KRS-One schools New Zealand on Hip Hop

A good rap cypher is a powerful incantation of the state of the human consciousness.

It is expression.

It is art.

It is life.

In short: It’s magic.

A lyrical spell of sorts. A celestially-inspired incantation of letters and words.

It’s an intriguing thing watching a seasoned musician deliver a seminar on the meaning and purpose of his craft. On the 22nd of April 2012, a sun-filled Sunday afternoon, New Zealand was blessed by the enamoured speech of one of the proverbial messiahs and founding fathers of this unique form of musical expression known as “Hiphop” or “Hip Hop” or even “hip-hop”. KRS-One wore a T-shirt with those 3 derivations of the words. The three spellings have completely different meanings he told us – much like the holy trinity in legend of old – where god, son and holy ghost are viewed as separate but the same – or perhaps an even better analogy would be water with its three forms of solid, liquid and gas.

Hiphop was the conscious foundation of the movement – the heart so to speak.

Hip Hop was the expression or culture and finally:

Hip-hop was the corporate or commercial arm.

KRS-One (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everything,) a 6ft3 beast of a man with rasta dreads and the deepest voice you’ve ever heard (forget the baritone of Barry White, this man sounds like a fog horn on steroids,) also known as The Teacha, is not only a rapper but also a philosopher and a well-versed scholar of life.

As someone who has spent a large portion of his adult life at schools and universities, it was incredible to witness a man with no formal background in education, schooling a 1000 “students of hip hop” (as he referred to the indelibly diverse crowd of young and old – kids as young as a couple of months to some people who looked like they were over a hundred years old) for nearly 3 hours without a pause in his breath.

He held us captive – without any notes, Teleprompters or primers of any kind. For three hours. Think about it? How many teachers or speakers have you heard in your lives that have kept your attention for more than 45 minutes? Not many, if any. That’s the definition of genius!

He decided to hold the talk on a whim- in reaction to some “important, political people” complaining about his music and throwing all sorts of allegations at him regarding its propensity to incite violence, lyrics that degrade women and even the allegation that it wasn’t music at all. Instead of firing off a PR war with the blinkered politicians (who’ll remain nameless) KRS-One smoothly announced that he was going to hold a talk entitled “The Meaning and Purpose of Hip Hop” at, of all places, Auckland Museum - Auckland City’s oldest and most respected land marks. The fact that this monument of tradition and conservatism was to host this talk was a big slap in the face of the boring people who’d had the audacity to criticise and negatively label his music. It was beautiful!

It was more than a lecture; it was indeed, providence of sorts. One of the more memorable moments came when a baby in the audience started crying, right when KRS was trying to introduce the audience to one of the cornerstone melodies of hip hop, its melodic inception one could say, namely “Good Times” by Chic – whilst KRS was singing the chorus at the top of his lungs, this baby just started screaming – everyone laughed, including the man himself. He then paused, flashing one of his exuberantly generous smiles, turned to his entourage and said “can someone please get that lady and her child some water? We all need something to drink every now and then”. It was the epitome of the day- the one act of valour that defines us all as human beings walking this Earth.

He candidly retold the birth story of Hiphop from it’s hey days in the parks of New York city’s 2 most eligible boroughs for the moniker “birthplace of hip hop,” namely the Bronx and Brooklyn (the former being KRS’s number one candidate of choice for the prize- as he had been raised there- naturally).

The man captivated the audience with a lesson not only in musical history but also political and philosophical. In fact he proved that those 3 stalwarts of human creative ability are more intertwined than one may initially assume. From the arrival of Marcus Garvey in the 60s who liberated the minds of many African Americans by introducing his native Jamaican culture to New York City in the form of Jamaican dance hall to the ingenious lateral thinking talents of the relatively unknown electrician DJ Flash who, by simply hooking up two turntables and creating the “cross-fader,” sparked the rise of modern DJs and in turn club culture (DJ Flash went on to become Grandmaster Flash after this little feat). He said that prior to Marcus Garvey, most African Americans were cerebrally trapped by the notion of their historical context in America. The brazenly evil notion of ‘white man is master and black man is slave’ had etched itself firmly into the minds of many people, trapping and inhibiting them reaching their true potentials in life. From the KKK lynching in the 50s and 60s to the assassination of their most revered leaders KRS painted the backdrop to what kick-started the movement of the spoken poet.

On top of Marcus Garvey, it was Dr King, Malcolm X and the lesser known Shirley Chisholm who further inspired and united the lost consciousness of black people in America after years of second class citizenship and slavery. In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman to serve in the United States Congress; she was in fact the first woman ever to run for president! Rosa Parks sat down in an all-white section of a bus in Alabama and it slowly began: The emancipation and re-birth of a people who had been disenfranchised for centuries; robbed of their livelihood and freedom - let alone the powerful passion of their culture they had been dispossessed of! And nowhere so did it become more powerful than in the art of the ‘spoken word’ synchronised to drum beats that would eventually become known to the world as Hip hop.

He also spoke of the gang culture in the US and how one man tried to put an end to that, Kevin Donald - who visited Africa and spoke with the chiefs of Zulu tribes who enlightened him as to their philosophy:

“When a brother fights another brother, enemies of their father take everything”

He brought this message back with him to New York City and told the newly formed Black Panthers that what they were doing was not going to help the case of their people and that they should stop the violence!

The rap battles actually started in the playground. It was a bizarre turn of events. The Jamaican dance hall clubs inspired by Garvey and further inflamed by Kool Herc’s passionate “cutting” of the turn table, eventually moved to the parks (because of over- capacity of the clubs due to huge popularity) – rendering them “open-sourced” events allowing the young kids a glimpse at what their parents were getting up to at night! These kids (young KRS-One included) then started inventing the “go off” which was a special blend of freestyle dancing and martial arts – they started naming moves and then started rhyming these names with things they saw the adults doing – these were the first tentative rap cyphers ever made.

There were so many names mentioned during the talk it was hard to commit them all to memory. From Afrika Bambaata, to Keith Cowboy, Cassanova Fly (who supposedly wrote the lyrics to the first multimillion dollar rap vinyl “Rapper’s Delight” but had them stolen from him,) to Curtis Blow and Russell Simmons. After “Rapper’s Delight” the slums of New York were crawling with agents looking for “any black man who could sing a rap to a beat.” He said the original MC’s were told not to sign with major labels by their mentors. Enter the young Jewish entrepreneurs who started signing people in their mother’s living rooms. “We trusted them because they lived like us. They were part of our hood and they were good at business things. They hung in the back of the clubs nodding their heads to the beat”. He said it was these Jewish kids who made them realise they could lift themselves out of poverty and get out of the ghetto.

It was quite moving when he spoke about this “Jewish kids believing in black kids at a time when they didn’t believe in themselves” and everyone in the audience could tell that this little bond had truly touched his life in a profound way. I think everyone in the audience had a tear in their eye at that point.

It was interesting hearing Krs, a man who grew up fatherless in relative poverty on the mean streets of the Bronx in the 70s, waxing lyrical about the responsibility of the medium he had helped create, to heal “and embrace the Earth with love.” Krs-One made everyone in the room believe in the power of Hiphop (the conscious form).

KRS-One became an MC because of the electrical black out of 1977. A black out that left large parts of the city dark for over 24 hours. He said his mother had always made a point of distinguishing between ‘good and bad folk’. “You see Samuel on the corner over there Chris? He’s a bad person because he sells drugs and kills people – and do you see Mrs. Johnson over there carrying her groceries home? She’s a good person because she works at the post office and pays taxes.”

This had made such an impression on the young boy that he had always viewed the world in this dualistic way. Well, until that fateful blackout that is. There were riots in the streets and people were stealing, guns were being shot. It was mayhem. Young KRS was watching the spectacle from his house when he witnessed something that would make such an indelible impression on him, ultimately changing his world view forever; he saw Mrs Johnson jumping out of the window of the electronics store opposite their house, carrying a stolen TV in her arms (complete with trailing cable)! He said he couldn’t believe it and asked his mother what happened, and for the first time he could remember, ‘the most talkative woman on Earth’ was rendered speechless.

“When the lights are on, everyone is active, wearing masks – when the lights go off, people become who they really are” was what his mother had always lectured him. But how did that relate to poor Mrs Johnson? A topsy-turvy world indeed.

It was then he decided he wanted to be a rapper. To tell a story to the world, his story.

As if the talk wasn’t divinely inspired enough, right when KRS was talking about rap’s unique ability to cross invisible borders and unify differing cultures and ethnicities – two young Maori girls walked up to a Chinese couple sitting behind them, motioning that they wanted to play with the couple’s son (who had been sitting shyly, almost enviously, watching the young girls run around the aisles having fun). The parents smiled and prodded the boy to go with the girls, after nervously burrowing his head in his dad’s lap, the boy stood up and ran off with the girls.

It was as if God or some other Grande Architect of this universe was actually present in the room- guiding the events with his invisible brush strokes.

He ended his seminar much like he had begun it, with profound insights into the origin of this music – “The preservation of hip hop, is the preservation of motherhood” referring to the fact that the majority of the original 80s MC's from New York, grew up fatherless with only their single mothers to raise them. So the inspiration and very delivery of their medium was garnered from women. "Men need women" he said "women don't need men. Women 'choose' to have men." He then touched upon the proverbial piece de resistance of his talk (addressing the very reason why he had decided to hold the seminar in the first place): All these guys learned the lingo from listening to their mothers gossiping in the living room with their girlfriends about other women (e.g. b*tch this, ho* that etc.). In context, this indeed rendered the misogynistic allegations of hip hop slightly ironic, and possibly even hypocritical.

KRS-one was born 3 months after Malcom X’s assassination by his own brothers at the Nation of Islam. His mother had told him that he knew he was going to be a special kid because she used to go to Malcolm X’s speeches and when he would be at the most poignant part of the speech, young KRS would always start kicking in her stomach.

On an interesting aside, someone I met the next day told me about how her 14 year old son had gone to the talk and come home preaching. I must say – I felt no different! This treatise being reflective of that I guess. If KRS-One started a church tomorrow – I would be his first apostle.

No doubt.

The world needs more men like him. Role models with a mission.

A mission to spread the word of hip hop.

A form of thought expression deeply manifested over thousands of centuries in our collective human consciousness. From sermons to sonnets. From ghettos to stages.

If Shakespeare were around in the 21st century, he would be a rapper.

So would Jesus and so would the Buddha!

It is a divinely inspired art form unprecedented in its degree of difficulty in delivery. Many have tried, only a few have mastered.

Thank you KRS-One. From the bottom of our hearts.

New Zealand loves you!

ENDS

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