Coke La Rock - Kool Herc and La Rock

Kool Herc and La Rock

Although it has been written that La Rock comes from Jamaica, in reality his parents were from North Carolina. He was born on April 24, 1955.

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 thus an original member of Herc's MC crew the Herculoids. According to Herc, 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".

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", although La Rock received no credit).

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 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 (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. 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 and Frank Lucas were to drugs."