Hip Hop at the Roxy — The Boom of the Room was the World Blowing Up

Everybody knows — or should — that hip hop came out of the Bronx. Not so many people know that hip hop passed from uptown to the rest of the world via the downtown scene, most essentially via the Roxy, a gigantic former roller skating rink on the far West Side of New York that two hipster Brits turned into a roiling vortex of movement and music every Friday night, a transformational explosion that changed everything.

I’m not here to give you the history of hip hop at the beginning of the 80s (for that, read Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.) I’m here to tell you how it felt to be at the Roxy on a Friday night in 1982, about a moment when the culture shifted with a heave that cracked the surface of reality and opened it up to something so new that the newness itself sucked us in, something we could hardly comprehend because it was so different.

To walk into the Roxy on a Friday night was to dive into a sea of sound and motion and shifting possibility. The passage down a long tunnel to the vast room. The vortexes of movement, a break dancing circle here, and another one over there, forming and shifting and expanding as people crowded around, as the B-Boys whirled and darted and flowed and flipped in a tornado of action surrounded by banks of intently watching people, gathered around the maelstrom generated by the dancers. The DJ — Afrika Bambaattaa, Afrika Islam, D.ST — presiding from high up on a platform in the center of the dance floor, like some totemic god…