They're all highly respected in the world of old-school rap. And they all hit the Top 40 just once in their careers.

In August 1973, the Jamaican-born Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell held his first block party in the Bronx, bringing the Jamaican sound system culture to America and inadvertently providing the first ...

When the mainstream popularity of rap music elevated in the late 1980s, it often did so with the help of inventive sampling. While many samples came from the R&B funk world, clever hip-hop artists and ...

The Rink, in Bergenfield, may not be the mean streets of L.A., or a burnt-out block in the Bronx. But here, too, hip-hop happened. "It was just a general rink, a skating rink, but everybody wanted to ...

Any conversation regarding the historical context of rap music will almost certainly rely heavily on the near ritualistic practice of sampling, essentially using older songs as the basis as the basis ...