Birth of the Beat: Looping Drum Breaks in the Bronx

Birth of the Beat: Looping Drum Breaks in the Bronx

On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc invented the breakbeat by using two turntables to continuously loop the drum solos of funk records at a Bronx house party.

Behind the vinyl curtain

Chapter 1

The birth of the beat

Chapter 2

The sound of rebellion

Chapter 3

Curators of the global groove

Chapter 4

The digital shift and the bedroom label

Ch 1 · The birth of the beat

schopenhauer The Birth of the Beat

Two turntables spin, looping that drum break, now the Bronx is gonna jump!

schopenhauer RCA Victor created the modern vinyl single.

The shellac shortage of World War II

schopenhauer How a wartime material shortage forced the record industry to invent the vinyl LP.

Fun Fact

Lac bug wax: Early records were made of shellac, a resin secreted by female lac bugs native to forests in India and Thailand.

Blue Note and the jazz blueprint

schopenhauer How two German refugees in New York created a legendary jazz record label.

Glossary

merseybeat (noun)
A style of British popular music of the early 1960s characterized by a strong, driving beat. This Liverpool-born style gained global fame in 1962 when the Beatles signed with Parlophone Records.

Quiz

What did the term 'album' originally refer to before it meant a single 12-inch vinyl record?

Gossip

Which retro music format is cooler?

Spin the Beat

BETA

schopenhauer Match classic tracks to their record labels to discover how legendary music empires were built.

schopenhauer The format war between Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner

Quiz

Which famous dog mascot appeared looking into a phonograph horn on the logo of RCA Victor?

schopenhauer Blue Note Records created the blueprint for modern jazz.

Quiz

What speed, measured in revolutions per minute (RPM), became the standard format for the single record released in 1949?

schopenhauer How the World War II shellac shortage created the vinyl record

Quiz

Which record label, founded in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Max Margulis, became synonymous with modern jazz?

Quiz

Who invented the gramophone disc, which eventually replaced Thomas Edison's wax cylinders?

Quiz

During World War II, what material's shortage led the music industry to experiment with vinyl instead of shellac?

Quiz

Before vinyl, early commercial disc records spun at what standard speed?

Quiz

Which country's classical music traditions were first extensively preserved on commercial disc recordings by the Gramophone Company in 1902?