african bambaataaThe man considered one of hip-hop’s main pioneers died of prostate cancer in Pennsylvania on Thursday, according to his lawyer. He was 68 years old.
Bambaataa’s sudden death was mourned by friends, family and fans around the world, who paid tribute to his deep and indelible impact on one of the world’s most popular and politically influential musical genres. But others have said that his influence faded in recent years when several men who knew Bambaataa since childhood accused him of sexual abuse.
Rapper and producer best known for successful tracks such as 1982’s “Planet Rock” and founding the Universal Zulu Nation art collective.
His talent agency, Naff Management Entertainment, wrote in an emailed statement Tuesday, “Hip Hop will never be the same without him – but Hip Hop is what it is today because of him. His spirit lives on in every beat, every cipher, and every corner of this world he touched.”
Bambaataa was Lance Taylor, born in the South Bronx in 1957, at a time when the New York City neighborhood was rapidly deteriorating after intense segregation and years of economic neglect. By the 1970s and 1980s, landlords were burning down apartment buildings to collect insurance money rather than investing in repairs, leaving low-income mostly Puerto Rican and black families without socioeconomic opportunity.
According to a 1998 interview with Frank Broughton, Bambaataa had Jamaican and Barbadian heritage, and was raised by his mother in a low-income public housing complex. He was introduced to music at an early age through his mother’s vinyl record collection.
Bambaataa said in interviews that his ability to rework old hits and mix them became one of his signatures at the parties he began hosting in neighborhood community centers in the early 1970s. He was deeply inspired by the work of Kool Herc, who is often considered father of hip-hop.
Bambaataa and the parties where he DJed grew in popularity throughout the decade and into the 1980s, when he released a series of electro tracks that helped shape the growing hip-hop and electro-funk music movements. He was one of the first DJs to use beat breaks, incorporating the iconic Roland TR-808 Drum Machine.
“We were playing into everything, everything that was weird,” he said. He later said that what distinguished his parties was that “other DJs would play their great records for fifteen, twenty minutes. We were changing our breakbeat every minute or two. I couldn’t hold a breakbeat for more than a minute or two.”
At the time, Bambaataa had said in previous interviews that he was able to take advantage of his affiliation with the local street gang the Black Spades to form a group he called the Zulu Nation, a nod to the South African ethnic group from which he took inspiration. His slogan eventually became known as “Peace, Love, Unity and Fun” and he said he wanted to use the growing popularity of hip-hop to resolve local gang conflicts.
Later, Bambaataa changed the name to the Universal Zulu Nation to indicate inclusion of “all peoples of planet Earth”.
“Fundamentally our music made people feel like they belonged to a movement, not for a moment, our music gave Hope something positive to believe in, it gave people identity, unity and a way out,” producer Ellis Williams, known as Mr. Biggs, wrote in an email to the AP. Mr. Biggs was a member of Afrika Bambaataa and the group Soulsonic Force, which also included Bambaataa.
In recent years, many people have accused Bambaataa of sexual abuse.
In 2016, Bronx political activist and former music industry executive Ronald Savage accused Bambaataa of abusing him in 1980, when Savage was a young teenager.
“I was scared, but at the same time I said, ‘This is Africa Bambata,'” Savage told the AP in 2016. At that time he recalled in detail that encounter and the four other encounters that followed.
Bambaataa has strongly denied That allegation.
After Savage made his claims public, several others came forward to share similar experiences about Bambaataa. In June 2016, the Universal Zulu Nation issued a public letter apologizing to “survivors of apparent sexual abuse by Bambaataa”, stating that some members of the group were aware of the abuse but “chose not to disclose it”.
“We offer our deepest and most sincere apologies to the many people who were hurt,” the organization wrote.
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Associated Press writer Maria Sherman contributed reporting from New York City.
