Hip Hop 101 for Baby Boomers
The Bridge Battle
VS. 
My friend Kurtis writes in that KRS-One looks familliar but he can't quite place him. KRS' hugeness in the hip-hop world and relative obscurity in the mainstream world is instructive. For any student of hip-hop, KRS-One is unavoidable. His lines are sampled all the time (off the top of my dome this is the only example I can think of: Lootpack samples KRS's stage patter from one of the first hip-hop live albums, BDP: Live, Worldwide, Hardcore), his styles are bitten, and his records are quite literally, the blueprint for hip-hop (sorry Jay-Z). But because he stuck to the postion he stated on 1989's My Philosophy that, " I don't walk this way to portray/or reinforce stereotypes of today/like all my brothas eat chicken and watermelon/talk broken english and drug sellin" mainstream radio has never been too interested in the knowledge that KRS drops.
His original claim to fame was as a battler and ferocious freestyler. Here, once and for all, is a brief and probably not complete recounting of the infamous Bridge Battle with MC Shan and the Juice Crew. The Juice Crew was the stable of artists produced by pioneering sampler, DJ Marley Marl. KRS ran with an equally influential sampler jock named Scott La Rock in a crew they called Boogie Down Productions (named after the "Boogie Down Bronx" where, as you will most certainly learn, they were from). Before Pac and Biggie, Scott La Rock was the most famous hip-hop martyr. He got shot in the course of breaking up a fight outside a show and only got to put out one full length album with BDP. The battle started with a fairly benign neighborhood shoutout from Marley Marl and his rapper MC Shan. The song, the Bridge, was about the Queensbridge projects in Queens and includes a list of old school hip-hop pioneers from Queens.
KRS and BDP took umbrage at the implication hip-hop began in Queens. They responded (as was a common fad in early hip-hop recording, the so-called "answer record" or 12" single responding directly to another artist's 12" single. These days this is rarely done and when dis or answer records are made they usually wind up, surprise surprise, on the internet mainly.) with a song about where they were from, South Bronx.
As you can plainly hear, KRS is like a thousand times doper than MC Shan. His flow is natural and his rhyme schemes are more complex and conceptually intricate. His styles switch up mid song and he rides the beat like its running the Kentucky Derby. Shan on the other hand has that old school rhyme style with emphasis on couplets and stressing the last syllable. He steps up his game a bit but it only really shows his limitations. His styles range from wack to slightly less wack. Here's Shan being slightly less wack on his response to South Bronx on a track called Kill That Noise. Notice he concedes the point of hip-hop origins and claims he was misunderstood. Unfortunately, he laughs in KRS's face at the end of the track which is just plain stupid.
Not content to let Shan have the last word, Scott La Rock and KRS came out with The Bridge Is Over which definitively ended the battle with the vaguelly Jamaicafied taunt of "Biddy-Bye-Bye". As you can hear, KRS again demonstrates his versatility as he sounds totally different from South Bronx, rocking a bit of a toasty, dancehall reggae-ish flow in the beginning.
Years later, Shan and KRS would come back to do a Sprite commercial in which they fake battled in a boxing ring about -if I remember correctly- who liked to drink Sprite more.
Update
The other reason KRS is famous: White people love him!
He did a song with the whitest band of all time, R.E.M. called Radio Song. And another extremely caucasian band, Sublime, wrote a whole song all about how dope he is. It's called (of course) KRS-One.
And Sonya, a woman so caucasian she's an actual factual white Russian, would really really really enjoy having KRS's baby. So far, this is as close she's gotten to consumating her relationship with the Blastmaster.
VS. My friend Kurtis writes in that KRS-One looks familliar but he can't quite place him. KRS' hugeness in the hip-hop world and relative obscurity in the mainstream world is instructive. For any student of hip-hop, KRS-One is unavoidable. His lines are sampled all the time (off the top of my dome this is the only example I can think of: Lootpack samples KRS's stage patter from one of the first hip-hop live albums, BDP: Live, Worldwide, Hardcore), his styles are bitten, and his records are quite literally, the blueprint for hip-hop (sorry Jay-Z). But because he stuck to the postion he stated on 1989's My Philosophy that, " I don't walk this way to portray/or reinforce stereotypes of today/like all my brothas eat chicken and watermelon/talk broken english and drug sellin" mainstream radio has never been too interested in the knowledge that KRS drops.
His original claim to fame was as a battler and ferocious freestyler. Here, once and for all, is a brief and probably not complete recounting of the infamous Bridge Battle with MC Shan and the Juice Crew. The Juice Crew was the stable of artists produced by pioneering sampler, DJ Marley Marl. KRS ran with an equally influential sampler jock named Scott La Rock in a crew they called Boogie Down Productions (named after the "Boogie Down Bronx" where, as you will most certainly learn, they were from). Before Pac and Biggie, Scott La Rock was the most famous hip-hop martyr. He got shot in the course of breaking up a fight outside a show and only got to put out one full length album with BDP. The battle started with a fairly benign neighborhood shoutout from Marley Marl and his rapper MC Shan. The song, the Bridge, was about the Queensbridge projects in Queens and includes a list of old school hip-hop pioneers from Queens.
KRS and BDP took umbrage at the implication hip-hop began in Queens. They responded (as was a common fad in early hip-hop recording, the so-called "answer record" or 12" single responding directly to another artist's 12" single. These days this is rarely done and when dis or answer records are made they usually wind up, surprise surprise, on the internet mainly.) with a song about where they were from, South Bronx.
As you can plainly hear, KRS is like a thousand times doper than MC Shan. His flow is natural and his rhyme schemes are more complex and conceptually intricate. His styles switch up mid song and he rides the beat like its running the Kentucky Derby. Shan on the other hand has that old school rhyme style with emphasis on couplets and stressing the last syllable. He steps up his game a bit but it only really shows his limitations. His styles range from wack to slightly less wack. Here's Shan being slightly less wack on his response to South Bronx on a track called Kill That Noise. Notice he concedes the point of hip-hop origins and claims he was misunderstood. Unfortunately, he laughs in KRS's face at the end of the track which is just plain stupid.
Not content to let Shan have the last word, Scott La Rock and KRS came out with The Bridge Is Over which definitively ended the battle with the vaguelly Jamaicafied taunt of "Biddy-Bye-Bye". As you can hear, KRS again demonstrates his versatility as he sounds totally different from South Bronx, rocking a bit of a toasty, dancehall reggae-ish flow in the beginning.
Years later, Shan and KRS would come back to do a Sprite commercial in which they fake battled in a boxing ring about -if I remember correctly- who liked to drink Sprite more.
Update
The other reason KRS is famous: White people love him!
He did a song with the whitest band of all time, R.E.M. called Radio Song. And another extremely caucasian band, Sublime, wrote a whole song all about how dope he is. It's called (of course) KRS-One.
And Sonya, a woman so caucasian she's an actual factual white Russian, would really really really enjoy having KRS's baby. So far, this is as close she's gotten to consumating her relationship with the Blastmaster.
posted by E at 4:33 PM
1 Comments:
He said, and i quote "We will meet again"
That's was big for me.
I want to have his children I think.
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