Today, for US$70, the Hush Tours bus whisks visitors to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, making stops at, among other places, the Graffiti Hall of Fame at 106th Street and Park Avenue, a schoolyard featuring enormous murals by some of the city's top graffiti artists, and Bobby's Happy House, a record store owned by Bobby Robinson, the onetime proprietor of Enjoy Records, which released some of the earliest hip hop singles.
The real action, though, takes place on the bus, where the tour guides play music, reminisce, instruct and proselytize. "This is an opportunity to pass on the truth," said the rapper Kurtis Blow, who is also host of Backspin, a Sirius Satellite Radio program devoted to old-school hip hop. "Hip-hop history has been lied about, distorted and in some cases outright destroyed."
Leading bus tours is not exactly the standard afterlife for onetime stars like Blow, whose 1980 single The Breaks was the first rap record to go gold. But the pioneers of hip hop regard the tours as a way to ensure their legacies.
Red Alert, a longtime fixture on the New York airwaves, said: "It's great because we didn't have a platform to pass on our knowledge. The tour has given us a platform to explain the history that we experienced, the history that we set in motion."
On that chilly Saturday a few weeks back, Caz was a jovial, blunt tour guide. "Today you're going to learn what hip hop is and what it's not," he announced at the tour's outset. "It's not just rap music, and it's definitely not just the 10 records you hear over and over again on the radio."
He peppered his talk with oft-told hip-hop tales and intriguing nuggets of cultural history. He told hip hop's creation story, of the famous 1973 party in the Bronx, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in Morris Heights, whose host was the legendary Jamaican immigrant disc jockey, DJ Kool Herc. He described how the looting of hi-fi stores during the 1977 New York City blackout propelled DJ culture. ("It was like Christmas for black people" he said. "The next day there were a thousand new DJs.")
He played charmingly primitive early rap records, like the Fatback Band's King Tim III (Personality Jock)(widely regarded as the genre's first single) and songs by the Sequence, one of the earliest all-female rap ensembles. He waxed rhapsodic over hip hop's humble beginnings, when the biggest rap shows in New York were announced on hand-lettered Xeroxed fliers (Caz distributed several vintage examples), and DJs powered their sound systems for outdoor block parties by tapping into the wiring of street lamps.
"The rappers today who can drive around in Bentleys, with their jewelry and million-dollar homes," Caz told the tour group. "They're able to live like that because cats like me and Bambaataa" -- the famous rapper and DJ Afrika Bambaataa -- "were in the trenches back in the day, laying the groundwork and getting chased off the block by the police."
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