“We dragged hip-hop upstate” DJ JMC, on 50 Years of Hip-Hop
Hip-hop began 50 years ago in The Bronx. While it has evolved into a mainstream, commercially successful genre in those five decades, its roots and its heart are with indy performers who create art from available pre-existing media blended and personalized into original expressions. There are “Five Pillars of Hip-Hop,” these include MCing (or rapping), break dancing, graffiti art, knowledge of self and the movement.
The first “pillar,” however, is DJ’ing. DJs or “disc jockeys” are the people who play, blend, and curate recorded music for live audiences or on radio stations like Utica’s hip-hop radio station, 95.5 FM “The Heat.”
In this series of recorded interviews with 95.5 FM’s “Heat Squad,” they talk about the art form, how it evolved, and its cultural impact globally and locally.
Today, I am talking to DJ JMC. In our interview, he explains how rap had its roots in scat and how DJs like him “dragged it upstate.”
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