Jeff Chang

They would do it in time and rhythmically and just, you know, really add a lot to sort of the flavor of the events.

And so Perkz starts doing that as well.

And he and his other folks, there's especially one guy named Coke LaRock, but he and Coke LaRock are especially adding in these lines, these sort of poetry rhymes sometimes.

And that kind of evolves as the years go by into emceeing, into what we now all know as rap music.

That's wild.

It's wild.

And he was also a graffiti writer as well.

So he was cool.

He was DJ Cool Herc.

He was the kind of person that just had style.

And style becomes the kind of currency that kids are trading on in the Bronx, as opposed to before, where your gang name or your gang affiliation

was the currency that you were training on that gave you status.

Now it's like individual style, and that changes everything for not just that mini generation in the Bronx, but it changes everything for everyone all around the world.

Well, a lot of the dances at that particular time, people told me were more of the James Brown dances, moving his feet in very fast time.

He was moving up, moving down and that kind of thing.

Sometimes he would drop to a splits, you know?

So those are the kinds of dances that, that folks are doing.

And yeah,

The idea was there's a circle of folks, they call it the cypher, and you would come in and you get maybe a minute or so or maybe even less if you weren't doing that well to impress people with the style that you had.

And then the next person would come in and try to do something that was even more jaw dropping.