Grandmaster Caz

If you want to feel the true spirit of Hip Hop, check out Hush Tours:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/arts/music/12rose.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1190866506-jNls/tfIMvQh8baDilGy6A

An excerpt:

Caz is one of several hip-hop pioneers — including Kurtis Blow, Doug E. Fresh and D.J. Red Alert — who work for Hush Tours (www.hushtours.com), a Manhattan company that since June 2002 has run hip-hop-centric sightseeing tours of Harlem and the Bronx.

The success of Hush Tours is a sign that hip-hop has become part of New York's official cultural heritage — for younger visitors especially, a tourist magnet right up there with the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty.

But Hush Tours offers something more than just sightseeing: an argument about authenticity, an opportunity, in the words of its promotional literature, to "see, hear and feel the true meaning of the elements of hip-hop." In so doing, the tour reflects debates about history, memory and "the real hip-hop" that have become more pronounced and contentious as the years have passed, and hip-hop culture has developed a self-consciousness about its past.

[...]

Today, for the price of $70, the Hush Tours bus whisks visitors to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, making stops at, among other places, the Graffiti Hall of Fame at 106th Street and Park Avenue, a schoolyard featuring enormous murals by some of the city's top graffiti artists, and Bobby's Happy House, a record store owned by Bobby Robinson, the onetime proprietor of Enjoy Records, which released some of the earliest hip-hop singles.

At the Graffiti Hall of Fame, there is a Disneyish touch: Caz distributes Kangol hats and fake gold chains with dangling dollar-sign pendants to the tourists, who cross their arms and strike B-boy stances for snapshots in front of the spray-painted walls. Harlem residents have seen a lot over the years, but a gaggle of white tourists dressed like LL Cool J circa 1985 is something new.