Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Clive Campbell in 1980. “Hip-hop is both an American immigrant story and a global story,” he later said. “It belongs to everybody.”

They Were Just Having a Back-to-School Party in an Apartment Rec Room. Little Did They Know They Were Creating Hip-Hop

The music genre that became a global sensation started with some creative teens just getting together and riffing rhymes to DJ Kool Herc’s curated beats