The culture that poor Black and Latino youth built in the South Bronx in the early 1970s out of almost nothing: two turntables, a microphone, a spray can, and their own bodies, worked into four linked art forms — DJing, rapping, b-boying, and graffiti. What began in the rubble of an abandoned city became, within thirty years, commercially dominant across the United States and globally influential, carrying long arguments about authenticity, violence, and the corporate industry it grew into.
The city was burning. In the South Bronx of the early 1970s, landlords torched buildings for the insurance, the factories had fled, and the poorest Black and Latino kids in New York were written off as a lost generation. With almost nothing, they built an entire culture out of two turntables, a microphone, a spray can, and their own bodies — and within thirty years the sound made in the rubble ruled American music and spread across the world.