Today in Hip-Hop — September 20: The Man Who Named the Culture
Born September 20, 1960 in the Bronx, Keith “Cowboy” Wiggins didn’t just rap for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five — he named the whole genre. In 1978, clowning a friend who’d just gotten drafted, Cowboy started chanting “hip/hop/hip/hop” in a marching cadence, mocking the rhythm of Army boots hitting pavement. The crowd loved it. He worked it into his stage routine. Within a few years, “hip-hop” wasn’t a joke anymore — it was the name of a culture.
Before Cowboy’s bit, the sound coming out of the Bronx didn’t have a name — DJs called it “beats,” MCs called it “rapping,” and nobody had one word for the whole package: the DJing, the dancing, the graffiti, the rhyming. Cowboy, the designated hype man and dancer for Flash’s crew, is the guy historians credit with putting a label on it — first as a throwaway joke, then as an actual stage chant that other MCs across the Bronx started biting. By the time journalists needed a word for the sound blowing up out of the boroughs in the early ’80s, “hip-hop” was already sitting there, ready-made, courtesy of a guy roasting his boy for enlisting.
Cowboy’s other job in the Furious Five was arguably just as foundational — he was one of the first MCs to work call-and-response directly into a live set, turning the crowd into a second voice on the mic. That’s the DNA running through every “wave your hands in the air” and “somebody scream” you’ve heard since. He didn’t live to see how big the word — or the culture — would get. Cowboy died September 8, 1989, at 28, just twelve days shy of what would’ve been his 29th birthday.
Also today in hip-hop:
- Craig Mack, Project: Funk da World (1994) — dropped September 20, 1994, the second-ever album released on Bad Boy Records, just one week behind The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die. Home to “Flava in Ya Ear,” which went from a Craig Mack solo cut to an all-timer once the remix pulled in Biggie, LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, and Rampage.
- Future & Drake, What a Time to Be Alive (2015) — the Metro Boomin-anchored joint tape dropped September 20, 2015, and opened at #1 on the Billboard 200 with 375,000 units — proof “mixtape” stopped meaning “free” a long time ago.
- Yung Joc — born September 20, 1980. “It’s Goin’ Down” ran the summer of 2006 and pushed New Joc City to #3 on the Billboard 200.
Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team
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