On August 11, 1973, Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, played a back to school party his sister Cindy organised in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. He had noticed the dancers went hardest on the drum breaks, so he bought two copies of the same record and played the break back and forth between them. Over the next few years Grandmaster Flash sharpened the cutting and Afrika Bambaataa built the Universal Zulu Nation around parties in parks and community centres, often running the sound off a street lamp. The music was free, outdoors and loud, and the dancers it was built for became the breakers.

Landing here means you think a party is something a neighbourhood throws for itself, and you care more about who gets in than who is booked. You hear the break as the point of the record, and you like a crowd that makes room for someone in the middle. The criticism is that this era is easy to turn into a founding myth. Most of the people there were teenagers with borrowed equipment, nobody planned a culture, and more of those parties ended badly than the stories admit. Treating 1973 as sacred can make you miss the block parties happening now, on smaller streets, under someone else's lamp post.