Google Doodle celebrates the 44th Anniversary of the Birth of Hip Hop

On August 11, 1973, an 18-year-old, Jamaican-American DJ who went by the name of Kool Herc threw a back-to-school jam at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York. 

During his set, he decided to do something different. Instead of playing the songs in full, he played only their instrumental sections, or “breaks” - sections where he noticed the crowd went wild. 

During these “breaks” his friend Coke La Rock hyped up the crowd with a microphone. And with that, Hip Hop was born.


Today, we celebrate the 44th anniversary of that very moment with a first-of-its-kind Doodle featuring a custom logo graphic by famed graffiti artist Cey Adams, interactive turntables on which users can mix samples from legendary tracks, and a serving of Hip Hop history - with an emphasis on its founding pioneers. 


What’s more, the whole experience is narrated by Hip Hop icon Fab 5 Freddy, former host of “Yo! MTV Raps.”

THE DAWN of hip-hop can be traced to a fateful Bronx back-to-school party in August 1973, so to celebrate the symbolic 44th birthday today, Google has teamed with two superstars to provide an epic global interactive jam.

To land the graffiti-art aspect of Friday’s Doodle, the team traveled to the New York studio of Adams, the brilliant Def Jam creative director responsible for the looks of decades of iconic album covers, logos, and ad campaigns.

Adams emerged from New York’s graffiti movement alongside Basquiat and Haring, and so lived firsthand how such visual art intertwined with the rise of rap.

The legendary artist Cey Adams (second from right) with Team Google, including Perla Campos, left, Ryan Germick and Pedro Vergani. (Google)

“First and foremost, the [visual] art component predates the other art forms,” Adams tells The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs. “Certainly music has been around, but when it comes to graffiti — that’s been around since the late ’60s. It was a thing unto itself, that had its own movement.

“So by the time the late ’70s came around, and all the elements become a collective,” Adams continues, “graffiti art took a back seat to rap music. Music has always been universal, whereas art has an elitist edge to it because it’s shown in museums and galleries — it’s not as attainable. Music lives in the air, music is everywhere — it doesn’t cost you anything.

“That said, hip-hop is a visual movement, [and] graffiti will remain a necessary element of creative expression within the culture.”

Cey Adams’s early sketch for the graffiti-art-inspired Google logo celebrating hip-hop’s 44th birthday. (Google)

Google wanted to create a Doodle that also tapped hip-hop’s musical roots, so they traveled, too, to 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx, where the Jamaican-born teenager DJ Kool Herc first played the instrumental “breaks” of songs at that famed back-to-school jam.

The Bay Area-based team also tapped the talents of Lyor Cohen, the global head of music for Google-owned YouTube and the former Def Jam president. Cohen says on Google’s blog that hip-hop “shows that people in any situation have the ability to create something powerful and meaningful. The progression of this culture and sound — from Kool Herc spinning James Brown breaks at a block party to Jay-Z, Kanye West and Drake being some of the biggest forces in music 44 years later — is something that few people at that first party could have anticipated.”

Google creates turntables for its first hip-hop Doodle, which involved such talents as animator-musician Kevin Burke, designer-animator Hélène Leroux and engineering lead David Lu. (Google)

Team Google Doodle leader Ryan Germick grew up watching Fab 5 Freddy as host of “Yo! MTV Raps,” and his creative crew was able to get the Brooklyn-born legend to narrate today’s home-page viewers through a quick hip-hop history, toward a tutorial of pulling tunes from the digital crate (from old-school George Clinton and Betty Wright to brand-new Prince Paul beats) and working the crossfader on the decks.

Early art of Fab 5 Freddy, who contributed to Friday’s hip-hop Doodle. (Google)

Happy 44th, hip-hop — let the jam long play. “And it don’t stop!”

An early intro storyboard for Google Doodle’s first hip-hop Doodle, which dropped Friday.

Is Aug. 11, 1973 the only recognized birthday of hip-hop?

Actually, no. During an interview with Narduwar, Universal Zulu Nation leader Afrika Bambataa said that the birthday of hip-hop was Nov. 12, 1974. Why Nov. 12? Bambataa explained it simply: that was "when we decided to call this whole culture hip-hop. Hip-hop even goes further than that, but we decided to name it hip-hop as a culture, meaning with the b-boys, the b-girls, the MCs, the aerosol writers, graffiti artists and the DJs and that fifth element that holds it all together."

When Nardwuar pressed further, Bambataa explained "that's the date that I decided we should name this as a whole culture and start moving from there. November was the time where people used to party inside in the centers or community gymnasiums or many of the inside clubs that we had and where people would come and have an enjoyment time. Everybody got together and got down to the hip-hop music that was being played by all the great pioneers at that time."
How do we get hip-hop's birthday to become a federal holiday?

If you want to get hip-hop's birthday (or any date) turned into a federal holiday, you need to get Congress on your side. While Slate says that a president can write an executive order to declare a one-time holiday, we doubt that Trump is going to back hip-hop getting a federal holiday. You have to get congressional approval to declare something a federal holiday, but don't forget, it took years for the state of Arizona to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so things can get tricky.How do we celebrate hip-hop's birthday?

Truth be told, that's up to you. If you're a hip-hop lover of an older demographic, you might throw on an Adidas tracksuit, get some crispy new (fat) laces for your Shell Toes and get your footwork on to some classic breakbeat-filled mixtapes. If you're from the West Coast, it might make more sense to throw on some creased khakis, Chucks, and pour up some O.E. to a mix of G-funk classics. Kids today might just find their current playlist and turn up to the sounds of Migos, Lil Yachty, Drake, and whoever else is ruling the airwaves Spotify and Apple Music services today.