CBH Talk | Brooklyn’s in the House: Exploring The Borough’s Local Hip Hop History, Part 1
The Bronx is widely credited as the birthplace of hip hop in the 70s and 80s, but there was a thriving and vibrant scene in Brooklyn as well, one less well-known but equally essential.
This 2-part series takes us back to those early Brooklyn hip hop years, when Birdel’s Records and Soul Shack on Pitkin Avenue were community fixtures, and high school rap hopefuls battled it out at Albee Square Mall hoping to someday hear their records played at the Latin Quarter or on DJ Red Alert’s radio show.
Part 1: A Conversation with DJ Clark Kent
Raised in Crown Heights and active as a deejay since the late 1970s, DJ Clark Kent has been a key participant in several eras of hip hop, first making his name as Dana Dane’s deejay in the mid-1980s, then as a leading deejay in the seminal hip hop clubs Union Square and Latin Quarter. In the 1990s, serving both as a record producer and A&R executive, Clark played key roles in the careers of the Notorious BIG and Jay-Z. Join him for this conversation about Brooklyn’s early hip hop contributions, moderated by Dr. Patrick Rivers and Dr. Will Fulton.
To register for Part 2, a conversation with Milk Dee, Daddy-O, and King of Chill, click HERE.
Participants
DJ Clark Kent (Rodolfo Antonio Franklin) is a Panamanian-American DJ, record producer, and music executive from Brooklyn who got his start in the late 1980s as the DJ for rapper Dana Dane. Among the highlights of his early career are producing the remix for Troop's hit song Spread My Wings and scoring his first street hit with the Junior M.A.F.I.A. song Player's Anthem which featured The Notorious B.I.G. and was the first record that Lil' Kim appeared on. He produced the hit Loverboy by Mariah Carey, which peaked at #2 in the US on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. He has produced tracks for artists such as Lil' Kim, The Notorious B.I.G., Mad Skillz, Estelle, Lil' Vicious, Mona Lisa, 50 Cent, Canibus, Slick Rick and Rakim, as well as groups like The Future Sound and Original Flavor. During the 1990s he was the host of the Clark Kent’s Superman Battle for World Supremacy DJ competition and director of A&R at East West Records and Atlantic Records. He would go on to produce three tracks on Jay-Z's critically acclaimed debut album, Reasonable Doubt. Clark is "an addict for sneakers" and once claimed to own 3,500 pairs of footwear. In 2010, Nike commissioned him to design and unveil a "Nike Five Boroughs AF1 Low" pack of special limited edition Nike Air Force 1 shoes. He has also collaborated with other popular brands, such as Adidas and New Balance.
Will Fulton is a Professor of Music at LaGuardia Community College. He is a musicologist, record producer, and DJ, and is the co-author with Dr. Patrick Rivers of the book 33 1/3: Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2017). He has contributed chapters to Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online (Indiana University Press, 2021), The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music (Oxford UP, 2018), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Oxford UP, 2016), The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd Edition (Oxford UP, 2013), and articles to American Music Review.
He has lectured at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, and at conferences for the Society of American Music, American Musicological Society, International Musicological Society, and the American Studies Association. Before he began teaching, Will served as A&R Director for Profile Records and Slash/Warner Music. His musical compositions and productions have appeared in numerous feature films and television broadcasts, and he has produced and remixed music for Run-D.M.C., Tupac Shakur, Camp Lo, and Jay-Z. He holds a Master’s Degree in Musicology from Brooklyn College, and a PhD in Musicology from the City University of New York.
Patrick Rivers is an ethnomusicologist and Associate Professor of music at the University of New Haven. He researches and teaches the processes of recorded music and the impact of recordings on aesthetics and consumption. Patrick is the co-writer of the 33 1/3 series book Uptown Saturday Night, and a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies.
