Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on the Ann Arbor District Library’s Pulp blog.

In August 1983, 200 people entered a new dimension above the Heidelberg in Ann Arbor.

The clubgoers stepped into an unfamiliar yet fascinating music realm at the Big Beat Club, now known as Club Above, to dance the night away.

“Want to be on the cutting edge?” wrote Jim Boyd for The Michigan Daily on July 28, 1983. “New York, as usual, is the place to be, but this Friday you can save the plane fare by going to the Big Beat Club. There you will be able to experience the latest music/dance craze that is now surfacing in New York. It’s called ‘hip hop’ and its impact may prove to be culturally vast.”

The show was pushed back to August 5, 1983, but when the concert finally happened, curious viewers arrived to watch Harold “Whiz Kid” McGuire, a New York City DJ, spin and mix records in a “new” musical style known as “hip-hop.”

“There have been articles about ‘hip hop’ – which includes a style of manipulating turntables known as ‘scratching,’ for which the Whiz Kid is known, ‘break’ dancing, and ‘rapping’ – in such prestigious publications as Rolling Stone and the New Musical Express,” wrote Bill Brown in a July 23, 1983 article for The Ann Arbor News.

During Whiz Kid’s mesmerizing set, clubgoers watched his hands move as smoothly as a Kung Fu master while he played, mixed, and scratched records.

“The Whiz Kid’s ‘show’ consisted of a continuous, five-hour stream of heavily synthesized, emphatically rhythmic dance music,” wrote Brown in an August 12, 1983, review for The Ann Arbor News.

“At some points, especially when more people were watching him than dancing, he would play straight, uninterrupted records such as ‘Billie Jean.’ He would gradually throw in rhythmic accents that he either improvised on his electronic drum machine, created by manipulating the turntable’s needle, or snatched directly from other records.”

Continue reading “The Message — 1980s Hip-Hop Through The Eyes of Local Media” →