Full Clip: KRS-One Runs Down His Catalogue Ft. BDP, Run-DMC, LL, DJ Premier, Diddy, Nelly And More

“Me and Scott La Rock (DJ and co-founder of Boogie Down Productions) started B Boy Records, which was a small little record company, with some other guys—Ray Wilson, Jack Allen and Bill Kamarra. That’s where we put out ‘South Bronx.’ Before all this, Scott Sterling (Scott La Rock) was my social worker and I was a homeless dude in the shelter. Me, Just-Ice, and ICU…we were all homeless b-boys who rapped and did graffiti. We were living in the streets day-to-day…all we had was hip-hop. We’d hang out at hip-hop spots, go to the train yards and tag, go to the park jams, battle each other…we were living it out completely. This was about 1985, and somehow, by the order of the universe, Scott becomes my social worker. He would ask me, ‘What is it that you want to do with your life?’ I would tell him I’m a MC and a philosopher [laughs]. But Scott really took that seriously and stayed on me. I did some rhymes for him about nuclear war and the world coming to an end and he loved it. But we didn’t always see eye-to-eye. We got into a lot of arguments.

But what’s crazy is Scott would invite me to a place called Broadway RT where he DJ’d every Friday and Saturday. That’s where my eyes opened up. I was on the guest list, had a drink ticket, walked in and the place was jammed. People were dancing and it was hip-hop to the maximum degree with the Adidas, bubble goose jackets, bamboo earrings, Cazal glasses and Kangols. And my corny, nerd social worker was the absolute coolest dude on Friday and Saturday nights! That blew my mind. Me and Scott formed the group Boogie Down Productions because with the way I rhymed we knew that nobody was going to sign us. We went around to everybody…RCA, Sony, Columbia…no one wanted to hear our records. So we became our own producers because we didn’t think we wasn’t going to make it as MC and DJ’s. That’s where the name Boogie Down Productions came from.

Flash forward. Boogie Down Productions’ career starts with a battle. A lot of people were saying we were going after Run-DMC. But let’s get this out of the way: Run-DMC was king during the time we were about to drop Criminal Minded! That needs to be said at the top of this interview. At that time Run and them weren’t king just because they were selling platinum records. They were king because of the way they presented hip-hop to hip-hop fans. It was the way that they dressed from the Adidas to the Godfather hats. It was the way that they rhymed. Everyone knew that Run-DMC with the great DJ Jam Master Jay were the ultimate hip-hop group from 1983 to 1987. In hip-hop you had to beat the guy on top. If you claimed you were the king, you had to be stomping crews out every week. And Run-DMC was killing them! Every week something was coming off those Run-DMC albums. And that’s when I came around in 1985. BDP wanted to prove we could be on top.

Now right around 1985 the crack cocaine scene was coming in. The West Coast had already had their share of it since ’82-’83, but it started getting into the East Coast on the street level. There was a group of people that felt like something should be said about the escalating violence; about how crack dealers were killing the weed dealers in the neighborhood. They were getting killed so that the crack dealers could move in. In a lot of cases, it was actually the cops that were working with the crack cocaine dealers killing off the Rastafarian dreads who would sell the herb in the ‘hood. Crack started destroying everything. At this time the MC was the person who spoke on behalf of our community. That was your job as a rapper. You didn’t think about making records. There were whole MC crews that never made records that influenced hip-hop greatly. Ask DMC who will tell you stories about sitting at the foot of Grandmaster Caz learning every cadence and move he made. This was a crazy time. You had Run-DMC, you had LL Cool J and Def Jam; and then you had another powerful clique on the rise—the Juice Crew. This was all happening as Boogie Down Productions was about to release Criminal Minded.

BDP wasn’t trying to be hard in a street sense. We were just taking our cue from the Black Panthers. Remember, they used to walk around with their guns out because it was legal before the Patriot Act. So on the cover of Criminal Minded you see me and Scott posing on the cover with guns. I even put the shotgun belt over my shoulder, which was a longtime symbol of revolution for the Mexicans, Native Americans, and for the Africans. The streets were bubbling. MC Shan from the Juice Crew disses LL and tells him that he bit his style and challenges him to a battle. This was huge! The Juice Crew was doing it big. Roxanne Shante just came off of battling UTFO. I finally had my demo of ‘Criminal Minded’ with Scott cutting up Trouble Funk. We also had ‘Elementary’ on there. Somehow we heard Mr. Magic (influential host of the legendary New York hip-hop radio show Rap Attack)—who was down with Marley and the Juice Crew—said we were wack. And we were like, ‘Wack???!!! Mr. Magic is wack! Shan is wack. Marley is wack!’ That’s when I picked a battle with Shan on ‘South Bronx.’ I mimicked his song the same way Roxanne did on ‘Roxanne, Roxanne.’ He answers me with ‘(South Bronx) Kill That Noise,’ which was a huge regional record as well. I then answered with ‘The Bridge Is Over.’ And I shut it down [laughs].

I was so happy to be making records. I’m still appreciative to MC Shan to this day. If it wasn’t for Shan there would be no KRS-One. BDP came out victorious, but we didn’t come out all the way victorious because the critics kept saying, ‘Well, all you guys are is a battle group…you’re not a real group like Run-DMC, the Fat Boys or like Whodini.’ And they were right. So I ran back and wrote songs that showed that we were here to stay…that we were capable of making an entire album. We did the [rock sound] like Run and them on ‘Dope Beat.’ We started making songs like ‘The P Is Free’ and ‘9mm Goes Bang,’ which talked about how the crack dealers were moving out the herb dealer. And we were breaking new ground by using dancehall reggae. Hip-hop had never heard anything like that before. Even Schoolly D was like, ‘Yo, that shit was cold.’ Even though he rhymed about street life, he was still a conscious street rapper like how NWA did it with ‘Express Yourself.’ Basically, BDP was all about realism. But on a conscious level.”

“When Ghetto Music was being recorded I was getting away from D-Nice, Harmony, Scotty Morris, who was our manager at the time, and Ms. Melodie. I was getting away from them because we all had a big falling out. I had gotten divorced from Ms. Melodie and D-Nice quit the group and went to Flava Unit. Boogie Down Productions fell apart after Scott’s death, so I went on. Here’s Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip-Hop, and as you can see from the earlier days we were trying to write out a cultural plan for hip-hop. Let’s look at the music more than just sounds and lyrics. Let’s look at this even from a spiritual point of view…let’s start questioning the philosophies and the theologies that are around us. This is where we started doing songs like ‘You Must Learn’ and ‘Why Is That.’ We were questioning what everyone thought was real. We were questioning the interpretation of the Bible. We were questioning how black kids were being taught in school.

I won’t take all the credit for Ghetto Music’s [groundbreaking sound]. At the time I was surrounded by some very talented people. Now I had some new people with me…some new influences. One of those new people who joined BDP was Sidney Mills who came in around 1988. He was one of the producers of this reggae jam ‘Telephone Lover.’ This record was disgustingly huge! At the same time I was producing Sly & Robbie, major reggae artists that did every reggae beat that you could imagine. I’m in the studio working with them and they were lending me ideas, and samples and basslines and all kind of craziness. And in addition to that, I had my own set-up in my basement…the SP-1200 is in full effect!

I got people like Kid Capri, who was just starting his DJing career. He’s sleeping on my couch in my house. I had people like Fat Joe who I was starting to take under my wing…just street dudes I was surrounding myself with. Ghetto Music comes out of all this. It’s very reggae-based, very dancehall…it leans to that side. It reflects the time when reggae and hip-hop was starting to merge after I did ‘The Bridge Is Over.’ These were the experimental days. That’s why we called the album The Blueprint. The lyrics and sound on that album was drawing a line in the sand for DJ’s, MC’s and producers: this is what hip-hop is. We were defining it in 1989.”  

“‘Self Destruction’ was out at the same time as Ghetto Music. When we talk about defining hip-hop this was very important to rap in the early days. The hip-hop community would have meetings and summits regularly. This is how the record ‘Self Destruction’ was made. It was another time in hip-hop when rappers actually called each other up and conversed with each other because there weren’t many of us. Most of the rappers were still in New York. This was before the West Coast really blew up. You had Ice T, you had Too $hort, NWA and a few other groups. And the South was just getting started with Luke and the Geto Boys. And that was about it. So that ‘Self Destruction’ record brought meaning and purpose to hip-hop. And hip-hop fans loved it! Because by the time ’89 comes around, the Teacher is victorious…everyone is with it. Everybody is wearing the African medallions. Everybody is listening to Public Enemy. Everybody is black…we got the flattop fades. Everybody knows their culture.

But it wasn’t [all unity]. No one should be looked at any less or any more, but having said that, it seemed that in the world of hip-hop even when you did conscious music you still had to be highly competitive. It started with ‘South Bronx.’ We were trying to get that record pressed up at the same time that Kurtis Blow was getting a record called ‘The Bronx’ pressed up. The pressing plant that we were using called us up and said Russell Simmons (Def Jam founder) halted the pressing of our record to press Kurtis’ record. So right away at the beginning of my career I’m starting to feel the sting of a more powerful corporation manipulating and trying to hold its space in the music industry by pushing us little guys around.

So having said all of that, we started working on the ‘Self Destruction’ record. Doug E. Fresh came up with the chorus…long live Doug E. Fresh. D-Nice did the music…long live D-Nice. But then D-Nice and Doug E gets into an argument while we were recording the song. It was over something stupid like D-Nice not being large enough to be on the record. There was an argument about Just-Ice because somebody had a problem with him being on the record because he was prone to violence. He was the original hip-hop gangsta…no bullshit. This was after he was arrested for allegedly shooting someone in Washington D.C. People had issues with him being on the song and in the video because we were talking stop the violence and they’re thinking I’m putting Just-Ice in the video only because they thought he was my man. But my argument was it’s not that he’s my man; it’s just the ones that should be saying stop the violence are the ones that have been the cause of it. Ann Carly, who was the A&R for Jive Records at the time and who helped put the whole project together, agreed with me.

Heavy, much respect the [late great] Heavy D, showed up to the ‘Self Destruction’ session. LL Cool J showed up, too, but he got a phone call from Def Jam in which somebody told him not to perform on the record or else he was going to be kicked off the label. This was a big threat, but he still came to the studio and I will always respect LL for that. He sat down with MC Lyte and co-wrote her part. There was a lot of love there. And Run-DMC wanted to be on the record, too! But they couldn’t be on it because of Rush. And Jam Master Jay was angry about this. Not just on some homeboy shit. Jay was really angry at the fact that he thought we wouldn’t consider Run-DMC for this record, like, ‘That’s some bullshit!’ But it wasn’t us. It was the record companies that were denying our record, one of which was Def Jam. And this was all supposedly coming out of Russell Simmons’ office. Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince also wanted to be on ‘Self Destruction.’ But Ann Carly stopped them because she felt that Will [Smith’s] and Jeff’s image was too commercial for the record. I didn’t even know that at the time. I learned this over the years. I respected Will Smith so much for even wanting to be a part of that record.

“Kwame Ture opened my eyes to what happened to the black power movement and who was a fraud and who was a snake. But more than anything else he taught me that we are all human. That’s when we formed H.E.A.L. (Human Education Against Lies). A few years later, I followed my teacher all the way to his deathbed when Kwame Ture was at Minister Farrakhan’s house dying of prostate cancer. I kissed him and he smiled at me. He gave me an elder’s hug where you can feel the spirit leave him and go into you. You can’t front after that. I can’t blame an artist who never knew a Martin Luther King or a Marcus Garvey or a Kwame Ture personally. There’s no ‘you’ with that. There’s no ‘I’ anymore. All you remember is your teacher, that deathbed and your mission.

We were able to get some great names on the H.E.A.L. record: Big Daddy Kane, MC Lyte, Kid Capri, Queen Latifah, Freddie Foxx, and LL Cool J. After Run-DMC weren’t allowed to be on ‘Self Destruction,’ Jam Master Jay tells me, ‘Okay…no problem. If you do another record like ‘Self Destruction’ call Run-DMC personally.’ And they were able to do the H.E.A.L. project; Jay and DMC came through for us! But Run didn’t show up. When it came time to shoot the video, however, LL wasn’t allowed to be in it. So again, when some rappers weren’t allowed [to appear in the video for ‘Heal Yourself’], this is just part of hip-hop’s history.”

“Right around 1992, the Gulf War is on big time. We just knew it was the New World Order. There were a lot of things going on in hip-hop that I didn’t like. So I made an album called Sex And Violence to make that point. I was letting everybody know what hip-hop had become. We needed to re-think this; we needed to re-think what we were becoming. So for the album cover I used Robert Williams’ surreal artwork, which depicted the Oracle of Delphi. It shows a half-man, half-woman swooping in on the entrepreneur, squeezing cheese out of a lady that was sitting on a man’s lap. This entrepreneur is obviously in a sexual situation with her and while he’s wasting time the oracle comes in with a clock that points to doomsday. I put that message out in 1992 because I didn’t want to be so blatant with just screaming out things like the New World Order or globalization or the Illuminati. I think we chronicled everything hip-hop was going through on Sex And Violence.

But I wasn’t the only one trying to say these things. Back then all of hip-hop had a philosophy. You had the pro-Black philosophy prevalent in hip-hop, which equaled to Pan-Africanism—Kwame Ture to the fullest. He talked about a socialist Africa. That’s how I got caught up with the African National Congress when [Nelson] Mandela got freed. When he was let out of jail I was one of the only rappers that was asked to perform at Yankee Stadium when he came to New York. So the Pro-black philosophy was still very prevalent. At this time the black man is God! The 5 Percent Nation was huge. This was an offshoot of the Nation of Islam. There were names like Born Allah and Freedom Justice Equality. People were studying what they called their lessons. But when you looked at some of these people’s actual lives—and not the leaders and serious studiers of 5 Percent knowledge, but their underlings—some of these people just had half knowledge and was running around saying they represented the entire culture. These were some of the people I was going up against when I was making Sex And Violence. And I addressed my beefs on the song ‘Build & Destroy’.

Basically what I was trying to get across on that song is I didn’t see color to be honest with you. I believe that human beings are consciousness and energy. Intellectually, I didn’t understand the whole concept of the black man being God or how the black woman was the earth. I didn’t grasp it, so some of my own ignorance was at the lead. Within my own ignorance of the 5 Percent Nation I’m looking at these cats like, ‘Y’all dudes are playing with God!’ And I’m serious about God. I was also getting into it with the X-Clan. They started taking shots at me saying stuff like, ‘Brother, you must learn’ and calling me captain human because I put out Human Education Against Lies and I’m doing records with R.E.M. and talking about environmentalism and saving the planet. It all just sounded too white to them.

And X-Clan was rolling with some old school revolutionaries like Sonny Carson. These guys put in work and it was actually them who was telling X-Clan, ‘Yo, go get that brother KRS-One…knock him down.’ I learned later on from Brother J (X-Clan’s lead MC) that they were putting him up to this. So I started putting word out around Brooklyn like, who is this Brother J dude? And J started putting word out like, who does KRS-One think he is? It started to get so wild that there were crews that were gearing up in the Bronx and in Brooklyn all because of X-Clan and KRS beefing! So Afrika Bambaataa calls us both us and says, ‘This is bullshit…both of y’all stand for something way deeper.’ Basically Bam embarrassed us both on the phone and called us up to the Bronx River. We shook hands and squashed it. From that day on, we became friends.

But right after I squashed it with X-Clan, cats from the 5 Percent Nation was still attacking me. They heard ‘Build & Destroy’ and were really coming at me. My own arrogance and ignorance allowed me to debate with others that were ignorant and arrogant. There was a real beef in the streets to where I was doing a show at the old Studio 54, which was called The Ritz back then. And about hundred Gods with guns came to the show and were screaming, ‘Yo, when KRS comes out we going to see him.’ And I’m like, ‘Fuck this…I ain’t no punk. I’ll battle everyone of these Gods.’ I was beefing with Poor Righteous Teachers, too. But then I realized from one of the leaders of the 5 Percent Nation who explained to me the depth of the movement. The fact that the Asiatic Blackman was the first man to walk the earth, even before writing was invented—this was solid knowledge. We broke bread and squashed the beef. I found out that my real beef was with the people who was taking this lightly. We all learned from each other.” 

“This is when I realized my first enlightenment. This is when I declared I’m not just doing hip-hop…I am hip-hop. The year before, I made the statement to a magazine that I was the living embodiment of hip-hop. And some people took that as me being arrogant. But I believe that everywhere I go, hip-hop goes. And I felt the same way about everyone else. We are all hip-hop. You are not just doing hip-hop…you are hip-hop. I started putting those slogans out and I got into a lot of debates and bumped heads with magazines.

There were new members in my crew: Mad Lion and Channel Live. We were killing it. This is also the time when the Wu-tang Clan was strong. You had people like Ol’ Dirty Bastard making great music. These were not just MC’s. These were characters, who just happened to MC. When we were making the KRS-One record, me and Preemo started to really find our niche. You can hear that chemistry on ‘MC’s Act Like They Don’t Know’. In any creative environment you enter a space where you know you have something good and nobody else can do it. If you are really into your art you maybe enter that space two or three times in your career. I entered this space a few times in my career and ‘MC’s Act Like They Don’t Know’ was one of those spaces. I was putting my flag up.” 

“I entered into that creative space again on ‘Step Into A World,’ which was produced by Jesse West. Musically, we were able to explore whatever we wanted to do. We became free men. It was so effortless. This was our sound.  But let me say this. We didn’t get a huge backlash in the beginning when Puff Daddy did the remix for ‘Step Into A World’. Because keep in mind…in ’97 Puffy was the shit! People forget how powerful Bad Boy was: Biggie, Craig Mack, 112, Faith, Total, Mase…they were unstoppable. So we didn’t get any backlash in the beginning because Puffy was the undisputed king of rap. And what was so interesting was I was making ‘Step Into A World’ to reclaim hip-hop because nobody wanted to put breakers in their videos. Nobody was standing behind graffiti art anymore. Hip-hop had went where Biggie had taken it, which was still dope. Rappers started wearing suits again! But everybody started to do the same things. And we were all mourning the deaths of Tupac and BIG.

So I went right back again to my formula of talking right to the community to say, ‘You think record sales make you the dopest? No it doesn’t…because I got the no. 1 record in the world!’ That was my campaign. And to go even further with it, I got Puffy to do the remix. I saw him in a club and I asked him if he would remix my shit, and he said, ‘Hell fucking yeah!’ And Puffy did it for free. That should be written down as hip-hop history. He charged Jive whatever the studio time was, but all that $120,000 for remix? We didn’t go through that. And when it came out it was blazing!

But the ‘Step Into A World’ remix backlash came a few months later when I became an executive at Warner Bros. Now we are all executives…we are at the pinnacle of our game. We have taken over the music industry literally. I’m talking about the street hoodlums way back in the days…they were now lead executives in the music industry. And I’m one of those people at Warner Bros. helping run the entire roster. But at this time, Puffy’s productions were getting played so much that it sparked a backlash. People thought Puffy was getting too much radio airplay and he was getting criticized by everybody in hip-hop. They thought that only the records Puffy produced were in regular rotation. So there was this backlash against everything P. Diddy produced. They started questioning why would an artist like myself work with someone like Puffy. But I wasn’t concerned with that because Puffy, in my eyes, showed he was real when he did that remix.”

“Most people in hip-hop felt like this album was wack. I didn’t think so and about 175,000 people didn’t think so either. Before that album I had gotten saved. I was heavy into theology. I was finishing up my Christian studies. I was heavy into the Christian thought…I had the Bible down. I went to Bishop Clarence McClendon’s church and got saved right there because he believed that hip-hop heads were God’s chosen people. He would preach this in the church. He would break down how the hip-hop generation would be the generation to lift up all other generations. And I was with that! I was like, ‘Yep…I’m getting saved at this church, right here!’ But from that moment I realized that what Christians call being saved is not really being saved. They tell you that you can’t curse no more, that you have to stop drinking and you can’t smoke weed. But I didn’t agree. People don’t want to talk about the shaman at the beginning of all religions. All of my studies of theology told me this didn’t add up. Every prophet smoked, drank and got so fucking high that they saw God.

I was giving a lot of time over to real Christian thought. And I looked at black Evangelism and churches…and it hurt my heart. They completely let me down. Every last one of the black preachers let me down. That’s why I did Spiritual Minded. They weren’t about saving people. I didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought about me being a Christian. To me this is what hip-hop needed to hear. This is what I’m about. I wanted to bring those Christian hip-hoppers who don’t get the time of day, who do their rap, but have to stay in the background because the church doesn’t appreciate them. Meanwhile, hip-hop fans don’t appreciate them either because they are rapping about Jesus. So they are in a hard place. That’s why I came out with an album saying, ‘No, I am hip-hop. And hip-hop can recognize Christian rap. Take a look at me…I’m going to join you.’ I found out that all of these Christian rappers were gangsta! Everyone of them was listening to 50 Cent and Redman. They didn’t bring it to the church because they had to clean up their raps. And I’m debating with these guys like, ‘Why do you have to change who you really are?’ You are hip-hop!” 

“After Spiritual Minded, I felt like, ‘Well, damn…I have to get back on my shit now and bring out that super lyrical cat.’ I started hammering these MC’s because for some reason they thought just because you say you are saved that means you’re soft now. To say that you are about love and peace means that you can punk me and push me around. So I put out an album called Kristyles and we brought the lyrics right back around to I’ll chop your fucking head off. I loved the lyrics off Kristyles. That was some of my best work. But my relationship with Koch Records had come to an end with this album because they tried to sneak it out without me knowing it. And Kristyles wasn’t even finished! I put an injunction on it, ran to Federal court and sued Koch. That’s when we settled out of court. I was of course dropped from the label…we just left it at the settlement.”

“Simple and plain, I owe my entire career to Marley Marl. If it wasn’t for that battle with the Juice Crew I would not be here. Real talk. I was grateful that I was able to do Hip Hop Lives with Marley because it was there I got the chance to say thank you to Marley, to MC Shan, and to Roxanne and to Mr. Magic, who has since passed away. I was working with a true legend in Marley. Again, we used to battle against each other…the Juice Crew and BDP. Think about that. Now Marley and KRS-One are together??? This album is history.”