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• #KURTIS BLOW BASKETBALL YOUTUBE HOW TO#

Every record store had its own chart, its own top 10, which coincidentally, is how I learned to read, by studying the charts. I majored in Communications and Broadcasting and learned that building up a track record in the boondocks was the path to follow. People like to focus on the more virtuoso lyricists of the time, such as Melle Mel, Grandmaster Caz, and Kool Moe Dee, but the genre needed the balance brought by people like Blow in order to spread it far and wide and get it on the radio.īLOW: I went to City College of New York, where I met Russell Simmons. He was a "party MC" who made dance songs that people could sing along to - and I don't say that disparagingly at all, it's a very important area of hip-hop and he was crucial in making it a viable force in the marketplace and music industry.

#KURTIS BLOW BASKETBALL YOUTUBE HOW TO#

PAUL EDWARDS (author, " How to Rap" and " How to Rap 2"): Kurtis Blow wasn't particularly ground-breaking on a technical level, but that wasn't what he was going for, he was going for hits, sort of like the Will Smith of his day. I saw Kurtis Blow rap "The Breaks" up there, it was insane energy. Here we had chain-link fences surrounding these basketball courts, and hundreds of people jammed in there to hear Afrika Bambaataa or Grandmaster Flash. Television was banned under the apartheid government and I was coming from a place of surfing in the morning and diving for lobsters for lunch. It was super dangerous, and I was definitely the only white kid from South Africa up there, but I'd never felt anything like it. It was amazing, an art form that only existed in the Bronx, parts of Brooklyn, and the upper reaches of Manhattan. I‘d become good friends with Charlie Ahearn, who would go on to direct " Wild Style," and we'd cruise up there on the subway to these concerts. Around that time, the first hip-hop shows were taking place in the South Bronx.

MICHAEL OBLOWITZ (video director, "Basketball"): I was part of the No Wave movement, which came out of the downtown arts scene, punk rock and experimental film and the like. Billy-Bill and I saw ourselves as rebels, that was our ideology for people who came to our more obscure parties, what I called "ghetto discos." As a DJ, I was already different because I wasn't playing disco. This was seven or eight years before the first hip-hop record came out, but I knew that here was something new and fresh. We learned to appreciate the elements of hip-hop before such a thing existed, but we didn't start writing anything down until the late 1970s.īLOW: I was doing my thing in Harlem and the Bronx, keeping up with what the better known DJs were doing, when I met Kool Herc. WARING: Eventually, we were dancing in the clubs.

We learned to appreciate the elements of hip-hop before such a thing existed. Billy-Bill was the guy who got me into all the parties to breakdance. He was doing something good with his life, not like a lot of the other thugs and criminals in Harlem. We started out breakdancing in 1972, house parties and block parties.īLOW: William is three years older than me and he was the only kid my mom would let me hang around with because he was headed to college. We grew up together, maybe 100 yards apart. WILLIAM "BILLY-BILL" WARING (Lyricist, "Basketball"): Kurtis and I are lifelong friends. I was 13 and I put together two component sets, my mom's and his mom's, and we had continuous music throughout the party. The first time I ever DJ'ed was in 1972 at my buddy Tony Rome's birthday party. I also used to play all the music for the family, spinning James Brown, Motown, the Isley Brothers, Jackie Wilson - all the stuff my mom loved. Guys used to come get me for the local dance competitions, I became a B-Boy. She was popular throughout the neighborhood. KURTIS BLOW: I've always been a big music lover thanks to my mom, who'd been a great dancer in Harlem at the Renaissance, the Savoy and the Cotton Club. Blow's had a long career and remains one of the few rap game elite who actually were down from day one. In 1984, Kurtis Blow dropped his fifth album "Ego Trip." The Harlem native was already hip-hop royalty as the first rapper signed to a major label, the first to tour the United States and Europe, and the first with a gold record, his 1980 smash "The Breaks." Other hits include his debut record "Christmas Rappin'," the Run-DMC collaboration "8 Million Stories," and "If I Ruled the World," which would be famously sampled by Nas.