Pioneers

Whether judged strictly by his work with Wu-Tang Clan or as a solo artist, Ghostface Killah is an indisputable giant. A masterful storyteller whose range extends from graphic crime fantasies to stirring autobiographical recollections, the rapper first appeared with his Staten Island group’s trail-blazing Enter the Wu-Tang (1993) and started building a vast solo discography with Ironman (1996). Dennis Coles (born May 9, 1970),better known by his stage name Ghostface Killah, is an American rapper and songwriter. He is a member of the hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan.After the group achieved breakthrough success in the aftermath of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the members went on to pursue solo careers to varying levels of success. Ghostface Killah debuted his solo career with Ironman, which was well received by music critics, in 1996. He has enjoyed continued success in the years that have followed, releasing critically acclaimed albums such as Supreme Clientele (2000) and Fishscale (2006). His stage name was taken from one of the characters in the 1979 kung fu film Mystery of Chessboxing. He is the founder of his own record label, Starks Enterprises.  His platinum-certified debut strengthened a partnership with the RZA, whose bracing mutations of dusty soul have either soundtracked or influenced much of his best output. After an occasionally commercial early period with Epic that yielded a second classic, Supreme Clientele (2000), Ghost moved to Def Jam, where he released six additional solo LPs highlighted by his fourth Top Ten pop album, Fishscale (2006). Throughout the following decade, Ghost added to his legacy with a series of creatively unrestricted works, many of which were whole-album collaborations, conceived with the likes of the RZA-inspired Adrian Younge, BadBadNotGood, and Czarface. These included the two-volume Twelve Reasons to Die (2013 and 2015), Sour Soul (2015), and Czarface Meets Ghostface (2019). The rapper born Dennis Coles emerged from his native Staten Island as part of Wu-Tang Clan, who released their first single in 1992 and became one of the strongest hip-hop institutions the following year with Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). On the album’s fifth and final single, “Can It Be All So Simple,” Ghostface rhymed about his intent to “make more hits with Rae and A,” singling out fellow Wu-Tang members Raekwon and the RZA. He quickly achieved his goal. In August 1995, a few months after Enter the Wu-Tang was certified platinum, “Tony Starks (Ghost Face Killer)” was billed as guest star on Raekwon’s RZA-produced Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. Among the tracks featuring Ghost were the preceding lead single “Heaven & Hell,” a remix of “Can It Be All So Simple,” and the Top Five Billboard rap hits “Criminology” and “Ice Cream.” During the same year, Ghost linked with Raekwon and RZA on other Wu-Tang projects, namely Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers and GZA’s Liquid Swords, and took part in the making of yet another classic, Queensbridge duo Mobb Deep’s The Infamous. These appearances, plus subsequent headlining contributions to the soundtracks of Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and Sunset Park, primed Ghost for his own solo breakout. Signed to major-label Epic via an arrangement with RZA boutique label Razor Sharp, Ghostface Killah became the fifth Wu-Tang member to release a solo album when Ironman was racked in October 1996. Continuing Wu-Tang’s unprecedented spate of spin-off releases, the LP entered the Billboard 200 at number two and topped the R&B/hip-hop chart. RZA served as producer. Raekwon and Ghost’s fellow Razor Sharp signee Cappadonna were featured throughout. Its deep R&B foundation and wide emotional range were promoted in the choice of singles, including the strong-arming and deceptively intricate “Daytona 500” (assisted by the Force M.D.’s) and the bleak autobiographical ballad “All That I Got Is You” (featuring Mary J. Blige). The album was certified gold within three months (and years later went platinum). Between one-off featured roles and his group’s return with Wu-Tang Forever, Ghost put solo activity on hold. He and RZA also spent time in Africa, an experience that fueled the writing of Supreme Clientele, the second Ghostface Killah LP. Production-wise, RZA handled a few tracks on his own and vacated his seat for affiliate beatmakers such as Ju-Ju (the Beatnuts), Hassan (the U.M.C.’s), and Carlos Bess, though he did touch every cut in some capacity. The album went Top Ten pop and number two R&B/hip-hop upon its February 2000 release, and shortly thereafter went gold, pushed by “Apollo Kids” and “Cherchez LaGhost,” both of which charted. “Cherchez LaGhost” actually became Ghost’s biggest single as a lead artist — a number three hit on Hot Rap Songs. That song’s comparatively lighter approach carried into Bulletproof Wallets, which rather expeditiously arrived in November 2001 as Ghost’s third solo album. Like “Cherchez LaGhost,” “Ghost Showers” was built on one of August “Kid Creole” Darnell’s high-spirited compositions, and was almost as successful, topping out at number 11 on the rap chart. Veering even farther away from RZA-style grime was another single, “Never Be the Same Again,” a smooth contemporary R&B production with then-hot Bad Boy artist Carl Thomas on the hook. Only four weeks after the album’s arrival, however, Wu-Tang Clan returned again with Iron Flag, highlighted by the hard-hitting “Uzi (Pinky Ring),” on which Ghost was back in his familiar raw form. Ghost’s next move, The Pretty Toney Album, issued in April 2004 as his first full-length for Def Jam, gunned for pop success with the Missy Elliott collaboration “Tush.” It was otherwise more street-oriented than Bulletproof Wallets, outfitted with tougher productions from the likes of RZA, No I.D., Nottz, and K-Def. Only a few months after it became Ghost’s third album to reach the pop Top Ten, the group Theodore Unit — primarily an outlet for Ghost and Trife da God, but open to several other artists — released the album 718 on the independent Sure Shot label. Theodore Unit ground to a halt, but not before welcoming Sun God, Ghost’s son. Ghost’s Def Jam

Luis Cedeño is an American DJ and is noted as being the first Latino DJ in Hip-Hop music. After being inspired at a Kool Herc jam by the emerging hip hop movement taking place in The Bronx, DJ Disco Wiz collaborated with his best friend, Casanova Fly (Grandmaster Caz), to form a group called the Mighty Force crew. Mighty Force is noted as being one of the first Hip-Hop DJ crews in the mid-to-late 1970s. Noted for their DJ battles in the streets of the South Bronx, the Mighty Force crew was also responsible for presenting the first Latino rapper to the world, Prince Whipper Whip, who is also of Puerto Rican descent. DJ Disco Wiz is also credited for being the first DJ to create a “mixed plate” in 1977 (Hip-Hop’s first mixed dub recording) when he and Grandmaster Caz, combined sound bites, special effects and paused beats.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. he first achieved fame as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. By the 1980s, his neo-expressionist paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community of his time, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. Basquiat’s visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. Basquiat has long had hip-hop ties. In 1981, he popped up at the turntables in the first rap video to air on MTV, for Blondie’s “Rapture.” In fact, he appears at Debbie Harry’s lyrical mention of Fab Five Freddy as a prominent graffiti artist, and also the primary curator during hip-hop’s formative days. By 1983, when MTV introduced the world to hip-hop with its movie Wild Style, Fab Five Freddy had orchestrated events that featured Basquiat alongside formative hip-hop artists like Afrika Bambaataa — having New York’s arts and music worlds collide.

Kevin Smith was an American MC, musician, and record producer. He began his career as a record boy in 1971 when hip-hop first appeared in the Bronx. He eventually became a DJ at the Disco Fever club in 1978. His popularity grew beyond the boroughs of New York when he was featured in 1984’s Beat Street, a film about graffiti, B-boying and DJing that has become a cult classic in the Hip Hop world. He is one of two people who may have come up with the term “hip-hop”. Starski claimed that he coined the phrase while trading the two words back and forth while improvising lines with DJ Hollywood at a farewell party for a friend who was headed into the Army. While some argue that Keith “Cowboy” Wiggins of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five introduced “hip-hop” into the genre’s vernacular, Smith accepted credit for the phrase in a 2017 interview with Amoeba Music. “That was one of my rhymes when I would get stuck for words and I used to go ‘hip, hop, the hip, the hip, hip the hopping,” he said. “You know it was just a nursery rhyme that coincided with the music, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

Joseph Saddler is an American hip hop recording artist and DJ and is considered to be one of the pioneers of hip hop DJing, cutting, scratching and mixing. DJ Grandmaster Flash and his group the Furious Five were hip-hop’s greatest innovators, transcending the genre’s party-music origins to explore the full scope of its lyrical and sonic horizons. Flash began spinning records as a teen growing up in the Bronx, performing live at area dances and block parties. By age 19, while attending technical school courses in electronics during the day, he was also spinning on the local disco circuit. Over time, he developed a series of groundbreaking techniques including “cutting” (moving between tracks exactly on the beat), “back-spinning” (manually turning records to repeat brief snippets of sound), and “phasing” (manipulating turntable speeds) — in short, creating the basic vocabulary which DJs continue to follow even today. Robert Keith Wiggins, a.k.a. “Cowboy” of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, is credited with naming hip-hop; the term became a common phrase used by MCs as part of a scat-inspired style of rhyming.

Clive Campbell is a Jamaican native that moved to the Bronx and is widely credited as the originator of Hip Hop. In the early 1970s he hosted dance parties at his family’s apartment complex. 11th August 1973, his younger sister, Cindy Campbell, wanted to earn extra cash for back-to-school clothes and decided to have her older brother play music for the neighborhood, it was called the “Back to School Jam”. Campbell began playing hard funk records of the sort typified by James Brown and began to isolate the instrumental portion of the record which emphasized the drum beat—the “break”—and switch from one break to another. Using the same two-turntable set-up of disco DJs, he used two copies of the same record to elongate the break. This breakbeat DJing, using funky drum solos, formed the basis of hip-hop music. He initially called the technique “the Merry-Go-Round,” but it came to be called “breakbeat” deejaying, and its sound would spawn an entirely new culture. Herc also commandeered the mike to rally dancers with rhymed exhortations (calling dancers “break-boys” and “break girls,” or B-boys and b-girls), laying the groundwork for rapping. Busy at the turntables, he eventually turned the mike over to Coke La Rock, who will then be the first-ever Hip-Hop MC.

Lance Taylor is notable for releasing a series of genre-defining electro tracks in the 1980s that influenced the development of hip-hop culture. He is one of the originators of breakbeat DJing and is respectfully known as “The Godfather” and “Amen Ra of Hip Hop Kulture”, as well as the father of electro-funk. Through his co-opting of the street gang the Black Spades into the music and culture- oriented Universal Zulu Nation, he has helped spread hip hop culture throughout the world.  Afrika Bambaataa ascended to godfather status with “Planet Rock,” the 1982 hip-hop classic that blended the beats of hip-hop with techno-pop futurism inspired by German pioneers Kraftwerk. Even before he began recording in 1980, Bambaataa was hip-hop’s foremost DJ, an organizer and promoter of the large block parties during the mid- to late ’70s that presaged the rise of rap. After the success of “Planet Rock,” he recorded electro-oriented rap only sparingly, concentrating instead on fusion. Bambaataa had moved to the background by the late ’80s (as far as hip-hop was concerned), but the rise of his Zulu Nation collective — including De La Soul, Queen Latifah, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Jungle Brothers — found him once more being tipped as one of rap’s founding fathers.