August 11 1973 should be a day all of us remember, but sadly many have not.. It was on that date that two siblings Clive and Cindy Campbell decided to do a back to school party in order to raise some money for school cloths and supplies. The party took place in the rec room of their apartment building on 1520 Sedgwick Ave in the West Bronx.. It would be the first of many parties the pair would throw..

Cindy was a budding entrepreneurial type who was good organizer who was the backbone to putting this party together. Her brother Clive was a hulking athletic type who had access to his father’s speakers, and a nice collection of funky records including pristine cuts from his idol James Brown.

It was at this party that Clive who was just starting to deejay and had taken on the nickname Herc, short for Hercules, would introduce a new style of deejaying that would eventually take hold and change the world. What he did was repeat the percussion breakdowns of popular songs… he discovered that the crowd reacted when he played the drum beats so rather than wait for song to play all the way through , he would go straight to the breakdown.. Herc would eventually come up with a system to keep those percussion breaks extended indefinitely. He dubbed it the Merry-Go-Round.. Later we would call them percussion breakdowns, breakbeats.

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