Breaks

A genre, a technique and a way of life: from ’70s New York roots to today, breakbeats have shaped music culture

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Regular readers know that this series has a borderline unhealthy obsession with neatly defined genres.

Nothing excites us more than being able to pinpoint the exact starting point of a musical movement, the exact defining characteristics and the key gear used to make it. This month is different. Breakbeat is a genre in a sense, but much more than that: it’s a history defined heavily by the evolution of the tech that enabled artists to create new sounds.

Our story starts, like so many others, in mid-’70s New York, where Jamaican-born Bronx DJ Kool Herc stumbled upon a technique while playing music for breakdancers, taking two copies of the same funk and soul records and playing them on a pair of turntables, cutting back and forth between the two to extend indefinitely the ‘breaks’, the instrumental breakdowns where the arrangement drops down to drums and minimal musical elements.©