Birth Of The Kool
Collected! Sophie Bramly’s photos of rap’s early dawn.
“IWAS DEFINITELY at the right place at the right time,” says photographer, TV presenter/ producer and writer Sophie Bramly of the archive of NY rap images collected in new book Yo! The Early Days Of Hip Hop 1982-84. “But you don’t know these things when you’re there. I don’t think anyone on the hip-hop scene had the feeling that it was going to change the world. It was a day-to-day thing, in a small community.”
Consequently, hers is a view of a form in the process of becoming. Taken in rap’s streets, studios and venues, it stars the scene’s DJs and MCs (Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, Run-DMC and many more) plus graffiti artists (Futura 2000, Zephyr) and breakdancers (the Rock Steady Crew, The Magnificent Force). As a photographer Bramly had already worked for Paris Match and Rock & Folk, plus French photo agencies. “I was allowed to work for France, but not for the US,” she explains. “Which was one of the reasons I had so much time to take so many pictures of people in the hip-hop world.”
“I think because there weren’t many people caring about this whole thing, someone with a camera was always welcome,” she goes on. “I took pictures as a friend, not as a threat or a stranger, and I’m still friends with Fab 5 Freddy, [Furious Five member] Rahiem, Zephyr… now they don’t even recall the days when I had a camera and when I didn’t. That’s why the photos are what they are, because I was always around.”
The book also illustrates how rap was considered “a hoodlum” thing in the still racially-divided New York, and also the process of those barriers breaking down as the punks catch on, Fab 5 Freddy connects the Bronx and the downtown arts scene and Madonna’s tag appears on a scrawled-on wall. There are intimations of the future too, with scenes related to 1984’s Harry Belafonte-produced rap movie Beat Street indicating the commercialisation of hip-hop.
With written contributions from Def Jam publicist Bill ‘Ill Badler’ Adler, Slick Rick, Arthur Baker and DJ Grand Mixer D.St (who states, “Hip-hop is nothing more than soul records from your mother’s collection”), Bramly recalls the times, scenes and nights at The Roxy or Roseland that she experienced as, “incredibly joyful.”
“Seeing these guys with really nothing much, with such joy and energy, wanting to do so many things, was mind-blowing for me,” she says. “They were kids, you know, staying at their moms’, being polite to their parents… I was there four years, more or less, and the amount of time I witnessed problems was way less than I witnessed later in Europe.
Only once did I hear a gunshot. On the other hand, I remember in London at a Shinehead gig, a gunshot that was way more scary than it had been in the Bronx.”
Her NY sojourn ended in 1984, and was followed by her hosting MTV Europe’s rap show Yo!, and much besides. “I still love hip-hop,” says Bramly, who was made a Chevalier des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2017. “Rap music is still my major source of energy.”
Yo! The Early Days Of Hip Hop 1982-84 is published by Soul Jazz Books.
“Someone with a camera was always welcome.” SOPHIE BRAMLY