IESS Music · Y7 · The Label
Session 4 · v.37 · Back Catalogue Nº 3
Two turntables → the biggest genre on Earth
Today's call sheet
BY THE END you can explain how hip hop was invented and what a genre gives a community, and you've performed the class bars.
August 11, 1973 · 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the Bronx
A back-to-school party in a rec room. Entry: 25 cents.
Cindy needs money for school clothes. Her big brother DJs. The biggest genre on Earth starts here.
Kool Herc's one trick
Dancers go crazy when the song drops to just drums. So: two copies of the same record, and the drums never have to stop.
One culture, four elements
the turntable · the mic · the body · the wall
Sampling = the back catalogue, talking
Which older record is hiding inside? And what did they borrow: bassline, drums, melody?
Water. Move. Back on the 2 and 4.
1973 · the Bronx is burning
What does a genre give a community that had no stage?
Why the Bronx? Whose stories? And how did it reach Stockholm?
1993 · before any of it
Tupac was already famous: platinum records, films. Biggie was the newcomer. Tupac gave him advice, let him stay at his house, shared a stage with him. Biggie asked him to be his manager.
Every version of this story you have heard starts at the end. Start here instead.
1994 to 1996 · how it grew
Tupac was robbed and shot in a New York studio lobby in 1994. He survived, and he believed Biggie knew. Biggie denied it, always. It was never proven. But the belief was enough.
Two record labels, two cities, and magazines that sold every issue by calling it a war. The story got bigger than the two people inside it.
1996 and 1997
Six months apart. Biggie's next album was already finished. It came out sixteen days after he died, called Life After Death.
Efterspelet · what came after
The magazines sold out. The records sold millions, more after the deaths than before. The two people at the centre were 25 and 24.
Tupac's case: nobody was convicted for thirty years, until August 2026. Biggie's murder has never been solved at all.
Beat on. Two seconds of movement each. Pass it on.
Rhythm first, rhyme second
4 bars. Call-and-response. Topic: us, this room, this term.
The oldest conversation
the fields → the church → Chess Records → the Bronx
Showcase
Class verse over the loop. MCs step up, the room is the hype section. Phones rolling. Term archive.
Debrief
One sentence: how did a 25-cent party become the biggest genre on Earth?
Next session · v.38 · the Sync Department opens
Two notes. That's all it took to make the whole world afraid of the ocean.