The Cornerstone of Culture: An Interview With Grandmaster Caz

Image via Karl Ferguson Jr Show your love of the game by subscribing to Passion of the Weiss on Patreon so that we can keep churning out interviews with legendary producers, feature the best emerging rap talent in the game, and gift you the only worthwhile playlists left in this streaming hellscape. Jeff Weiss says it’s regular but it’s not normal. In the summer of ’74, a new world bloomed from skeletal ruins and smoldering debris. This parallel universe expanded out of an incandescent string of innovations in the rec rooms and gymnasiums of the South Bronx. Psychedelic manipulations of wax, fluorescent subway car bombings, and 360-degree power moves on the blacktop. At first, it lacked a name. This was just the wild style spawned from dispossessed kids uptown, wholly unaware that they had accidentally invented the future. The break offered the first foundational rupture, isolating drum beats in infinite space. Kool Herc, Love Bug Starski, Grandmaster Flash, and Grand Wizzard Theodore created the heavens and earth in a furnace of disco, funk, and nickel-plated soul. Whole genres sliced up by scientifically-precise samurai. A three-dimensional realm reinvented from familiar shapes. Rapping was the final evolutionary adaptation. The Jamaican tradition of...