When I walk down 125th to catch the train I pass a liquor store that has a poster in the front window with this guy's face on it endorsing a vodka company. It breaks my fucking heart everytime. When I was a teenager I heard him speak at a local university's lecture space in front of a very small assembly of college students. He covered all kinds of topics from race to economics to the world power structure to his experiences growing up in New York City including being homeless and the murder of his friend Scott La Rock. He delivered the talk like there were hundreds of people there.
He spoke the way he raps: each word pronounced in a deliberate manner like he's teaching you to speak English, a clear and booming but not overly loud voice, a non-stop flow of opinions and examples all connected with a logical train of thought, hand movements chopping the air and a physical presence demanding your complete attention. After his talk he made himself available in a hallway to take questions, sign autographs and shake hands. Most of the people from the lecture hall followed him there as he stood against a wall commanding respect but not in a manner meant to intimidate. He put forth an energy and way of carrying oneself that I doubt few of us in the mostly white crowd had encountered before.
Years later in college I ran the entertainment board and booked KRS-One to headline the annual Spring concert. He was seeing a major comeback on the strength of the Return Of The Boom Bap album which had delivered a string of huge singles including "Black Cop", "I Can't Wake Up", "Sound Of Da Police" and the title track. On the evening of the concert there was a fairly large crowd, given the size of our school, filling the basketball gym - with the mostly black and latino students from the city jammed up front and the Long Island and upstate white kids filling out the bleachers. It was probably the most racially diverse gathering I'd seen in my years there as his music had attracted not just pure hip-hop fans but also the smokers, the art crowd, skaters, ravers and those that just liked hard shit like Rage and House Of Pain.
DJ Kenny Parker dropped record after record of BDP and KRS solo classics and album cuts, changing the selections throughout to include a current dancehall rhythm or switching songs on the fly per the direction of KRS. Most rap groups we booked to the school had been playing to DAT tapes and faking the DJ set-up or just lamely adding scratches on choruses. This was my first time seeing a sound system concept in action, seeing an MC reading the crowd then pushing and adjusting the energy of the set as needed. He was enjoying himself up there, he really was as much a pure entertainer as he was an educator and he knew how to put on a show.
I stood in the back in the dark where the stage lights couldn't reach, where that relentless boom-bap was bouncing directly off the back of the gym, going forward and then coming back at me again. It sounded like I was inside a massive stadium but I felt enclosed, like I could have reached out and touched the waves that were pinning my back against those blue mats. It was one of the best performances I've ever seen regardless of music genre.
After the last song and with the gym lights slowly coming back on I didn't go downstairs to the makeshift green room we had set up for KRS and his group. I instead pushed open the metal side doors and watched as our security detail of Fruit Of Islam in bow ties and suits and off-duty cops in windbreakers ushered a visibly drained crowd out into the night. I remember looking down at my watch and realizing KRS-One had been onstage for over an hour. It occurred to me then that he had rocked the crowd for much longer than we had agreed upon in his contract.
I don't know how much the vodka company paid him or what opportunities were presented to him - but I know it wasn't nearly the amount that it should have been to get KRS-One of Boogie Down Productions to put his face on a poster in the front of a liquor store to help sell some alcohol on 125th St in Harlem USA.
- LEE / MRE
