These handmade flyers from the earliest days of hip-hop advertise parties with rap’s biggest names
Spreading the word in the 1970s Bronx
By now, hip-hop is so ingrained in mainstream culture that some readers may not remember when it was anything but. The genre’s origins have become the stuff of legend for anyone outside of New York or the Bronx, where a collision of socioeconomic conditions and geography provided the crucible from which the culture was born in the late 1970s. Early DJ parties there were held in community centers and row house basements, on nondescript blocks far from the disco clubs of Midtown, and further still from the punk thing happening downtown. To attract a crowd, promoters relied on word of mouth and printed flyers, the designs of which unintentionally contributed to the development of hip-hop’s nascent visual aesthetic. A recently digitized collection of early hip hop party flyers showcases the artistry of those designs and provides a window into the beginnings of one of New York’s most influential homegrown subcultures.
While many of the names on these flyers are familiar to the casual rap fan—Afrika Bambaataa, Grand Master Flash—others whose contributions to the art are no less substantial include Eddie Chebba, DJ Hollywood, and Jazzy Jay. Their music is the foundation of what we now call rap, but these artifacts also highlight the overlap between early hip-hop and the era’s dominant genre of club music, disco.
As the Cornell Hip Hop Collection puts it, “These flyers preserve raw data from the days when Hip Hop was primarily a live, performance-based culture in the Bronx.” That rawness is apparent in minimal, copy-shop designs crafted by hand using magazine cutouts, line drawings, and graffiti-influenced lettering. It’s an aesthetic that echoes the youthfulness that underpins all great subcultures, and the circumstances that gave rise to this one specifically.
