History of Hip Hop

Rap started in the South Bronx of New York, which had been a mainly black and Hispanic ghetto for decades. By 1930 nearly a quarter of the people who lived there were West Indian immigrants. And most of the Spanish speakers living in the Bronx now either came originally from Caribbean islands like Puerto Rico and Cuba or are the children of Caribbean immigrants. The Cubans began arriving in the Bronx in the 1930s and 1940s …

…to the people in a slightly different form. And anyone could do it. All you needed was a cassette tape recorder, a cassette, a pair of hands and ears and some imagination. The heart of hip-hop was in the cassette recorder, the drum machine, the Walkman and the big ghetto blasters. These are the machines that were used to take the sounds out on to the streets and the vacant lots, and into the parks.