Toppa Top 10: Caribbean Hip-Hop Pioneers

Words by Jesse Serwer

If you’re familiar with the story of how hip-hop came to be, you’ve surely come across the detail that the man responsible for starting the whole thing in motion, Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell, was born in Jamaica. Lesser known is that an overwhelming number of hip-hop’s earliest and most influential practitioners came from across the Caribbean, from PR to Barbados. Here’s a look at some of the most important ones.

10. Prince Whipper Whip and DJ Charlie Chase of the Cold Crush Brothers

In contrast to Latinos’ well documented role in the development of B-boying and graffiti, Boricua rappers and DJs such as Prince Whipper Whip and DJ Charlie Chase of the Cold Crush Brothers are often overlooked. Whipper Whip would later leave Cold Crush to join Grand Wizzard Theodore’s Fantastic Five (aka the “Fantastic Freaks”), which also included Puerto Rican rapper Ruby Dee. The crews’ rivalry was captured in Wild Style‘s classic “Basketball Court” scene.

9. Lee Quinones

The father of whole car bombing and one of the first street artists to graduate to canvas painting, Puerto Rico-born, Lower East Side Manhattan-raised Quinones was one of the most influential writers of graffiti’s late ’70s/early ’80s heyday, and the star of hip-hop’s most seminal film, Wild Style.

7/8. Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick

One helped pioneer and popularize the art of beatboxing (along with the Fat Boys’ Buffy and Biz Markie), the other is considered by many to be rap’s finest storyteller, and one of the first MCs to rap with a foreign accent. They both came to fame as partners on the game-changing 1985 single “The Show.” Self-professed “World’s Greatest Entertainer” and unofficial Mayor of Harlem, Doug E. Fresh was born in Barbados and also has roots in the Virgin Islands; Slick Rick is Jamaican by way of the U.K. and the Bronx.

6. Fab Five Freddy

Before he brought hip-hop into the bedrooms of young suburbanites in the late ’80s as the host of Yo! MTV Raps (and the director of some of the era’s most significant videos), Fab Five Freddy, who is of Barbadian and Guyanese descent, was the primary figure responsible for bringing hip-hop culture into the mix of New York’s art/downtown scene. Hip-hop’s first true renaissance man, the promoter, artist and occasional rapper (his “Change the Beat” is likely the first rap record delivered in French) curated the first graffiti art show “Beyond Words” with Futura 2000 at New York’s Mudd Club and, and, as director Charlie Ahearn’s co-producer, co-star and chief talent scout, enabled the making of the original hip-hop movie, Wild Style.

5. Richard “Crazy Legs” Colon

The most visible member of the Rock Steady Crew and the world’s best known B-boy, this Puerto Rican Bronx native helped turn breakdancing into a national and international phenomenon with his appearances (alongside the rest of Rock Steady) in Wild Style, Style Wars, Flashdance and Beat Street—not to mention “(Hey You) The Rocksteady Crew,” the Jerry Lewis Telethon and 1982’s “New York City Rap Tour,” the first major exportation of hip-hop culture.

4. Kool DJ Red Alert

Yaaaayyaahhhhhh. Hip-hop radio pioneer Red Alert is most closely associated with the 1980s, when he broke Boogie Down Productions, battled WBLS rival Marley Marl for NYC airwave dominance at KISS-FM and oversaw the emerging Native Tongues movement as the manager of the Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah and A Tribe Called Quest. But the Harlem-born, Antiguan-American DJ’s hip-hop stripes go all the way back to the culture’s beginnings in the Bronx of the mid 1970s.

3. Grandmaster Flash

Yup, all three figures in the “trinity of hip-hop music,” as writer Jeff Chang described Herc, Bam and Flash in his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, are Caribbean. The man who pioneered the backspin, popularized scratching, first incorporated a drum machine into hip-hop and generally turned the turntables into an instrument (and founded hip-hop’s first supergroup in the Furious Five), Joseph “Grandmaster Flash” Saddler grew up in the Bronx, but he was born in Bridgetown, Barbados.

2. Afrika Bambaataa

Befitting his mystical aura, Afrika Bambaataa has some of the sketchiest biographical details of any major American cultural figure in recent history. One thing that is known about the founder of the Universal Zulu Nation (and the father of hip-hop as a concept), whose birthdate and government name are even subject to conflicting reports, is that he was born in Manhattan to parents of Jamaican and Barbadian descent.

1. DJ Kool Herc

No question about this choice. The guy who set everything in motion by dropping a needle directly onto some breakbeats at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in 1973 spent the first 11 years of his life in Kingston, Jamaica, absorbing deejay chatter and other elements of sound system culture that he would later translate into hip-hop for his audiences in the Bronx.

Honorebel Mention: Just-Ice and KRS-One

These two half-Caribbean MCs (Just’s mother was Jamaican, KRS’ father was Trini) were the first rappers to make Jamaican fashions, patois and reggae references a staple part of their repertoire. Their adaptation of deejay-style gun talk also laid the blueprints for gangster rap. Before the Bronx pair inevitably hooked up for Just’s sophomore album Kool and Deadly, Just got his beats from Jamaican-born producer Kurtis Mantronik, who is certainly deserving of an extra extra honorable mention here.