Sorry about all the music posts lately, but here's another one:

Michaelangelo Matos (with some multimedia assistance from Oliver Wang) on "the cultural history of 'Apache'"

In other words, a record written by a white Englishman imitating Native Americans as portrayed by white Americans and made famous by a Dane with a vaguely Hawaiian sound, arranged by a Canadian, became the biggest record in black New York. Juggling multiple copies of the track’s percussion break until they became a hypnotic rhythmic mantra, over which his accompanying MCs would rhyme, Kool Herc and the pioneering hip-hop DJs who followed him—the most storied being Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash—turned the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache” into an underground hit in the manner of other early-’70s records like Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” or TSOP’s “Love Is the Message”—a DJ specialty, played and treasured by those in the know. And like those songs, “Apache” eventually become a mass-cult hit. It just wouldn’t do it as itself.