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existing records and deejayed percussion "breaks", mixing this music with his
own Jamaican-style "toasting" (a style of chanting and boastful talking over a
microphone) to rev up the crowd and dancers. Kool Herc is credited as the "father"
of hip hop for developing the key DJ techniques that, along with rapping, founded
the hip hop music style by creating rhythmic beats by looping"breaks" (small
portions of songs emphasizing a percussive pattern) on two turntables. This was
later accompanied by "rapping" or "MCing" and beatboxing. An original form of
dancing called breakdancing, which later became accompanied by popping,
locking and other dance moves, which was done to the accompaniment of hip hop
songs played on boom boxes and particular fashion styles also developed . Hip-hop
has 4 elements: DJ, MC, graffiti and breakdancers. Graffiti and break dancing, the
aspects of the culture that first caught public attention, had the least lasting effect.
Reputedly, the graffiti movement was started about 1972 by a Greek American
teenager who signed, or “tagged,” Taki 183 (his name and street, 183rd Street) on
walls throughout the New York City subway system. By 1975 youths in the
Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn were stealing into train yards under cover of
darkness to spray-paint colourful mural-size renderings of their names, imagery
from underground comics and television, and even Andy Warhol-like Campbell’s
soup cans onto the sides of subway cars. Soon, influential art dealers in the United
States, Europe, and Japan were displaying graffiti in major galleries. New York
City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority responded with dogs, barbed-wire fences,
paint-removing acid baths, and undercover police squads.
Grandmaster Flash isolated and extended the break beat (the part of a
dance record where all sounds but the drums drop out), stimulating
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