In a 1979 Rolling Stone article, Dave Marsh assessed that disco was seen as "the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins" , particularly among heterosexual, white consumers. Dyer's apologia, appearing the same year, found subversive potential in the eroticism, romanticism, and materialism that accompanied the "gay appropriation of disco" . In Lawrence's analysis, "Gay men, however, weren't the sole focus of the anti-disco movement's rage. Almost as target-friendly were the equality-demanding women and African Americans" . The antithesis created between disco and hip hop has always belied substantial musical and cultural overlap.

"In retrospect, 1977 was a transitional year. The opening of Studio 54, the glitziest and most exclusionary venue of the disco era, in April, followed by the release of Saturday Night Fever in November, steamrollered the ethical model of the downtown party network into smithereens, at least in terms of the emergent disco industry. Whereas the dance floor was previously experienced as a space of sonic dominance, in which the sound system underpinned a dynamic of integration, experimentation and release, at Studio this became secondary to the theatre of a hierarchical door policy that was organised around exclusion and humiliation, as well as a brightly-lit dance floor that prioritised looking above listening, and separation above submersion." – Tim Lawrence

"These days the name 'disco' is stuck to Saturday Night Fever, to the Bee Gees, Abba and the Village People, to plastic compilation CDs and tacky retro club nights." – Brewster & Broughton

The usual protests against genre also enabled the rapid flight from the "disco" label. Funk, Philly Soul, Hustle, R&B, electro-funk, and post-disco leave nothing left except refuse and the most emblematic hits. This liberation also entails burial. Earl Young was moved to reflect, "I feel that as a drummer, and especially as a black drummer, that a lot of the music that we created has gone and been forgotten about" . This musical progress, or "evolution," was examined by Lawrence in 2006: "Since the 1970s, disco, which formally went out of production towards the end of 1979, has moved under a different guise, yet remains prevalent. The clubbing sections of Time Out are testament to the ongoing popularity and vitality of the social practice popularised by disco, and the music's pounding rhythm is prominent in mainstream pop" .

"I feel that that's why my music continues to be accepted, because... it's real!" – Cheryl Lynn

"Love is the Message." That's the message we was trying to get across." – Kenny Gamble

1. The preferred version was the 1970 live recording on the Sex Machine album, according to Chang .
2. For example, this performance by Dizzy Gillespie's quintet in 1966 . The lyrics to his composition "Oop Bop Sh'Bam" also imitate drum sounds.
3. Flash provided a similar account of the beatbox to radio station Hot 97 in 2016 (although he gives the number as $150) .