According to Afrika Bambaataa:[2] Now he took the music of like Mandrill, like "Fencewalk", certain disco records that had funky percussion breaks like the Incredible Bongo Band when they came out with "Apache" and he just kept that beat going.
There were many parallels in the techniques used by Kool DJ Herc and a pioneering disco DJ like Francis Grasso, who worked at Sanctuary, as they used similar mixtures and superimpositions of drumbeats, rock music, funk and African records For less creative disco DJs, however, the ideal was to slip-cute smoothly from the end of one record into the beginning of the next.
In the words of DJ Grandmaster Flash, "Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music.
In this case the who was b-boys (otherwise known as break-boys or breakdancers) and what they wanted was an opportunity to move explosively, express themselves, and peacock to women (Brester and Broughton 167).
[4] A break may be described as when the song takes a "breather, drops down to some exciting percussion, and then comes storming back again"[1] and compared to a false ending.
[1] According to Peter van der Merwe[5] a break "occurs when the voice stops at the end of a phrase and is answered by a snatch of accompaniment", and originated from the bass runs of marches of the "Sousa school".
Some tunes, like 'Buck Dancer's Lament' from early in the nineteenth century, featured a two-bar silence in every eight bars for the break—a quick showcase of improvised dance steps.
[7] However, it is likely that there were a number of like-minded DJs developing the technique at the same time; for example, Walter Gibbons was noted in first-hand accounts by his peers for cutting two copies of the same record in his discothèque gigs of the mid-1970s.
DJ Kool Herc inspired local dancers to dance on the break beats, creating new sounds by combining the breakbeats from various songs.