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DJ Premier at the Kool Herc tribute.

Kool Herc's Birthday/Sutra; Normalized Dance Night/Niagara Bar
Thursday, April 26

Better than: Reading about how NYC's nightlife is dead.

Last month, in the spirit of March Madness, SOTC created a tournament with the aim of crowning the quintessential New York musician. Popularly dubbed the Godfather of Hip-Hop, Kool Herc made it onto the bracket as a representative of the Bronx, though he was knocked out of the running early. Readers voted Bette Midler on to the next round instead. It's funny, really—an over-the-top diva pitted against an understated, genre-defining man of the streets—but the legendary DJ's understated familiarity is part of his charm. (As our bracket lobbyist noted, the 57 year-old DJ can be seen riding his bike around the Bronx during warmer months.) And at his birthday celebration at Sutra last night, it couldn't be any more apparent that as far as New York's rap community is concerned, Herc will always be the guy who made it happen for them all.

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The Round of 64 for Sound of the City's own version of March Madness--in which we determine the quintessential New York musician--launches this morning with a series of polls. Up for debate this time: Hip-hop pioneer Kool Herc and the brassy yet divine Bette Midler. Check out the arguments in favor of each contestant below, then cast your ballot at the bottom of the page.

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River left empty for obligatory Klosterman blurb.

Yes, tonight at Housing Works longtime Voice pal Will Hermes assembles hip-hop Godfather DJ Kool Herc, Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, Laurie Anderson, Salsa legend Larry Harlow, and former Voice music editor Robert Christgau to discuss the city's music scene(s), as they unfolded from 1973 through 1977. This period is also the subject of Hermes's recent book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, a remarkable side-by-side examination of downtown rock, loft jazz, salsa, disco, early hip-hop, and whatever else was going on sonically, tracking each genre as it evolved over the period. Hermes has been part of a few excellent panels lately, joining Mark Yarm, Marcus Reeves, and Marisa Meltzer at the Brooklyn Book Festival and Nitsuh Abebe at a recent Love Goes To event, but this looks like the best one yet.

And in slightly nerdier news, on Friday, Steven Shaviro, whose essay on Greil Marcus and the Pointer Sisters was one of the highlights from Zer0 Books's extraordinary The Resistable Demise of Michael Jackson, speaks uptown at Columbia's Center for Ethnomusicology, where he'll deliver a paper entitled, "Splitting the Atom: Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision." Apparently, he'll be focusing on the music video for the Massive Attack song of the same name, embedded below.

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Kool Herc plays the genesis figure in hip-hop's fable; the first party the Jamaican-born, Bronx-raised DJ threw in the recreation room of his building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in 1973 is credited with formalizing the genre. From behind two turntables Herc spun the short, percussive sections of (often) soul and funk songs; on the dance floor in front of him, kids would kick moves that eventually became known as breaking. Before hip-hop's holy old school trinity of Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizard Theodore, there was Herc. As Herc puts it today, "That's the reference point for hip-hop right there."

Backed up by the might of his Herculoids crew and a sound system comprised of a gargantuan wall of speakers, Herc continued to hold down the key DJ position during the period of hip-hop history that unfurled before the first rap records were released in 1979. Herc excelled in a creative playground of high school gymnasiums and local nightclubs, not the recording studios of corporate record labels that would scramble around to try and monetize hip-hop. In advance of his appearance at fellow old-school giant Melle Mel's 50th birthday party at BB Kings tomorrow--which will have a lineup spanning several rap generations--Herc looks back on his three most notable old-school hip-hop venues.

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Over the weekend DJ Premier, as authoritative a voice as you could ask for in a situation like this, raised the alarm re: Clive Campbell, a/k/a DJ Kool Herc, the guy with as good as claim to the Godfather of Hip-Hop title as anyone. Though details are scarce at the moment, evidently Herc's been hospitalized, sans health insurance; that info right there is hopefully enough to launch the mother of all Kickstarter campaigns. (Thus far donation-wise all that's out there is an address, but there's no need to be retro about this.) Herc is, of course, the Jamaican-born DJ who more or less single-handedly invented The Break as we know it, immortalizing 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx as hip-hop's birthplace; for far more crucial detail, please see Jeff Chang's indispensable Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation,, for which Herc wrote the forward, because who the hell else is gonna do it. As Questlove has frequently noted, artists of Herc's stature usually only hit trending-topic status when they've passed -- let's get the jump on this one, shall we? Because picture a world where he never invents the Merry-Go-Round, like so . . .

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Starting today, intrepid Voice intern Michael Downes will offer a daily, highly biased digest of that evening's best NYC shows -- and the whole weekend's slate on Friday, which today is, mercifully, if you were not aware. Enjoy.

FRIDAY

Zaire-born Marie Daulne fronts Zap Mama at Joe's Pub. Founded as an a capella group in the early '90s, the Belgian ensemble now performs a fusion of Afro-pop and R&B.

Cake, the polarizing and perpetually sour alt-rock staple, plays Terminal 5. The show's sold out, but if you're interested in procuring a tree (and/or privy to the band's ritualistic tree-giveaways), the surest chance of admission is a $100 ticket from StubHub. (Read an illuminating interview with the trumpet player here.)

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