The clubs were dark, smoke-filled places where every vice could be had and any desire satisfied discreetly in the shadows. Eventually he started living in the after-hours establishments he worked at. In the suffocating summertime heat, he slept on rooftops to stay cool. Initially, when he left home, he found shelter in a basement. To understand his contributions, we have to travel back in time to the world inhabited by a fourteen-year-old runaway named Anthony Holloway.ĭJ Hollywood with R&B legend Gerald Alston of The Manhattans “What the fuck is that? So, okay, I’m disco, aight, aight,” he says, “I’m the disco nigga that made all of you niggas in hip-hop do what this nigga in disco was doin’.”

“Can you believe that? Disco?” he asks me, apparently annoyed at the idea.

For the most part, he gets left out of the story because many of his contemporaries, like Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc, have dismissed him as having been “disco.” The only public acknowledgement he’s received for his hand in the creation of rap was back in 2005 on VH1’s Hip Hop Honors. His influence on the genre he helped to pioneer is evident in the styles of DJ’s Kid Capri, Biz Markie and Lovebug Starsky, as well as rappers who specialize in crowd participation like Kurtis Blow and Doug E Fresh. I can’t take nothin’ from none of ‘em… but none of ‘em was doin’ what I was doin’ with the turntables and a mic.” I can’t take nothin’ away from people like Oscar Brown Jr., Pigmeat Markham, the Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron, the Watts Prophets, Rudy Ray Moore, I used to listen to all of ‘em. “Don’t get me wrong,” he continues, “they had people rapped before me-syncopated and unsyncopated. “Nobody was doin’ the turntables and the microphone before me. And after me…” he pauses and reflects, “there was all.” “Before me,” he proclaimed, in the same kind of prophetic voice that the guy who discovered fire many millenniums ago may have used, “there was none. Lines stretched for blocks to hear what the flyers advertised as the “golden voice” of DJ Hollywood. And once I realized that it was me they wanted, I figured, well, they’ll have to pay a couple of extra dollars to get me.” And they did. “People wanted that, that, that… seasoning.

Not Herc, nor Bam, or Flash, or Starsky were making $500 a show back then. DJ Hollywood: Before me there was none, and after me there was allīut don’t get it twisted: in his heyday, he made money.

Fifteen bucks little man lyrics