where does the expression drop the mic come from
Mic drop The gesture dates to the 1980s when it was used by rappers and comedians. Performers from both groups can engage in confrontational performance styles - rappers may participate in rap battles, comedians may interact with a heckler in the audience - and dropping the microphone after a particularly effective line indicated complete confidence in the opponent's inability to come back with anything that would be worthy of a response. An early occurrence was Eddie Murphy in 1983 in his standup show Delirious.[2]
Turntablism To understand the significance of this achievement, it is important to first define the "break." Briefly, the "break" of a song is a musical fragment only seconds in length, which typically takes the form of an "interlude" in which all or most of the music stops except for the percussion. Kool Herc introduced the break-beat technique as a way of extending the break indefinitely. This is done by buying two of the same record, finding the break on each record, and switching from one to the other using the DJ mixer: e.g., as record A plays, the DJ quickly backtracks to the same break on record B, which will again take the place of A at a specific moment where the audience will not notice that the DJ has switched records. Using that idea, Grandmaster Flash elaborated on Kool Herc's invention of break-beat DJing and came up with the quick-mix theory, in which Flash sectioned off a part of the record like a clock.[13] He described it as being "...like cutting, the backspin, and the double-back." [14]