DJ Hollywood: The Original King of New York by Mark Skillz

By Mark Skillz

In 1970s Harlem, one man with a golden voice and a great idea transformed party rocking forever

 Those old enough to remember call him the Godfather of Rap. He was the King of New York when hustlers wore sharkskin suits. He was the Jay-Z of the 70s. Now he’s kissing 60-years-old and can still rock a party. There’s no million dollar check waiting for him or royalty money from a hit single. Those days have passed. Now, it’s about the love he’s always had playing music.

But don’t get it twisted: in his heyday, he made money. More than any other rapper in his era. And this was before records. Not Herc, nor Bam, or Flash, or Starsky were making $500 a show back then.

“I was in demand,” he told me. “People wanted that, that, that… seasoning. 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. Lines stretched for blocks to hear what the flyers advertised as the “golden voice” of DJ Hollywood.

“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. And after me…” he pauses and reflects, “there was all.”

 “Nobody was doin’ the turntables and the microphone before me. Nobody,” he emphasizes. “Don’t get me wrong,” he continues, “they had people [who] rapped before me—syncopated and unsyncopated. 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. 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.”

His influence on the genre he helped to pioneer is evident in the styles of DJ’s Kid Capri, Biz Markie and Lovebug Starski, as well as rappers who specialize in crowd participation like Kurtis Blow and Doug E Fresh.

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. 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.”

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

To understand his contributions, we have to travel back in time to the world inhabited by a fourteen-year-old runaway named Anthony Holloway.

TO READ MORE OF THIS ARTICLE Visit https://medium.com/cuepoint/dj-hollywood-the-original-king-of-new-york-41b131b966ee