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(Brian Gorman, the other co-founder, publishes Chicago Community Activism Magazine.) They met in high school, at Dunbar. “Hip hop is just the name that New York put on what it saw on Soul Train,” says Kingdom Come.Īrtistic grew up in Roseland, Kingdom Come in Ida B. And he just took that to California when he went there.” I never knew where the Soul Train line came from until I heard Don Cornelius say they used to do this very concept in the backyards of events here in Chicago.

We watched Soul Train because of the music, the fashion and the dance. “In Chicago, we keep it real,” Artistic says. As Kingdom Come puts it, “rap is something you do hip hop is something you live.” A lot of that lifestyle first showed up on Soul Train.

Don didn’t really like rap, but hip hop goes a lot deeper than music - it’s a lifestyle that also encompasses art, dance, and fashion. The show made Chicago the birthplace of hip hop. Really, though, says Artistic, Chicago’s contribution to hip hop goes back even further than that - all the way to Soul Train, which former Chicago police officer Don Cornelius first hosted on WCIU in 1970. In 1980, we learn, “Point Blank Sapp Supreme an emcee from the west side begins to write his own rhymes then later forms the group Raw Material” and “Graffiti writer WARP starts writing in Chicago from Cabrini Green Housing Projects.” In the front hallway is a timeline of Chicago hip hop in the 1980s, the decade when Artistic and Kingdom Rock came on the scene.

The museum is easy to miss on this residential block: there’s just a red, white and blue sign over the door, and another in a window, as modest as a school pride placard, or an advertisement for an aldermanic candidate. Indiana Ave., in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood. They’re two of the founders, curators and tour guides of the Chicago Hip Hop Heritage Museum, which occupies an apartment in a greystone at 4505 S. Darrell “Artistic” Roberts, a graffiti artist, and Carrico “Kingdom Rock” Sanders, a rapper, are both 51. We’re gonna meet a coupla old school dudes.