Hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa dies at age 68

Afrika Bambaataa, a man widely considered one of the main pioneers of hip-hop, died in Pennsylvania of prostate cancer on Thursday, according to his lawyer. He was 68.

Bambaataa’s sudden death was met with an outpouring of condolences from friends, family and fans across the world, who paid tribute to his profound and unmistakable impact on one of the world’s most popular and politically influential music genres. But others have said that his impact was overshadowed in recent years after numerous men who knew Bambaataa when they were boys accused him of sexual abuse.

The rapper and producer is best known for breakthrough tracks like 1982’s “Planet Rock” and for founding the Universal Zulu Nation art collective.

“When you talk about Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, these are the three founding fathers of the whole culture,” rapper Fat Joe told The Associated Press of Bambaataa’s legacy in 2023.

Bambaataa was Lance Taylor born in 1957 in the South Bronx, and he came of age at a time when the New York City neighborhood was rapidly deteriorating after intensifying segregation and years of economic neglect. By the 1970s and 1980s, landlords were burning apartment buildings to collect insurance money instead of investing in repairs, leaving low-income mostly Puerto Rican and Black families without socioeconomic opportunity.

Bambaataa had Jamaican and Barbadian heritage, and he was raised in a low-income public housing complex by his mother, according to an interview he gave Frank Broughton in 1998. He was exposed to music at an early age through his mother’s vinyl record collection.

The ability to repurpose and mix old hits became one of his signatures at the parties he began to throw in community centers across the neighborhood in the early 1970s, Bambaataa said in the interview. He was deeply inspired by the work of Kool Herc, who is often deemed the father of hip-hop.

Bambaataa and the parties where he DJ’ed swelled in popularity throughout the decade and well into the 1980s, when he released a series of electro tracks that helped shaped the burgeoning hip-hop and electro-funk music movements. He also was one of the first DJs to use beat breaks, incorporating the iconic Roland TR-808 drum machine.

“We was playin’ everything, everything that was funky,” he said. He later added that what set his parties apart was that “other DJs would play they great records for fifteen, twenty minutes. We was changing ours every minute or two. I couldn’t have no breakbeat go longer than a minute or two.”

At that time, Bambaataa said in previous interviews that he was able to leverage his affiliation with the local street gang the Black Spades in order to form a group he called the Zulu Nation, a nod to a South African ethnic group that he drew inspiration from. His slogan eventually became known as “peace, love, unity and having fun,” and he said that he sought to use hip-hops’ ballooning popularity to resolve local gang conflicts.

Later, Bambaataa changed the name to the Universal Zulu Nation to signal the inclusion of “all people from the planet earth.”

“At the core our music made people feel like they belong to a movement and not a moment, our music offered Hope something positive to believe in, it gave people identity, unity, and a way out,” Ellis Williams, a producer known as Mr. Biggs, wrote in an email to the AP. Mr. Biggs was a member of the group Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force that included Bambaataa.

Accused of sexual abuse

In recent years, numerous 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 he was Savage was a young teen.

“I was scared, but at the same time I was like, ’This is Afrika Bambaataa,’ ” Savage told the AP in 2016. At the time he recalled, in detail, that encounter and four others that he said followed.

Bambaataa has vehemently denied those allegations.

After Savage went public with his claims, numerous other men came forward to share similar experiences about Bambaataa. In June 2016, the Universal Zulu Nation released a public letter apologizing to “the survivors of apparent sexual molestation by Bambaataa” saying that some members of the group knew about the abuse but “chose not to disclose” it.

“We extend our deepest and most sincere apologies to the many people who have been hurt,” organization wrote.

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Associated Press writer Maria Sherman contributed reporting from New York City.