TORONTO – In 1973, a Jamaican-American teen known as DJ Kool Herc played a bunch of funk records for his sister’s birthday party in a Bronx , N.Y., rec room.
The electric energy in the room gave birth to the B-boy generation, which South Bronx DJ Afrika Bambaataa further nurtured.
It was the start of hip-hop culture as he know it today, says Darby Wheeler, Canadian director of the new documentary “Hip-Hop Evolution.”
“Most people think it starts with Run-DMC,” he says. “It doesn’t.”
“Hip-Hop Evolution” makes its world premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto on Friday and will air on HBO Canada in the summer as a four-part series.
Historian Rodrigo Bascunan wrote the film, which starts from the Kool Herc’s days in the Bronx and goes up until 1992 with Dr. Dre’s first solo album, “The Chronic.”
“That album really puts hip hop on the map in a popular form,” says Wheeler.
The doc is based on over 90 interviews with artists including De La Soul, Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, Ice T, Ice Cube and Chuck D from Public Enemy.
CBC Radio host Shad guides viewers through the evolution of the genre.
Wheeler says one of the earliest known rappers was DJ Hollywood, who spun disco tracks in Harlem and said “pre-rap” things to his audiences, like “Yes, yes, y’all’ and ‘You don’t stop.'”
“He is someone I think no one’s ever heard of but he inspired a generation of early guys, Kurtis Blow, you know, Russell Simmons — he says there would never be a rap album without this guy DJ Hollywood,” says Wheeler.
Artists like the Cold Crush Brothers and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five started to pop up and, with the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 hit “Rapper’s Delight,” hip hop started to become mainstream.
As Wheeler explains it, the song was the brainchild of studio owner Sylvia Robinson, “the first hip-hop mogul.”
Inspired by a rapping DJ named Lovebug Starski, she got “some kids from her town in Englewood, New Jersey to start rapping and it creates the biggest hit, it puts it on the map — 17 million singles sold of ‘Rapper’s Delight.'”
Then came Run-DMC with their hard rhymes and street style.
“They really are the Beatles, I would say, of hip hop,” says Wheeler.
Hot Docs runs through May 8.
