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    A New Venue Celebrates the Sound of the Bronx

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    The Bronx Music Hall is the first new independent music venue in the borough in more than 50 years.Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll get a look at the Bronx Music Hall, the first brand-new music performance space to open in that borough in more than 50 years.David Dee Delgado for The New York TimesThe 250-seat music performance space that is opening tonight in the Melrose section of the Bronx began with a cassette recording that was played at a staff meeting of a nonprofit organization. This was in the early 2000s, when cassette tapes were still a thing.The tape was a sampling of the musical legacy of the Bronx — music that had been written or performed there.“Everyone’s eyes lit up,” recalled Nancy Biberman, who at the time was the president of the nonprofit, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation.She remembers telling herself after the meeting that “maybe we are thinking too narrowly about what community development could mean — it’s not just bricks and mortar.” That realization morphed into thinking about what tenants would want besides basic needs like food, health care and education. What would make them happy?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Howie Cohen, Whose Alka-Seltzer Ads Spawned Catchphrases, Dies at 81

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      A copywriter, he and a partner in 1972 came up with “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing.” Soon, sales were, well, fizzing.Howie Cohen, an advertising copywriter, often said he was congenitally familiar with indigestion. So perhaps it was only natural that in the 1970s, he, along with an ad agency colleague, would conjure up a catchy slogan that would not only sell more Alka-Seltzer but also become an American pop culture punchline: “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”That bedside lament, spoken by the comedian and dialectician Milt Moss — he actually said that thing on camera — vaulted from a 30-second TV commercial to sweatshirts, supermarket windows and even church marquees.It proved even more popular than “Try it, you’ll like it,” the first catchphrase for Alka-Seltzer that Mr. Cohen coined with his business partner, Bob Pasqualina, an art director at the Manhattan agency Wells Rich Greene.Mr. Cohen, who helped popularize products and companies like Petco (“Where the pets go”) and the fast-food chain Jack in the Box (exploding its clown mascot in a TV commercial in announcing a new, more sophisticated menu), died on March 2 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Hip-Hop Comic Book Star Comes to Life in Steel

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      A statue of Rappin’ Max Robot is bound for Paris. But first it’s making a stop in the Bronx.Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll meet a new iteration of Rappin’ Max Robot that is bound for Paris, via the Bronx. We’ll also get details on Robert Kennedy Jr.’s testimony in the court case seeking to have him removed from the November ballot in New York.Clark Ivers, Welder UndergroundRappin’ Max Robot began life as a comic book character only a few inches tall. Now he is a man of steel. He has a skin of steel plates up to an inch thick that covers an I-beam skeleton.He is on his way to Paris, to take note of breaking’s debut in the Olympics, but he will get there a little late. First he will spend some time in the Bronx, the birthplace of hip-hop.Today an 18-foot-tall statue of Rappin’ Max Robot that was fabricated in Brooklyn will be hauled to a spot outside the Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx. The museum is not scheduled to open until next year. But Marc Levin, who with his wife, Adina, runs the studio and foundry where the statue took shape, said it would be assembled for a Champagne toast on Saturday, the second day of breaking events at the Olympics.Hip-hop is a “wondrous and centerless tangle,” The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote last year, so perhaps it is not surprising that the toast will not be the only hip-hop event this weekend. Sunday is the 51st anniversary of the day hip-hop is said to have gotten its start, in the rec room of the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and a group that is not affiliated with the museum is planning a march from that neighborhood to Crotona Park, a couple of miles away.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Angela Bofill, R&B Hitmaker With a Silky Voice, Dies at 70

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      Starting in the late 1970s, she scored multiple hit singles, including “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter” and “I Try,” but multiple strokes in the 2000s ended her career.Angela Bofill, a New York-bred singer whose sultry alto propelled a string of R&B hits in the late 1970s and early ’80s before strokes derailed her career in the 2000s, died on Thursday in Vallejo, Calif. She was 70.Her death, at the home of her daughter, Shauna Bofill Vincent, was announced in a social media post by her manager, Rich Engel. He did not specify a cause.With a silky blend of Latin, jazz, adult-contemporary and soul, Ms. Bofill is best remembered for jazzy love songs like “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter” and funk-inflected pop numbers like “Something About You.” Armed with a three-and-a-half-octave range, her voice was “as cool as sherbet, creamy, delicately colored, mildly flavored,” as Ariel Swartley wrote in Rolling Stone magazine in 1979.Starting in 1978, Ms. Bofill logged six albums in the Top 40 of the Billboard R&B charts, with five of them crossing over to the Top 100 of the pop charts. She also scored seven Top 40 R&B singles, including “Angel of the Night,” (1979) and “Too Tough” (1983).Angela Tomasa Bofill was born on May 2, 1954, in New York City to a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father and grew up in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, in Manhattan and in the West Bronx. She started writing songs as a child.By her teens, she was already showing off her vocal chops in a duo with her sister Sandra and a group called the Puerto Rican Supremes, and also as a member of the prestigious All-City Chorus, a group composed of top high-school singers in the city’s five boroughs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Scott Kempner, Del Lords Guitarist and Punk Rock Pioneer, Dies at 69

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      The Bronx-born musician played guitar for and co-founded the Dictators, an early punk band. He later founded the Del Lords.Scott Kempner, a guitarist and songwriter and a co-founder of the Dictators, one of the first punk rock bands, died on Wednesday. He was 69.His death, at a nursing home in Connecticut, was confirmed by Rich Nesin, who managed his solo career. Mr. Kempner died from complications related to early onset dementia, Mr. Nesin said.Born and raised in the Bronx, Mr. Kempner started his music career not long after he had graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. He was born Feb. 6, 1954, to Manny and Lynn Kempner.In 1972, while visiting a friend who was in college in New Paltz, N.Y., Mr. Kempner started playing music with Andy Shernoff and Ross Friedman, who was known as the Boss, and together they created the Dictators.That was when he earned the nickname, Top Ten. The band’s first album, “The Dictators Go Girl Crazy,” was released in 1975, a year before the Ramones made their debut. The All Music Guide called the band “one of the finest and most influential proto-punk bands to walk the earth” but said that on its debut album, the group’s satire and “ahead-of-their-time enthusiasm for wrestling, White Castle hamburgers, and television confused more kids than it converted.”The band was dropped by its label, Epic, after its first album. It recorded two more albums, on the Elektra label, that failed to find a big audience, and the band split up, though the members occasionally reunited over the ensuing years.After the breakup, Mr. Kempner founded the roots rock band the Del Lords and took the lead as chief singer and songwriter. “In the Dictators, he was a team player, the heart of the band,” Eric Ambel, a member of the Del Lords, said of his former bandmate.Frank Funaro, the drummer for the Del Lords, said Mr. Kempner had been someone he looked up to.“Scott Kempner was like the older brother that I never had,” Mr. Funaro said in an interview. “The older, cool brother, that turns you on to an encyclopedia worth of rock ’n’ roll, country music, soul music.”The Del Lords released seven albums, including “Elvis Club” in 2013, which featured the doo-wop star Dion DiMucci one on track. Mr. Kempner also played and toured as a side man in several bands, including Little Kings, with Mr. DiMucci, and the Paradise Brothers.Starting in 1992, Mr. Kempner also released three solo albums: “Tenement Angels,” “Saving Grace” and “Live on Blueberry Hill.”The Dictators re-formed in 2019 with Mr. Kempner on board, until he was diagnosed with dementia and had to leave the band in 2021.Mr. Kempner is survived by his wife, Sharon Ludtke, and by his sister, Robin Kempner, and her wife, Mary Noa-Kempner. More

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      Larry Chance, Who Helped Keep Doo-Wop Alive for Decades, Dies at 82

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      His career began in 1957, when he and some friends from the Bronx formed the vocal group that would become the Earls. He recorded his last song 65 years later.Larry Chance, whose Bronx vocal group the Earls was one of the most enduring acts of the doo-wop era, helping to keep alive the vocal harmonies, rhythmic syllables and onomatopoeic lyrics that had once been improvised on city street corners and in subway stations, died on Sept. 6 in a hospital in Orlando, Fla. He was 82.His daughter, Nicole Chance, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.Larry Chance and the Earls were distinguished as much for their longevity — the group began in 1957 as the High Hatters, and Mr. Chance was still performing in its latest incarnation this year — as for their hits, some of which became doo-wop anthems.The first doo-wop groups were Black, but there were white artists in the mix almost from the beginning. The Earls were among the first.“The Earls unknowingly became the forerunners of white doo-wop groups who took standards done by rhythm and blues balladeers and brought them to the attention of a new generation,” the music historian Jay Warner wrote in “American Singing Groups: A History From 1940 to Today” (1992).Among the group’s most popular records were “Life Is But A Dream,” (1961), a song first recorded by the Harptones, a Black doo-wop group, in 1955; “Never” (1963), an up-tempo torch song; and, most notably, “Remember Then” (1962), which, with its distinctive chant of “Re-mem-mem, re-mem-ma-mem-ber,” reached No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and became a staple of oldies radio.“Life Is But a Dream” was a hit on New York radio and prompted invitations for the group to appear with the disc jockey Murray the K at the Fox Theater in Brooklyn and on Dick Clark’s popular television show “American Bandstand.”The Earls’ signature song later became the ballad “I Believe,” whose inspiriting lyrics begin, “I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows/I believe that somewhere in the darkest night, a candle glows.”The Earls’ 1965 recording of “I Believe” was far from the first; it had earlier been recorded by, among others, Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Presley and Frankie Laine, who had a hit with it in 1952. But it became a regular crowd-pleasing finale at the Earls’ live shows. The group dedicated its recording to Larry Palumbo, an early member who died in 1959 in an accident when he was in the Army.“I Believe” was an illustration of the music executive Hy Weiss’s faith in the group: Their demo version was released as the completed master.Mr. Weiss, who had offered the group a contract with his imprint Old Town Records shortly after hearing “Remember Then,” also figured in the transformation of Lawrence Figueiredo into Larry Chance. It happened just before “I Believe” was released.“Hy Weiss wanted him to step out front,” Mr. Warner wrote, “and though Figueiredo was reluctant, Weiss and his super salesmanship convinced him to take a chance when he said, ‘I’m gonna call you Larry Chance.’”The drummer Bobby Tribuzio, in a phone interview, characterized Mr. Chance, with whom he performed for six decades, as “a singer’s singer.” He was also a versatile entertainer (his solo shows incorporated comedy) and wrote songs, including “Get On Up and Dance (The Continental),” which he wrote with Jimmy Fracassi and the Earls recorded in 1976.When doo-wop’s popularity declined in the early 1970s, the group adapted by briefly becoming a nine-piece rhythm-and-blues ensemble called Smokestack. They resumed performing as the Earls during the subsequent doo-wop revival.In the 1980s, Mr. Chance also voiced the provocative radio characters Geraldo Santana Banana and Rainbow Johnson on Don Imus’s WNBC radio show.His last public performance was in June at Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, N.Y., where he sang “Stand by Me” as a duet with the singer, songwriter and music historian Billy Vera. Mr. Chance’s last recording was a duet of the same song with Mr. Vera in 2022.Mr. Chance, left, in performance with Johnny Petillo of the Duprees in 2008. His last public performance was this year.Bobby Bank/WireImage, via Getty ImagesLawrence Figueiredo was born on Oct. 19, 1940, in the Bronx and raised in South Philadelphia — a neighborhood that also spawned the opera singer Mario Lanza, as well as Larry’s pop-music contemporaries Fabian, Frankie Avalon and Chubby Checker.His father, John, owned a construction company. His mother, Mary (Pedra) Figueiredo, was a homemaker.At the age of 6, Larry was cast in an elementary school production of “The Baker and the Pie Man.”“I was the baker,” Mr. Chance told Gene DiNapoli, an entertainer and podcast host, in 2020. “I got applause. I decided then that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”The family moved back to the Bronx in 1955. Mr. Chance later took some jobs with masonry companies to get by, but he pursued a singing career despite opposition at home.When he told his father he wanted a career in music, Mr. Chance recalled, “he told me, ‘Get a man’s job.’”In 1957, at around the time he graduated from Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, he and four friends — Bob Del Din, Eddie Harder, John Wray and Mr. Palumbo — formed the High Hatters.They performed at local venues and were singing outside the entrance to a subway station when they were discovered by Johnny Powers, who recorded their version of “Life Is But a Dream” for his small Rome Records label.Mr. Chance lived for decades in Sullivan County, N.Y., close to the Catskills, where he performed in hotels. He later relocated to Florida to be near his daughter.In addition to her, he is survived by his wife, Sandra; a son, Christopher; and three grandchildren.As the lead singer of one of the most durable doo-wop groups, Mr. Chance understood from the beginning that talent and luck weren’t enough. “Remember Then” was played on the radio for the first time in 1962 on a program whose listeners were invited to phone in and vote for the best of five songs.“We had every kid in the North Bronx with a pocket full of dimes, and we just flooded that station with calls and won the contest,” he told Anthony P. Musso, the author of “Setting the Record Straight: The Music and Careers of Recording Artists from the 1950s and Early 1960s … in Their Own Words” (2007).He acknowledged, though, that luck might have played a role when the group was deciding on a new name. They couldn’t afford to purchase the tuxedos, canes, spats, toppers and other formal attire they fancied to redeem their original billing as the High Hatters, and they couldn’t agree on what to call themselves.“To make it fair, we stuck our finger in a dictionary and said whatever it falls on, that’s what we’ll be,” Mr. Chance told Mr. Musso. “I always said I was happy that I didn’t put my fingers about a quarter of an inch up, or we would have been called the Ears.”Jeff Roth More

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      Fans Celebrate Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary

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      The start of hip-hop dates to Aug. 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc created continuous break-beats by working two turntables during a party in a rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave in the Bronx. On Friday night, exactly 50 years later, a concert was held at Yankee Stadium — roughly a mile and a half from hip-hop’s birthplace — to honor the occasion, featuring Run-DMC, Slick Rick, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Lil’ Kim and Nas. DJ Kool Herc, 68, also appeared onstage to accept an award.Before the show, which was billed as “Hip Hop 50 Live,” the scene outside the stadium was heavy with fans of the sounds from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Middle-aged couples on date nights arrived wearing matching Adidas track suits. A man strolled the promenade carrying a boombox and wearing a Kangol hat. Hawkers sold pins with pictures of Biz Markie and The Notorious B.I.G.Outside a McDonald’s opposite the stadium, a street musician performed Tupac Shakur hits, while an in-line skater entertained the crowd with basketball tricks. Stationed beside a subway entrance was an 8-year-old rapper, Hetep BarBoy, who, accompanied by his father, was selling CDs of his album. “I prefer old-school hip-hop,” Hetep said. “I like Rakim because of his flow and the clean message he was putting into the world. He rapped about positivity, and that’s also what my music is about.”In the edited interviews below, attendees reflected on hip-hop’s 50th. Some recalled witnessing the park jams and parties that defined the genre’s beginnings.Tamika TalbotExecutive assistantJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesPick a side: Old-school hip-hop or new? Old-school all day. I was at the rap battles in the parks. Hip-hop came from the dirt. You had to be a lyrical assassin then. If you weren’t, you were trash. I feel if you have something to say now, you’re seen as wack. Back then your flow had to be intact.Your old-school hero? Big Daddy Kane was once the prince of hip-hop. He had crazy lyrical flow. He was super-duper fly. He was unmatched.Richard ByarsCelebrity chefJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhich old-school hero are you here to see? Ice Cube. To me he represents the beginning of hip-hop’s renaissance. But I’d never use the term “old-school.” I call artists like him “true-school.”What’s a significant hip-hop history moment for you? The public access television show “Video Music Box” was essential to hip-hop’s growth in the 1980s. All the forefathers appeared on that show.Adam JenkinsFiber optics specialistJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOld-school or new? I saw the birth of hip-hop as a kid growing up in the Bronx. I was at those Sedgwick Avenue parties. I saw Cold Crush Brothers and Afrika Bambaataa. So this all goes way back for me. It’s amazing to see how hip-hop has become a global force, but when I was a kid, it was just about having fun in the park. It wasn’t about how nice your car was or how much money you had.Do you ever boast about seeing hip-hop’s birth? I do sometimes tell young people that I saw the beginning of all this, but it usually falls on deaf ears, and they don’t get it. But that kind of response is also part of hip-hop to me, because it’s a genre that’s supposed to be always evolving from its past.Lesley SmithHome-care aideJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOld-school or new? For me it’s still all about Melle Mel, the Sugarhill Gang and Kurtis Blow. They’re the originals. Back in the day hip-hop was wholesome and fun. I don’t even understand it now. Primo GonzalezSecurity guardJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhat’s a significant hip-hop history moment for you? I remember seeing “Beat Street” in the movie theater in the 1980s. It was a world I already knew from seeing B-Boys on University Avenue, but for many people, that was the first time they ever saw break dancing culture.Mary Olivette BookmanFordham University music studentJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWho do you consider a pioneer? Missy Elliott. She had something to say. What she was doing was sonically unique, and her skill and individuality were always immediately visible in her rap style.Who are you here to see tonight? I’m here to see them all. I want to see hip-hop history. Tonight is music education for me.Gearni ThompsonMusic marketing professionalJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhat’s a significant hip-hop moment for you? I can still remember riding in a car with my friends when I heard “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang for the first time.Old-school or new? I love the old-school. I feel like the new school is about all the wrong stuff, like buying jewelry and expensive cars. Grandmaster Flash was reaching the kids in a good way. Old-school rap was about community and where we came from. It changed our lives.Ricardo VaronaStreet ball entertainerJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesYour old-school hero? Snoop Dogg. When he and Dr. Dre came out with “The Chronic” it shook the world. Everyone followed their way after that.What’s a significant hip-hop moment for you? An important artist who I feel is too little known now is Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. Her hit “Can You Feel the Beat” was impossible to not want to sing and dance to when it came out.Wisdom McClurkinHospitality professionalJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWho do you want to see tonight? Lil’ Kim. She’s a pioneer. She’s from the block. She’s the queen of everything. She was the blueprint. If it wasn’t for her, there would be no Nicki Minaj.William GainesRetired chefJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOld-school or new? I grew up in the boogie-down Bronx, so I went to all those legendary park jams. They’d hook up the turntables and speakers, and the cops would eventually come to turn it all off. You’d see Biz Markie and Doug E. Fresh. It was a good time. It all started from nothing and became something. But it all began with us just saying to each other: “Yo, they’re having a party on Sedgwick Avenue tonight. Want to go?” More

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      How Hip-Hop Conquered the World

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      How Hip-HopConqueredthe World A crowd in Harlem watching Doug E. Fresh, 1995.David Corio The Great Read How Hip-Hop Conquered the World Fifty years ago, a party in the Bronx jumpstarted an essential American artform. For decades the genre has thrived by explaining the country to itself. Aug. 10, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET We’ve gathered here […] More

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      How Do You Tell the Story of 50 Years of Hip-Hop?

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      Hip-hop is a fount of constant innovation woven into nearly every corner of American life. So don’t look for cohesion: Lean into the cacophony.Sean “Puffy” Combs in a celebratory mood. In the mid-1990s, labels like Bad Boy helped bring rap to the center of American culture.Johnny Nunez/GettyHip-hop is a wondrous and centerless tangle, ubiquitous even if not always totally visible.It is a fount of constant innovation, and a historical text ripe for pilfering. It is a continuation of rock, soul and jazz traditions, while also explicitly loosening their cultural grip. It is evolving more rapidly than ever — new styles emerge yearly, or faster, multiplying the genre’s potential. And it has impact far beyond music: Hip-hop is woven into television and film, fashion, advertising, literature, politics and countless other corners of American life. It is lingua franca, impossible to avoid.It is far too vast to be contained under one tent, or limited to one narrative. The genre is gargantuan, nonlinear and unruly. It has its own internal quarrels and misunderstandings, and its stakeholders are sometimes friends and collaborators, and sometimes view each other warily.So when trying to catalog hip-hop in full, it’s only reasonable to lean into the cacophony. The package that accompanies this essay does just that, collecting oral histories from 50 genre titans of the past five-plus decades. The number matters. It’s an acknowledgment that at 50 years old — a mild fiction, but more on that later — hip-hop is broad and fruitful, enthralling and polyglot, the source of an endless fount of narratives. Its fullness cannot be captured without sprawl and ambition. Many voices need to be heard, and they won’t always agree.Side by side, there are stylistic innovators, crossover superstars, regional heroes, micromarket celebrities. There are those who insist on their primacy and see themselves as a center of gravity, and those who are proud students of the game and understand their place in hip-hop’s broader artistic arc. There are those who are universally recognized, and those known mainly by connoisseurs. There are agitators and accommodationists. The revered and the maligned. Some even play with the boundaries of what rapping is ordinarily considered to be.All taken together, these artists form a family tree of the genre, one that highlights bridges between groups that are typically discussed separately, and that underscores the ways in which rappers — no matter the city they hail from, or the era in which they found their success — have been grappling with similar circumstances, creative questions and obstacles.The Cold Crush Brothers in the Bronx, 1979. Joe Conzo, via Easy A.D.These 50 histories detail hip-hop from countless vantage points: the past forward, and vice versa; the underground upward; the less populated regions outward; the big cities out into the suburbs. They tell the story of a makeshift musical movement that laid the foundation for the defining cultural shift of the past few decades.Fifty years ago, though, that outcome seemed fanciful at best. In the 1970s, Bronx block parties gave way to nightclubs, and talking D.J.s laid the foundation for dedicated M.C.s to begin taking over. Soon, the intrusion of capitalism removed and packaged the part of these live events that was the easiest to transmit: rapping.Then it was off to the races. By the mid-1980s, the hip-hop industry was a small club but big business, as audiences around the country were primed by the commercial release of recordings from countless New York artists. A wave of soon-to-be-global stars arrived: Run-DMC, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys. Hip-hop became worldwide counterculture.Run-DMC in 1985, onstage in Providence, R.I.John Nordell/Getty ImagesBy the dawn of the 1990s, it flowered everywhere in this country — the South, the West, the Midwest — and seeped into the global mainstream. In the mid-90s, thanks to the work of Biggie Smalls and Puffy, Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre, Bad Boy and Death Row, it became the center of American pop music, despite resistance from those convinced rock was destined to forever reign supreme.Into the 2000s, the genre’s power center shifted from the coasts to the South, where the genre was flourishing (largely away from the scrutiny of the major labels) in Miami, Houston, Virginia, Atlanta and Memphis. 2 Live Crew, the Geto Boys, Missy Elliott, Outkast, Three 6 Mafia — each had absorbed what was being imported from the rest of the country and created new lingo and sonic frameworks around it. Hip-hop was becoming a widely shared language with numerous dialects.T.I. onstage in his hometown, Atlanta, in 2005.Ray Tamarra/Getty ImagesAll the while, the genre was expanding, becoming more commercially successful and inescapable with each year. It became centrist pop, which in turn spun off its own dissidents: the New York and Los Angeles undergrounds of the 1990s; the progressive indie scenes of the 2000s; and the SoundCloud rap of the 2010s. In the past 20 years, hip-hop has been responsible not only for some of the biggest pop music of the era — Drake, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Cardi B — but its templates have become open source for performers in other genres to borrow from, which they did, and do, widely. Hip-hop became a crucial touch point for country music, for reggaeton, for hard rock, for K-pop and much more.What’s striking in the histories collected in this package is how no part of that ascent has been taken for granted. In every era, there were stumbling blocks. For each artist, there was a promise of a scene just out of reach. And for all of these rappers, that meant leaning in to a new idea of what their version of hip-hop could be, and hoping ears would meet them in this untested place.Missy Elliott performing in New York in 2012.Jerritt Clark/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesThere is also the matter of untold history — to read these recollections is to be continually reminded of those who are no longer here to share their tales. There is a punishing catalog of before-their-time deaths just below these stories, a reminder that canons can’t include songs that never got to be made.As for the 50th anniversary, well, it is a framing of convenience. The date refers to Aug. 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc — in the rec room of the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx — reportedly first mixed two copies of the same album into one seamless breakbeat. That is, of course, one way to think about hip-hop’s big-bang moment, but by no means the only one. If you think of rapping as toasting, or talking over prerecorded music, or speaking in rhythmic form, then hip-hop has been around longer than 50 years. Just ask the Last Poets, or DJ Hollywood, who would improvise rhymes on the microphone as he was spinning disco records. There are also, depending upon whom you ask, others who had previously mixed two of the same record.Kanye West’s Saint Pablo tour opener in Indianapolis in 2016.AJ Mast for The New York TimesBut the canniness and the cynicism of attempting to enshrine a date that everyone can stand behind reflects a darker and more worrisome truth, which is that, for decades, hip-hop was perceived as disposable, a nuisance, an aberration. Commemoration and enshrinement seemed far-fetched. For a long time, hip-hop had to argue for its rightful place in pop music, and pop culture, facing hostilities that were racial, legal, musical and beyond.Insisting that the genre has an origin point, therefore, is really just another way of insisting on its importance, its stability and its future. You can quarrel with the specific details — and many do — but not with the intent, which is to ensure that no one again overlooks the genre’s power and influence.That said, hip-hop was never going anywhere, because no style of pop music has been as adaptive and as sly. Hip-hop directly answers its critics, and it voraciously consumes and reframes its antecedents. It is restless and immediate, sometimes changing so quickly that it doesn’t stop to document itself. So here is a landing place to reflect, and a jumping off point for the next 50 or so years. More