Film Screening and Panel Discussion at Parrish Will Commemorate 50th Anniversary of Hip Hop

Bakari Kitwana’s love of hip hop can be traced back to the basement at the Bridgehampton Child Care & Recreational Center.

Kitwana, a 1984 graduate of Bridgehampton High School, and who went by the name Kevin Dance at that time, grew up a stone’s throw from the center, on Huntington Crossway. For Kitwana and many of his peers, the center was a home away from home, a place where they could always gather to engage in two of their favorite activities — playing pickup basketball on the center’s outdoor courts, and listening to hip hop.

Kitwana remembers being in junior high, and attending hip hop parties held in the basement of the center in the late 1970s and early 1980s, back when it was “an old white building with a black door,” he said.

“Some of the first hip hop parties I went to were at the center,” he said. “One thing I remember was that there were these ‘Battle of the DJs’ parties.”

Prominent local DJs from the area and even, occasionally, from farther up-island would come to the center, toting all the tools of the trade — crates full of vinyl records, speakers, microphones, and more.

“The turntables would be set up on the opposite sides of the room, with the dance floor in the middle, in the middle of the dimly lit basement,” he said. “That music was what early hip hop was; the breakbeat on the popular R&B records we were listening to anyway.”

“It was still pre-MC, so the focus was still very much on who was DJ’ing,” Kitwana added. “The two DJs would have turns to play, and it was about the sound, the music, and the crowd deciding who won. That was my first real beginning with hip hop other than people getting on the mic at graduation parties and weddings.”

Kitwana went on to have a successful career based in the hip hop industry, becoming a well-established journalist and author, cultural critic and thought leader in the interconnected worlds of hip hop, youth culture, and Black political engagement.

His resume is impressive — he has written several books about hip hop, and became editor-in-chief of The Source, the world-renowned hip hop magazine, in 1995, working there until 1999.

Kitwana, who now lives outside of Cleveland, is returning to his hometown this weekend to take part in a special event at the Parrish Art Museum on Friday, one that will honor and commemorate the rich history of hip hop, and is a can’t-miss event for anyone in the area who has any kind of special relationship with or connection to the genre or simply nostalgia for the glory days of that era.

In partnership with the fourth annual Black Film Festival and the Bridgehampton Child Care & Recreational Center, the Parrish will host an outdoor screening of the classic 1990 film “House Party,” directed by Reginald Hudlin.

The night will start at 6:30 p.m. with a wine and cheese reception, followed by a brief curator-led museum tour of the new exhibition “James Brooks: A Painting Is a Real Thing,” a retrospective of the abstract expressionist artist who lived and worked in Springs, from 1957 until his death in 1992, and was a key figure in the local art community. At 7 p.m., an hour before the movie screening, there will be a panel discussion featuring Kitwana, DJ Belal — a legendary DJ who hails from Wyandanch and has worked with hip hop greats such as Rakim, Biz Markie and more — ½ Pint, an educator, hip hop artist, educational consultant, podcast co-host and webcast producer, and Roggie Pettaway, aka DJ Rah-G-Raj, a well-known DJ and owner of owner of ROLI Professional Entertainment Co.

The event is also part of the 50th anniversary of hip hop celebrations that are happening around the country this year.

Friday, August 11, is considered by many to be the exact 50th anniversary of hip-hop. On that day in 1973, DJ Kool Herc—considered to be the founder of hip-hop — and his sister, Cindy Campbell, hosted a “back to school” party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, that is now recognized as the catalyst that sparked worldwide interest in hip hop.

“House Party” is a classic hip hop film, starring Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin, the duo best known as “Kid and Play.” In the movie, Kid is invited to a party at Play’s house, and decides to sneak out to the party despite being grounded by his father, leading to a wild night. The film also stars Martin Lawrence in one of the earlier roles in his career, playing a character based on DJ Belal.

Kitwana described the significance of the film and its place in hip hop history.

“It’s the epitome of hip hop aesthetic,” he said, adding the director, Reginald Hudlin, was young at the time he made the film, which was based off an award-winning film he made while he was a student at Harvard University. In 2022, “House Party” was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress because of its cultural and historical significance. The film’s hip-hop and R&B soundtrack, released by Motown Records, peaked at 104 on the Billboard 200 and 20 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums.

“The film is iconic because of the people in it,” Kitwana said. “It told a story about hip hop that was fun and innocent; young people hanging out at a party. What could go wrong with that?”

It’s one of the earlier films to celebrate hip hop and hip hop culture, and Kitwana and his fellow panelists will discuss the context and significance of the movie and the genre, and everything it has stood for over the past half century during their discussion. Kitwana spoke about how, in the early days of the 1980s, hip hop was often misunderstood.

“My brothers were eight and nine years older than me, and they grew up in a different era of music than me,” he said. “They thought hip hop was outrageous. They were like, ‘What is this music where these guys don’t even play instruments?’ I remember my brothers teasing me, saying, ‘This isn’t even real music, this is just people talking.’”

Kitwana’s older siblings could not have predicted at that time the enormous cultural significance and power the genre would come to wield, and the crucial role it would play in the intersection of Black life, political engagement and community organizing.

Kitwana worked for The Source in the 1990s, during what was a golden era for hip hop, a time when it became a juggernaut in American culture. He’s written several books on the genre and its power and influence. His 2002 book, “The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crises in African-American Culture” popularized the expression “the hip-hop generation.” In 2007, The New York Times described that book as “the leading scholarly work on the culture.” Kitwana was also a collaborating writer for Rakim’s 2019 memoir “Sweat the Technique-Revelations on Creativity From the Lyrical Genius,” and is also the author of the 2005 book, “Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: The New Realities of Race in America.”

The intersection of hip hop, art, activism and politics is where Kitwana has kept his focus in more recent years, he said. In 2005, he started an organization called Rap Sessions, hosting town hall style meetings around “hip hop issues,” and “difficult dialogues facing the millennial generation.”

In 2020, he co-founded The Hip-Hop Political Education Summit, which held two major virtual summits that reached more than 20,000 viewers during the height of the pandemic, with a summit on voter suppression and a summit on Black men and the vote. The summits featured leading journalists, academics, politicians and hip-hop artists, from Soledad O’Brien, to Cornel West, Senator Corey Booker, hip hop artists Chuck D, Rapsody and others.

“The work that I do is basically, how do we transform these communities?” he said. “How do we use the power and influence of hip hop to go beyond selling records and making people happy and channel it into community transformation?”

Friday night’s panel discussion will be another way to keep working toward that goal, and also represents a sort of full circle moment for Kitwana, and chance to return home for the first time in years and engage with the kind of work he’s committed to doing, on the milestone anniversary of the genre he discovered a passion for when he was still a child, and ultimately made the focus of his life’s work.

Admission for Friday night’s event at the Parrish is $16, and attendees are encouraged to bring their own lawn or beach chairs. The night will conclude with an after-party at the Old Stove Pub featuring music by DJ Belal. The after-party, which will feature hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar, has a $30 admission fee.

For more information, visit parrishart.org.