This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.
The standard histories. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Jeff Chang, the fullest single account, and the one that takes the Bronx’s political and economic conditions seriously rather than treating them as scenery; Movement One of this volume is substantially indebted to it. The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop, Dan Charnas, the essential source for Movement Four, and the only book-length treatment of this genre’s business that goes into the contracts. Yes Yes Y’all, Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, an oral history of the pre-record years assembled from interviews with the participants, and the closest thing to a primary source for 1973 to 1979.
On the technique and the technology. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, Joseph Schloss, the best account of production practice and of the ethics producers actually held. How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC, Paul Edwards, an interview-based technical study; this volume’s vocabulary for describing flow is drawn from that tradition of analysis. Bring the Noise and Hip-Hop Family Tree, Ed Piskor, for chronology.
On the Bronx. The Power Broker, Robert Caro, for the Cross Bronx Expressway and the political mechanism behind it. The Bronx Is Burning, Jonathan Mahler, for 1977.
Memoirs and participant accounts, all to be read as interested: Grandmaster Flash, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash; KRS-One, The Gospel of Hip Hop; Russell Simmons, Life and Def; Rakim, Sweat the Technique; and four decades of interviews with Grandmaster Caz, whose account of Rapper’s Delight is the single most consistently repeated and never seriously contradicted claim in this book.
The films of 1983 and 1984 (the Bronx drama, the subway graffiti documentary, and the studio picture that followed) are primary sources for the practice, not just for its export.
Contemporaneous press. The Village Voice covered this music seriously before anybody else; The Source from 1988. Radio recordings of the New York weekly rap shows survive in substantial quantity and are the best record of what was actually being played.
The party tapes. The primary source for 1975 to 1979, and the most problematic: undated, mislabelled, degraded, of contested provenance, and in some cases not what they claim to be. Movement Two says so at length. Any confident statement about who did what first in those years, in any book including this one, rests on recollection.
On the allegations in Movement One. The accounts made publicly from 2016, the denial, the Universal Zulu Nation’s removal of Bambaataa and its subsequent public apology, and the civil action filed in 2021 are all matters of public record and contemporaneous reporting. This book states those procedural facts and nothing further; readers should go to that reporting rather than to this summary of it.
On the law. The 1991 judgment is a matter of public record and is discussed in every music-business text written since. Creative License, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, is the fullest treatment of what sample clearance actually costs and does.
Where figures are disputed (the size of the early advances, the attendance and exact character of the first parties, who first did what with a turntable, what any given artist was actually paid) the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. In this volume, more than any other in the series, they are the record, because for six years nobody was writing anything down.
