Pistes d'exploration

Discuss the significance of the author’s note. Do you think it enhances the story? Compare author’s notes across several texts.

Explore the resources about the history of Hip Hop in the selected bibliography at the back of the book. Share and explain one of the resources to a partner, group or class.

Write a list of interview questions you would like to ask DJ Kool Herc.

Reflect on the way that Clive/DJ Kool Herc turned his childhood passion into a lifelong career. Write about your passions and how you might pursue them as you grow up.

Do a picture walk of the book. What do you notice, predict and wonder?

With a partner, create a word web on hip hop music.

Practise choral reading some passages of the book in a hip hop style.

Reflect on the way that Clive/DJ Kool Herc turned his childhood passion into a lifelong career. Write about your passions and how you might pursue them as you grow up.

This multimodal and multigenre text incorporates aspects of biography through the narrative of DJ Kool Herc as well as the conventions of information-based texts in the exploration of the history of hip hop culture. Model ways to make connections between the two types of content.

Discuss the way the text deals with Clive’s backstory and early days. How is this similar to or different from other biographies?

In conjunction with other biographies, use the text as a model for the production of multimodal biographies.

Write “Hip Hop” at the top of your page. Then write the 5 W questions on your page. In small teams, discuss each question. Write a team answer on your page. Then, discuss your work as a class.

Using the timeline in the Author’s Note, create a storyboard about the history and evolution of hip hop.

Get inspired by your own relatives. Ask them about the music with which they connected the most. Choose one music style and create a timeline about its history and its evolution. Make it personal by including family anecdotes to the timeline.

Mots-clés

Biography , dance , DJ Kool Herc , hip-hop , innovations , music , New York City

Commentaire descriptif

DJ Cool Herc started out as a boy named Clive. Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, he would watch DJ King George set up “the biggest and baddest house parties” in Somerset Lane and dream of doing the same. At 13, he moved to the Bronx, New York, and grew to be so tall the other boys called him Hercules. When his father bought “a monster sound system with giant six-foot speakers” his record-spinning career took off. He and his sister hosted parties in a rec room on Sedgwick Avenue and then took to the streets, plugging the speakers into lampposts. He knew how to play the breaks, do shout outs and, before long, he put the “Hip Hip Hop, Hippity Hop into the world’s heartbeat.” The wonderful combination of engaging storytelling and captivating images brings this biography of the man who started Hip Hop into vivid focus. The voice is full of dialect, slang and rhythm: “Clive loved music . . . a wah wah scat of a jiving trumpet, a sorrowful twang of a sad voice.” Digitally executed illustrations have a human touch with a graffiti art edge. Rich in movement and facial expressions, pictures get inside Cool Herc’s head and world. Dense reds, greens and browns fill the pages, with a turquoise stripe that appears to weave across the book as the tone of the music itself. An informative and captivating read about the birth of an era, the book includes a timeline, an author’s note and a bibliography at the back with more information.