The Blueprint of KRS-One: Highlights from Hip Hop Appreciation Week
We were in the birth of hip-hop
His May 21 performance at the Loft highlighted a week of wide-ranging cultural events (from concerts to ciphers to community service efforts) conceived and/or promoted in part by HHAW organizers Ms. Dia (host of "The Show" on 89.3 WRFG-FM), Angie the HipHop Angel, and Minister Server of HipHop Ministries, Inc.-
''As he passed the mic among an overflowing stage of true-school Atlanta MCs - including an impressive Killer Mike - KRS-One's set resembled a progressive rap revival more than a traditional concert. His own freestyle flow took on a metaphysical air when he began to rhyme about his spiritual self occupying a different dimension of time and simultaneously meditating on the present moment as he acted it out live onstage. The show concluded with Ms. Dia and others awarding KRS-One a plaque in honor of his life-long service as hip-hop's revered "Teacha."-
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Five hours earlier, while holding court with local media, the 44-year-old was asked to tell the story of his life. The following, in his own words, recounts how he met his eventual DJ Scott La Rock in a homeless shelter in 1986, how he got his big break in hip-hop via the Bridge Wars with MC Shan (who popped up backstage near the end), and how he continued on with Boogie Down Productions after Scott La Rock's murder in '87.-
KRS-One: I was born August 20, 1965, Brooklyn, New York.-
Back then it was the ghetto - little small town, working-class people. Today you can't even buy a condominium there for a million dollars. Gentrification at its best. However, we did move around. I moved from Brooklyn. My mother, single parent; my father I never met. He was actually deported, he came from Trinidad. Him and my mom hooked up, but then he got deported and we never saw him again. And so I was raised then by a single parent, single mother. And she started in Brooklyn, like I said. Moved to Manhattan. I went to the Charles B. Russwurm (sp?) School. Lived in Lenox Terrace at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. Spent several years there. But then around 1972-1973 - really it was from '72 to '74 - I moved to the Bronx, to a place called 1600 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. And why would that be across the hall, across the way a park, from Kool DJ Herc. Kool Herc lived at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and it was there that he first brought his system out at the request of his sister, Cindy, brought his turntables out, started playing music for me and other six and seven and eight year olds, and teenagers of the neighborhood.-
I saw a lot of jams go on in that park and the surrounding area. We didn't know it was early hip-hop. We had no idea. We would just call 'em jams, block parties. You just hear the music and you went to the block party and that was it. Years later we learned that was Kool DJ Herc, Pebbly Poo, Coke La Rock.… We were in the birth of hip-hop, we didn't even know it. ''