When the Beat Was Born - DJ Kool Herc and the Creation of Hip Hop - Album

Before there was hip hop, there was DJ Kool Herc. DJ Kool Herc lived in the Bronx, where there was a lot of fighting. But he didn't want to fight. He wanted to play music. DJ Kool Herc had a new way of spinning records. He played the breaks of songs back-to-back so that the music best for dancing could go on and on. DJ Kool Herc liked to shout out to his friends while he was playing music. Sometimes he made up rhymes about the songs he loved or the break-dancers who had the best moves.
This is the story of DJ Kool Herc. The story of how he came to be a DJ, how kids in his neighborhood stopped fighting in order to break-dance, and how he invented a new kind of music that would change the world. This is the story of hip hop.