Coke La Rock

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Coke La Rock (aka Coco La Rock) is often credited as being the first MC in the history of hip-hop. Coke 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.

Coke joined Kool Herc for his first party, in 1973, to celebrate Herc’s sister Cindy’s birthday where he played host as Master of Ceremonies, 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 although Coke never was recognized for… According to Coke, while rapping “at first I would just call out [my 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, Coke’s raps (which were very much in the Jamaican tradition of “toasting”) 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. Coke 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 and Frank Lucas were to drugs.”

2010, Coke La Rock was inducted into the High Times Counterculture Hall of Fame