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…