By Kim Hudson
Photographs by Amber Schmisseur
Each Friday night, promptly at 9:30, the needle drops and the bass bounces off the walls of the Elvis Room, in the basement of Blueberry Hill. It’s the time and place patrons gather for The Science, the weekly hip-hop party made famous last year in Rolling Stone, and the mood is always expectant.
“Hip-hop starts as something mental. It has a feeling to it, something that can’t be seen,” murmurs the party’s emcee, Da-Fly D-Ex. A Milwaukee native, he visited family in New York as a small child and went home intoxicated by the DJs, rapping, breakdancing and graffiti he saw there. After that early exposure to the four pillars of hip-hop, he was hooked. Now he makes The Science happen every week and broadcasts the party on KDHX (88.1 FM).
Even over the airwaves, the party has a New York basement-party feel, but radio only tells half of the story. D-Ex tapes vinyl to the floor for the breakdancers—including resident “B-boy” Nick Gates, who’s a COCA dance instructor and former competitor on the Fox reality show So You Think You Can Dance—who attend each week.
The Science spins the latest hits from rappers such as Fat Joe and old-school favorites from the likes of MC Lyte. The party regularly plays host to national stars such as DJ Premier and the Nappy Roots, but last fall St. Louisans were treated to what was, for many, a once-in-a-lifetime event: a party emceed by Kool DJ Herc. D-Ex notes that it was Herc who coined the term “B-boy” (“break-boy”) to describe a dancer who turns it up a notch during the parts of a song in which almost all the instrumentation drops out, leaving only drums and bass line. Herc started as a DJ in the 1970s—and his performance at The Science was his first in St. Louis.
“There aren’t too many people you’d be in a position to meet in your lifetime who’ve been responsible for creating a movement,” says D-Ex.
In offering a lot of what’s history and a lot of what’s now, D-Ex keeps the party on track to fulfilling its mission: “Just to give people something different, give them an alternative to what they are used to.”
