[Today: The original break beat...]
Michael Viner was an MGM music executive who needed two tracks for a chase scene for a bottom rung B-movie called The Thing With Two Heads. So Viner joined together with drummer Jim Gordon, bongo and conga player King Errisson, and producer and songwriter Perry Botkin, and gave the group the grandiloquently ridiculous name of the Incredible Bongo Band. They recorded a cover of a 1959 hit called ‘Bongo Rock’ and backed it with a song called ‘Bongolia’. When ‘Bongo Rock ’73′ became a surprise hit and sold more than a million singles, MGM decided to finance a full length album.
That LP was called Bongo Rock, and it sank without a trace upon release. It was filled with driving instrumental covers that included extended drum and percussion passages. One song in particular – ‘Apache’ – caught the ear of a South Bronx DJ named Kool Herc, who began spinning it into his late-night block party sets. When Herc looped together two turntables and stretched the percussive break in ‘Apache’, he made it the first breakbeat in Hip-Hop. From humble (and absurd) beginnings, ‘Apache’ became one of the most sampled records in history, and a cornerstone in the birth and growth of hip-hop.
Kool Herc calls it the “national anthem of hip-hop” and Pete Rock says that “If you don’t know ‘Apache’ you don’t know hip-hop.” Indeed, listening to Bongo Rock is like peeking beneath the scaffolding of hip-hop’s messy, ever-changing, graffiti-strewn exterior. Within this tossed-off commercial non-entity, it’s possible to hear the backbone of everything from Grandmaster Flash to Beastie Boys to Nas to Missy Elliott, without really straining your ears. It should have been a short hop from The Thing With Two Heads to obscurity for the Incredible Bongo Band, but Bongo Rock took a detour through the South Bronx and ended up becoming one of the most influential recordings of the 20th century…
Listen: Apache
Listen: Bongolia
Listen: Last Bongo in Belgium
Tags: Beastie Boys, Bongo Rock, DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Incredible Bongo Band, Jim Gordon, King Errisson, Michael Viner, Missy Elliott, Nas
