Blacktronika: Beat Society
Johnny Brenda’s
1201 Frankford Ave.
Philadelphia
June 25, 2026
From hip-hop’s onset, the beat has not only provided rhythm for the music — it's served as the very heartbeat of the culture. Rap, with its emphasis in the human voice, is often foregrounded in hip-hop’s story, but the beat has always served as the culture’s foundational element. In the early 1970s, hip-hop culture literally formed around the practice of DJs playing breakbeats at parties throughout The Bronx. DJs would manually loop the breakbeat (aka a funky, steady drum solo) by using a mixer to crossfade back and forth between two identical copies of the record. In a way, the beats heard at those early hip-hop parties— Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache," Juice’s “Catch a Groove” and James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turn It Loose” — formed a rhythmic nerve center around which hip-hop culture itself coalesced. DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and The Brothers Disco built massive sound systems whose reverberations acted as a clarion call attracting dancers, writers and would-be rappers. As rapping developed as an art form and rap music ascended commercially, the voice supplanted the beat as hip-hop culture’s focal point. Rappers began to receive top billing over DJs and, eventually, the producers of the beat were isolated to the confines of the studio and relegated to the background of creative process.
In the Fall of 2002, a new event called Beat Society launched here in Philadelphia, with the aim of highlighting hip-hop beats and the ingenious producers that create them. Founded by MC/Producer Hezekiah and hosts SAO and Stef Tataz, Beat Society recruited talented producers from around the world and hosted a showcase where they’d play their studio creations live on stage. Today, these kinds of live beat shows are common globally, but in the early 2000s, Beat Society was one of the earliest events of its kind. Highly innovative for its time and widely influential, Beat Society’s list of alumni reads like a who’s who of hip-hop production, including Kanye West, Illmind, Diplo, Kev Brown, Diamond D and many more. On June 26, King Britt and Hezekiah’s team brought Beat Society back to Johnny Brenda’s for the third night of Britt’s Blacktronika festival.
With Mr. Sonny James holding it down on the decks, the energy of the night was high as James played an impeccable set of beats and classic hip-hop cuts from Busta Rhymes, Bahamadia and more. Britt and Hezekiah gave a brief intro to the evening’s proceedings and screened a short documentary on Beat Society’s history. From there Stef and SAO took over the hosting duties and it was time to get to the beats. The featured producers of the evening, Oddisee, FlamesEmoji, Kel_c1000 and PC Beatz were all seated onstage with laptops at small tables, playing their music, round robin-style. With Stef and SAO guiding the musicians through multiple rounds, the music was a testament to the diversity of hip-hop production. Oddisee’s first round beat was a nimble and funky track with discordant piano chords. At one point Kel played a snippet of The Village People’s cheesy disco anthem “YMCA” before chopping up its vocal and completely transforming it into a soulful hip-hop track. FlamesEmoji’s beats coaxed many oohs and ahhs from the crowd with his inventive, rhythmically lopsided grooves; at one point, PC Beatz played a tune with drums and bass so intense it elicited screams from the audience. Beat Society usually does a sample round in which producers are presented with the same musical source material and challenged to reconstruct it in their own way. Last night, the producers were thrown a curveball that added a new dimension to the sample round. The producers and James were given a recording of Sun Ra’s “Blue Soul." As each producer played their reinterpretations of “Blue Soul,” they were joined on stage by saxophonist Knoel Scott and 102 year-old saxman and composer Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Allen and Scott improvised brilliantly over the new sampling grooves, creating a living bridge between hip-hop, the blues and avant-garde jazz in real time. Rounded out with performances from Smdr and hip-hop legend Grand Agent, this Blacktronika edition of Beat Society was one for the ages. Throughout the evening, the music kept every single head and every pair of shoulders in the venue bopped along in time, keeping us all in sync. For one night, it felt like the beat had regained its rightful place as the pulse of hip-hop culture.
