'Born in the Bronx' is an Essential Hip Hop Text
Joe Conzo's vintage photos anchor a visually rich book
When Baz Luhrmann was developing the Netflix hip-hop series ‘The Get Down,’ a crucial reference for the creative team was ‘Born in the Bronx: A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip-Hip,’ which was originally published in 2007 and updated in 2020 by editor Johan Kugelberg. The backbone of the book are photos by Joe Conzo, a teenager living in the Bronx in the ‘70s who happened to go to high school with many key rappers and MCs of the era. Conzo’s photos, of performances, parties, and nightlife in that legendary slice of New York, are intimate, joyous, and filled with the sparkle of youth. While most folks now connect old school hip-hop with unlaced Adidas sneakers, track suits and thick gold chains, Conzo’s catalog of images show that hard bottomed shoes, shiny suits, and small gold chains were considered quite stylish in the ‘70s and overlapped with garb associated with disco
Alongside Conzo’s vivid photos are scores of flyers from parties in the Bronx, Harlem and, later, downtown spots like the Roxy roller rink. Again, people now often see graffiti as the essential hip-hop visual style, but these flyers illustrate that to attract people to organized gatherings (and pay to get it) promoters used upscale illustrations and ornate design elements to cut through the urban clutter of the city. There’s a brief essay in the book ‘, ‘The Ephemeral Beauty of Hip Hop Flyers,’ that discusses why so few people, outside old school folks, know about them. One of the funniest elements of the flyers is the use of the term “invited guests” to suggest (but not guarantee) that hip-hop luminaries would show up
‘Born in the Bronx’ also contains testimonials from many who were part of this early scene, shots of 12 inch single sleeves, and a time line of the culture’s development from the late ‘60s to the mid-80s by Jeff Chang. Looking through it I was pleasantly surprised to see a mention of the book, ‘Fresh: Hip Hop Don’t Stop,’ a 1984 collection of essays on this emerging culture that I contributed to and had completely forgotten about! I’m sure I have a copy in storage. Gotta dig it and see what I said. ‘Fresh’ was one of the first books focused on how rapping, DJing, break dancing, and graffiti were coalescing to create a movement
In this, the fifty anniversary of hip-hop, they’ll be a lot of books, documentaries and programming around this culture. If you’re really interested in the years when hip-hop grew as an underground movement in New York’s most abandoned borough, ‘Born in the Bronx’ is an essential text.