The 1956 guitar break Angus Young could never stop playing
A lot of people don’t realise just how humble the origins of hip hop were. It all dates back to 1973, and a tiny little venue in the Bronx.
DJ Kool Herc was throwing a small party, and he was using a brand new style of DJing that nobody had come across before. You have to keep in mind that over in Manhattan, you had funk and disco completely dominating the club scene, and so the records that were available in different stores were very much a reflection of that.
However, Herc wasn’t interested in merely playing those same songs for a different audience; he manipulated them to reflect a style that he preferred.
How did he do this? Well, he would get to what a lot of people called the ‘yolk’ of the record. This meant he would pick out one of his favourite dance or drum breaks, play it on one turntable, then play it on the other, and continue doing so to create one continuous loop. It was a style of music made entirely out of breaks, hence why people called the dancing that came from it ‘breakdancing’.
Here, Herc invented what would essentially become the hip hop beat. It was a pretty innovative way of DJing, and one that really got crowds moving, but what’s funny is that the method isn’t necessarily new. Who amongst us, pre- and post-1973, haven’t found a piece of music that we like and so replayed it constantly to keep listening. The difference is that Herc did it in a way that appealed to wider audiences, rather than just you as the listener.
All you need to do is listen to Angus Young and AC/DC’s music, and it’s not hard to work out that the band has a real affinity for great guitar playing. It took a while for them to get this style over the line, as they were making such music during a period when guitar rock wasn’t quite as popular; however, when they released their album Let There Be Rock, they made a statement that these kinds of headbanging tunes weren’t going anywhere.
“Let There Be Rock, for me, is the album,” said Angus, “My brother, George, [asked] me and Malcolm… ‘What sort of album do you wanna do this time?’ And Malcolm just looked at me, and he said, ‘We just want an album that’s just gonna be pure hard rock guitar’.”
He continued, “I thought it was great because everyone else in the world was into whole other genres; there was punk music, there was new wave, it was all this other stuff that was coming out […] And I just thought, ‘This is pure magic’. And that album defined AC/DC in my eyes. That’s when I went, ‘This is a great band’.”
To say that Angus and his brother Malcolm were obsessed with great guitar music would be an understatement. Given how much they were all into rock ‘n’ roll, the blues and R&B, the music they wound up creating was only going to go one way. They didn’t just listen but broke songs down to their crucial components, attempting to dissect them so they could understand them much more effectively.
There was one break in particular that Angus Young spent time attempting to truly understand. He rewound the guitar break in it so often that Young mused he might have accidentally invented hip hop a couple of decades early. DJ Kool Herc would be proud.
“When I was young, one of the earliest records I heard was Little Richard’s ‘You Keep a Knockin’,” said Angus, “I think I nearly invented rap with that record: I’d take the needle and keep putting it back to the same spot, to the blues bit, over and over again; ’cause that was the best part of the song. My mother said, ‘You touch that needle one more time, and you’re going to have a very sore fist’. But I couldn’t help it. I just loved that one bit.”
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