Hip Hop Hooray NYC

I’ve been on a lot of buses in my time--from the CTA to Greyhound USA and Australia to some large, metal rattling contraption that passed for a bus in Bolivia--but never did the mere act of riding a bus make me feel so cool, so bad-ass as when I stepped onto Hush Tours Birthplace of Hip Hop tour bus last week in New York City.



Birthplace of Hip Hop Tour Group with Grandmaster Caz. Photo courtesy of Hush Tours.

Imagine walking up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue one Friday morning looking for the designated meeting place for a little music tour you’ve signed up for. You know it’s a hip hop tour and you’re excited, but you’re not sure what to expect. The guy who took your reservation over the phone said, “Cool. That is a fun tour.” And the tour company website promises photo ops with “the legends of hip hop.” Will this tour deliver? You know you’ve got your answer when you find your tour group boarding a gleaming jet-black coach with black-tinted windows and a super-sonic stereo system blaring the soaring beats of Jay-Z’s and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind.” Plus, J.D.L. from the Cold Crush Brothers has just shook your hand.

Me and J.D.L. of the Cold Crush Bros. This is the only "sign" I know.

Our midnight-colored ride on the hip hop tour.

After we’re all settled on the bus, J.D.L. hands over the mic to his Cold Crush bandmate Grandmaster Caz. Grandmaster Caz’s old school hip hop credentials are so solid he’s referenced in the world’s first hip hop hit single, Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” from 1979. And there’s a good reason he’s referenced in that song--because he wrote some of its lyrics, a credit that was never given to Caz for years and years. Caz settles the score in one of the many stories he tells on our tour about the early days of hip hop.

That turns out to be one of the best things about this particular tour. Hush Hip Hop Tours are led by some of hip hop’s founding fathers--from Grandmaster Caz and J.D.L. to Kurtis Blow to Rahiem from Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. In other words, guys who were there, guys who know--not guides hired from the everyday crowd and given a crash course and script on hip hop history. Choosing seasoned performers as tour guides means choosing guides who are not only used to putting on a good, fun show for an audience but who also come with an arsenal of personally experienced stories about the subject. And Caz is just that--a natural, engaging storyteller, filling us in on everything from hip hop’s birth at a back-to-school house party in the South Bronx in 1973 to how New York City’s Blackout of 1977 affected the burgeoning hip hop scene.

Where hip hop was born. South Bronx. Everything's gotta start somewhere.

This is a fun tour, and a unique way to see New York. I admit I was a little nervous when the tour began. I don’t know much about hip hop for one thing--even if I did once know all the words to all the songs on Run DMC’s “Raising Hell” album back in the day. (Yes, it’s true. People, I am a child of the 80s.) And when Grandmaster Caz makes sure we’re all on the right tour after everyone’s settled on the bus, by way of joking that some of us look like we belong on the Sex and the City Tour, I think to myself, “Oh God, please don’t let him mean me.” Yes, I’m a single woman in her late 30s and dressed a little less casually than some of the others on this tour--but in all honesty I’d be mortified to find myself on a Sex and the City Tour. I’d take a breakdancing lesson over a manicure or shopping spree any day of the week.

And speaking of breakdancing lessons, the chance to bust a few moves and embarrass the hell out of myself comes soon after a pilgrimage to the Graffiti Wall of Fame--a schoolyard wall in Spanish Harlem where every year the top graffiti crews in the world are invited to cover the entire wall in spray-paint masterpieces that stay untouchable until they’re painted over in the summer and another crop of crews get their chance.

Grandmaster Caz in front of the Graffiti Wall of Fame.

Section of Graffiti Wall of Fame. Pic is sideways but it looks cooler this way.

About a block away from the Wall of Fame, we find a b-boy named Mighty Mouse waiting with a boom box in a play lot to give a show-and-tell about breakdancing. Mighty Mouse shows us a few minutes of the real thing before a few of us wannabe b-boys and girls are invited to throw down on the pavement. J.D.L. gently coaxes me into participating and then snaps a few photos as I alone of the group fall over and need help getting back up. “Great, we gonna put these up on the website,” J.D.L. says matter-of-factly as he snaps away. A week later I am simultaneously relieved and disappointed that there are actually no posted shots of me breakdancing. But I understand. Pictures of a nearly-40-year-old woman falling on pavement during a dance lesson are probably not the best PR for any company. Unless your company is TMZ.

Mighty Mouse bringing it.

But it was real fun, and if anyone’s reading this thinking they could never take a tour where they might have to breakdance or rap (which comes later! J )--come on, folks, if I can do it, anyone can!


Me in Harlem--post-breakdancing. From the play lot to the Apollo.