Just before noon on a raw, wet Saturday a few weeks ago, two dozen tourists piled off of a bus at Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 155th Street in Harlem and made their way into Rucker Park. The park is a Harlem landmark, the site of the annual Entertainer's Basketball Classic, a summer tournament that pits local legends against professional players. But the tour group was there for a different kind of performance.
In the otherwise empty park, they were greeted by Wonder Rock and Mouse, two break dancers from Brooklyn, who hooked up an MP3 player to a Pignose portable amplifier, blasted a James Brown breakbeat, and were soon moving across the rain-slickened asphalt, demonstrating moves like the toprock, the coffee grinder and the windmill. When the show was over, the audience was invited to clamber down from the bleachers for a quick tutorial. A paunchy, 40-ish white guy from Dallas announced that he had been in a break dance crew a couple of decades earlier, and was soon down on the ground, executing a better-than-passable windmill.
That elicited whoops from the tour guide, a burly 45-year-old named Curtis Fisher, better known as Grandmaster Caz. Caz is a renowned figure in early hip hop, a member of the venerated Bronx rap crew the Cold Crush Brothers and the ghostwriter of some famous verses of Rapper's Delight, the 1979 Sugarhill Gang song that became rap's breakthrough single.
Today, he has gone from making history to teaching it. Caz is one of several hip-hop pioneers -- including Kurtis Blow, Doug E. Fresh and DJ Red Alert -- who work for Hush Tours (www.hushtours.com), a Manhattan company that since June 2002 has run hip-hop-centric sightseeing tours of Harlem and the Bronx.
The success of Hush Tours is a sign that hip hop has become part of New York's official cultural heritage -- for younger visitors especially, a tourist magnet right up there with the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty.
But Hush Tours offers something more than just sightseeing: an argument about authenticity, an opportunity, in the words of its promotional literature, to "see, hear and feel the true meaning of the elements of hip hop." In so doing, the tour reflects debates about history, memory and "the real hip hop" that have become more pronounced and contentious as the years have passed and hip-hop culture has developed a self-consciousness about its past.
As Hush Tours takes pains to point out, hip-hop history stretches back to the early 1970s, years before the first rap records were even recorded. "This is the 32nd year of the culture of hip hop," said Caz, as the bus rolled north on Madison Avenue, adding, with an MC's flair for self-mythology, "This is my 33rd year in the game."
Hush Tours is the brainchild of a 38-year-old Bronx native, Debra Harris. Several years ago, Harris, a legal secretary, began taking members of her family on impromptu driving tours to places like the former site of Harlem World Entertainment Complex on 116th Street, where rival rap crews had faced off in rhyme battles a quarter-century ago. Harris was motivated, she said, by a desire to pass along knowledge of hip hop's roots to her children. She soon realized that she had stumbled on an untapped tourist market.
"When you go to Nashville, you know that's the home of country music," Harris said. "New York needed to step up to the plate, to say officially that this is the birthplace of hip hop. The city was sleeping on it. I discovered that younger visitors who loved rap music were eager for more knowledge, for a different kind of tourist experience that would get them out of Times Square."
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