Coke La Rock (aka Coco La Rock; born April 24, 1955) is an American rapper from New York City who is sometimes credited as being the first
MC in the history of
hip-hop
Hip-hop or hip hop (originally disco rap) is a popular music genre that emerged in the early 1970s from the African-American community of New York City. The style is characterized by its synthesis of a wide range of musical techniques. Hi ...
. In 2010, he was inducted into the High Times
Counterculture Hall of Fame at the annual ceremonies at the
Cannabis Cup in
Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...
.
Kool Herc and Coke La Rock
La Rock was born in
The Bronx
The Bronx ( ) is the northernmost of the five Boroughs of New York City, boroughs of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. It shares a land border with Westchester County, New York, West ...
,
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
on April 24, 1955, with family roots going back to
North Carolina
North Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, South Carolina to the south, Georgia (U.S. stat ...
.
Coke La Rock was a friend and musical partner of
DJ Kool Herc, who himself is generally considered to have laid down the foundation for hip-hop music starting in 1973. La Rock was an original member of Herc's MC crew, the Herculoids.
According to Herc, Coke La Rock's MC name had various iterations, beginning as "A-1 Coke," and then moving on to "Nasty Coke" before it was finalized as "Coke La Rock".
Coke La Rock joined Kool Herc for his first party, in 1973, to celebrate Herc's sister Cindy's birthday. It wasn't until about the fifth or sixth party that he took the name Coke La Rock. The name came to him in a dream. Before that time, he had no name and did his rapping out of sight from the audience, so no one knew who was doing the rapping.
His original raps were usually shout-outs to friends, but gradually the poetry emerged.
He originated such phrases as "You rock and you don't stop," and "Hotel, motel, you don't tell, we won't tell" (which was immortalized on the first Sugarhill Gang single "
Rapper's Delight
"Rapper's Delight" is a 1979 rap song that serves as the debut single of American hip-hop trio the Sugarhill Gang, produced by Sylvia Robinson. Although it was shortly preceded by the Fatback Band's " King Tim III (Personality Jock)", "Rapper ...
", although La Rock received no credit).
Coke La Rock's raps were always purely improvisational, unlike those of later 70s-era rap groups, —such as the
Furious Five and
Cold Crush Brothers, who wrote down and rehearsed their rhymes and created elaborate routines. According to La Rock, while rapping "at first I would just call out
y friends'names. Then I pretended dudes had double-parked cars; that was to impress the girls. Truthfully, I wasn’t there to rap, I was just playing around."
Nonetheless, La Rock's raps would, as with much else at Kool Herc's parties in the mid-1970s, serve as a basic model for other hip-hop artists that would come onto the Bronx music scene by the end of the decade. La Rock himself has argued, in a reference to two pioneering New York City narcotics dealers, that "me and Herc were to hip-hop what
Nicky Barnes
Leroy Nicholas Barnes (October 15, 1933 – 2012) was an American crime boss, active in New York City during the 1970s.
In 1972, Barnes formed The Council (drug syndicate), The Council, a seven-man African-American organized crime syndicate tha ...
and
Frank Lucas were to drugs."
Decline in popularity and later years
As other nascent hip-hop groups patterned themselves after Herc and La Rock and improved on their formula, the popularity of Herc and the Herculoids began to wane as early as 1977.
After Kool Herc was stabbed at a party, La Rock went looking to kill the perpetrator, who was part of the Executive Playhouse crew. He found the man's friends in a Bronx pool hall, but they had already moved their friend down south to avoid a confrontation. After this incident, La Rock decided to step away from hip hop and let the younger generation move in. Since he'd had a long run lasting several years of being on top of the Bronx hip hop scene, La Rock didn't want to continue if murder was going to continue to be part of the game. Also his son, Donte La Rock, had just been born, and he needed to spend more time at home.
Gary Harris, an employee of the first hip-hop record label,
Sugar Hill, noted that "people respected Herc and Coke, but by the early eighties those guys were like specters—they just weren’t visible on the scene anymore."
In contrast to other early Bronx hip-hop artists like
Afrika Bambaataa
Lance Taylor (born April 17, 1957), also known as Afrika Bambaataa (), is a retired American DJ, rapper, and record producer. He is notable for releasing a series of genre-defining electro tracks in the 1980s that influenced the development of ...
and
Grandmaster Flash
Joseph Robert Saddler (born January 1, 1958), known by his stage name Grandmaster Flash, is a Barbadian-American musician and DJ. He created a DJ technique called the Quick Mix Theory. This technique serviced the break-dancer and the rapper by el ...
, Coke La Rock—like his partner Kool Herc—never achieved any recording success (indeed he did not record at all). However, late 2008 saw the release of what was deemed the first ever recording featuring La Rock, a song titled "Hello – Merry Christmas Baby!" which was released by Sedgwick & Cedar as part of a special holiday compilation to pay homage to the birthplace of hip-hop.
La Rock's place in hip-hop history was arguably immortalized in the legendary 1986
Boogie Down Productions
Boogie Down Productions (BDP) was an American hip-hop group formed in the Bronx, New York City, in 1986. It originally consisted of KRS-One, D-Nice, and DJ Scott La Rock. DJ Scott La Rock was murdered on August 27, 1987, five months after the ...
song "South Bronx" (the opening salvo of the so-called "
Bridge Wars") wherein
KRS-One
Lawrence "Kris" Parker (born August 20, 1965), better known by his stage names KRS-One (; an abbreviation of "Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone") and Teacha, is an American rapper from the Bronx. He rose to prominence as part of the ...
raps this:
Now way back in the days when hip-hop began
With Coke La Rock, Kool Herc, and then Bam
Coke La Rock had no association with, nor relation to, KRS-One's DJ at the time,
Scott La Rock
Scott Monroe Sterling (March 2, 1962 – August 27, 1987), known by the stage name DJ Scott La Rock, was an American hip-hop disc jockey and music producer from the Bronx, New York. He was a founding member of the East Coast hip hop group Boog ...
. Nor did Coke La Rock and another influential old-school MC,
T La Rock
Terrence Ronnie Keaton known by the stage name T La Rock, (born September 16, 1961) is an American old school hip hop, old-school emcee best known for his collaboration with Def Jam Recordings co-founder Rick Rubin and the 1984 in music, 1984 Si ...
, know one another in the early days of hip-hop, and thus the name similarity is coincidental.
In 2021, after years of being absent from the hip hop scene, Coke La Rock returned to the microphone with a verse on the
DJ Kay Slay posse track "Rolling 110 Deep".
In 2023 he returned once again to deliver a verse on "Rolling 200 Deep".
Live Recordings
L Brothers vs The Herculoids – Bronx River Centre (1978)
DJ Kool Herc and Whiz kid with the Herculoids: Live at T-Connection (1981)
References
External links
Coke La Rockon
Myspace
Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...
2008 interview with La Rock*
{{DEFAULTSORT:La Rock, Coke
Living people
1955 births
African-American male rappers
21st-century American male rappers
20th-century American male rappers
Rappers from the Bronx
East Coast hip-hop musicians
21st-century American rappers
21st-century American male musicians
21st-century African-American musicians
20th-century African-American musicians