For hip-hop’s 50th, we’re running it back to the very beginning—telling the story of its evolution through a series of audio specials, DJ mixes, and, of course, a handpicked collection of classic records and must-hear playlists.

Have a listen to our original audio series on hip-hop’s foundational figures and storylines, hosted by Ebro.

Let’s say it was The Last Poets. Let’s say it was DJ Hollywood. Let’s say it was Kool Herc at a back-to-school party in the rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, or Grandmaster Flash marking his favorite breaks in a record with a grease pencil or crayon so he could run them back on infinite loop. The who of hip-hop’s birth depends on how you want to tell the story, but the where is always New York. The genius of hip-hop’s early sound lay in making do with what you had—take JAY-Z, who practiced his rhymes by banging out beats on the kitchen table. But even as the city’s style evolved, the attitude remained scrappy, whether it was Rakim starting his cosmic flights by putting 16 dots on a piece of paper (one for each bar in a verse) or Just Blaze building the colossal Roc-A-Fella sound on a sampler in his mom’s living room: portable music made with modest ingredients by people who never expected a shot in the first place. Of course, New York hip-hop was never just one thing, and East Coast hip-hop was never just about New York. So, while Public Enemy were making noisy polemics like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, De La Soul were exploring rap’s capacity for humor and wonder. And as much as Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star defined the oblique soul of late-’90s alternative rap, so did Philadelphia’s The Roots and New Jersey’s Lauryn Hill. Over time, the lens has rightfully shifted to other parts of the country (not to mention the world), but you can still measure the vitality of the East Coast both through crossover artists like Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, and through scenes like Brooklyn drill and the underground renaissance of Roc Marciano, Mach-Hommy, and the like. Here’s to the source.

Too $hort said he started sampling Parliament records because he figured the East Coast guys had already gotten to James Brown. Dr. Dre said he loved Run-DMC, but it wasn’t until Ice-T’s “6 ’N the Mornin’” that rap had spoken directly to his community, and Ice-T, in turn, said he hadn’t thought of his stuff as gangsta rap so much as reality rap. No one thing made the West Coast different, but it inarguably was, and while New York could claim primacy, the image and attitude of California in the late ’80s penetrated the national conversation in ways rap hadn’t before. Police and racial profiling had been subjects in the music since the outro of Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” in 1982 (“Excuse me, officer, officer, what’s the problem?/You the problem”), but no one had been nearly as antagonistic or direct about it as N.W.A. And where Ice Cube carried that anger forward into his solo career, part of what made Dre’s The Chronic so chilling was the way that conflict—especially the riots following the 1991 police beating of Rodney King—played out in the background of what otherwise felt like party music. The picture hadn’t gotten prettier—they’d just learned how to live with it. The controversies were real. But so was the playfulness of Bay Area hyphy and the slanted wit of Souls of Mischief and The Pharcyde, or the strange breeze that blows through a good Madlib beat. DJ Quik tells a story about waking up to his first hangover with the track for “Tonite” still looping in the corner of the room, and then immediately writing a verse to capture the feeling. That’s what you hear: ordinary people forging a good time in the face of whatever came their way. You can still sense that resilience in Kendrick Lamar and Vince Staples, but also in the funk of producers like Mustard and the ultra-musical hybrids of Anderson .Paak. It’s a freer sound, lighter and more expressive. They didn’t invent the stuff—but they did make it their own.

The thing about André 3000 getting onstage at the 1995 Source Awards and saying the South had something to say is that they were already saying it. After all, he wasn’t there uninvited, and Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik was already a platinum-selling record. But as Goodie Mob’s Big Gipp pointed out, in a national narrative dominated by New York and LA, most people didn’t seem to care. When JAY-Z asked Bun B and Pimp C to rap on “Big Pimpin’” a few years later, Bun said he brought the best he had. Pimp C, though? He said he’d provide eight bars, no more. Either way, as Bun put it, he’s since heard audiences rap those same bars in countries where English wasn’t even the third language. They’d made it, but they weren’t going to strain themselves on New York’s account. So even as Cash Money and No Limit merged into the mainstream and Lil Wayne achieved a level of acclaim previously unheard of for someone with his accent, Southern rap was handled with the polite condescension with which America handles almost anything Southern. But of course, anyone reading this knows how that all turned out. And if not, just ask Migos or Young Thug or Lil Baby or Mike Will or Metro Boomin. Speaking on why he thought the South had outpaced the rest of the country, Snoop Dogg said clubs in New York and LA will play whatever’s hot at the moment, no matter where it came from. But if you go to a club in the South, the South is what you’ll get. Underdogs remember.

Roots MC Black Thought said he used to go to Detroit every year just to be the first to hear the new Dilla beats. It’s a quaint image, but given Dilla’s status with artists as regionally disparate as Tribe, The Pharcyde, and Erykah Badu, it also captures the notion of America’s Midwest as both out of the way and in the middle of everything. Think Kanye West handling half of The Blueprint, or Eminem’s passage from regional open mics to Dr. Dre’s studio to every living room in America: The historical narrative isn’t as obvious as the East, West, or South’s, but the impact is undeniable. It’s fitting, then, that Bone Thugs were among the first. Neither strictly singers nor strictly rappers, the Cleveland group landed on a hybrid of hip-hop and R&B that felt like an ingenious novelty in the mid-’90s, and a sound that has since come to define most Black pop since. Or consider Common, whose soft sound bore hard lessons. Or even a guy like Danny Brown, who could be both arty and unimaginably filthy. The style was never unified—like, say, New York in the ’80s—but you get the sense that the limited cultural oversight and lack of any central tradition to uphold or reject let the artists be defined by who they were and not where they were from. Both/and, not either/or. In some ways, no other region has benefitted as much from the speed and independence of the digital era as the Midwest has, whether it’s Chance and Acid Rap or Detroit and Flint in the early 2020s. Like Dilla, they didn’t go to you—they brought you to them. Dive into a new episode of Hip-Hop DNA, then explore a selection of playlists, albums, and our Origins DJ mix.

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