Yes Yes Y'All: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop's First Decade

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The first and only account of hip-hop's birth, told in the never-before-published words of its founders and stars, and highlighted by almost 200 photos and flyers.
"I always knew that, for those that never heard this music, that if they had a chance to hear it, they would have no choice but to love it."
—Grandmaster Flash
Hip-hop today is ubiquitous, dominating not only the music industry but also popular culture around the world. Like rock and roll before it, it has permanently transformed music, art, dance, and fashion while capturing millions of listeners-and this vast cultural revolution was all started by a bunch of street kids in the ravaged Bronx of the 1970s. Documenting hip-hop's remarkable genesis for the very first time, this book tells its stories in voices that bristle with vitality, character, humor, and menace, tracing the music from DJ Kool Herc's first parties in 1973 through the release of "Rapper's Delight" in 1979 and the rise of the new school in the mid-'80s. Fricke and Ahearn weave an electric narrative from the never-before-heard accounts of over fifty of hip-hop's founders and stars, old school and new, including Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc, Melle Mel, Grand Wizard Theodore, Grandmaster Caz, Rahiem, Fab 5 Freddy, Tony Tone, and DMC. A wealth of previously unseen photographs, flyers, and posters illustrate the text; noted critic Nelson George introduces it all.
Yes Yes Y'All is a chorus of voices, a tale of artistry in the face of extraordinary adversity, and the definitive history of a revolution created with nothing more than a microphone, a turntable, and a dance floor.

Author Biography: Jim Fricke is Senior Curator at the Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle, Washington. He was curator of the Hip-Hop Nation exhibit, and has been active in the Northwest music scene for more than twenty-five years. He lives in Seattle. Charlie Ahearn is a filmmaker whose 1982 landmark film Wild Style has become a hip-hop classic. He lives in New York City. Nelson George is the author of fourteen books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Death of Rhythm and Blues and Hip-Hop America, both nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He wrote about hip-hop for Billboard and The Village Voice in the 1970s and '80s. He lives in Brooklyn.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New Yorker

Hip-hop rose from the streets of the Bronx, offering relief from the crime and poverty of the mid-nineteen-seventies. Yes Yes Y'all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop's First Decade by Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, captures those early days of battling, breaking, and tagging, when d.j.s like Afrika Bambaataa threw down beats for the b-boys on the floor. "Little did anybody know that this thing was going to turn into a world-wide phenomenon, billion-dollar business and all that," says one of the forefathers of hip-hop, Kool DJ Herc.

In Gunshots in my Cook-Up, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds tracks his own journey from hip-hop fan to hip-hop luminary. In essays that range from paeans to Lauryn Hill to an account of Hinds's tenure as the editor-in-chief at The Source, he grapples with what it means to stay true to the ethos of rap. "The streets are the people and places from which an MC springs. The streets birth you. Certify and validate you . . . They can also kill you," he writes.

Sometimes keeping it real means making it up. In Percival Everett's satirical novel Erasure, Thelonious (Monk) Ellison, an academic with a penchant for Latin, sets out to write a satire of black literature -- an amalgamation of "Native Son," gangsta rap, and trashy talk shows; to his dismay, the book is acclaimed for its authenticity. Contemplating its success after the obscurity of his other books (including a retelling of Aeschylus' "The Persians"), Ellison notes, "I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression." (Andrea Thompson)

Library Journal