It's striking, in retrospect, how little rapping there is on Kurtis Blow.
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But Blow knew he couldn't make a full album of crowd-participation bits, so he does everything he can think of to keep people entertained. He tries to do that a bit on the album songs like "The Breaks" are full of ambient noises of people partying. At parties, Blow would shout out neighborhoods, gangs, individual people in the audience. Blow was already an anomaly-a slick solo rapper in an era when groups like the Furious 5 and the Treacherous Three were specializing in complicated, interweaving routines.
There's a huge divide between what Kurtis Blow did on that album and what he'd done while rocking parties in the late '70s. Today, Kurtis Blow stands as a fascinating document of an art form in the process of becoming. (Sylvia Robinson didn't have any faith that a full album of rap music could sell.) With his self-titled 1980 debut, Blow became the first rapper to release an LP on a major label. The Sugarhill Gang had come out with their first LP earlier that year, but it's really just the full 15-minute Rapper's Delight paired with a few awkward R&B songs. In 1980, nobody had any idea how a rap album might sound. Nicholas." A few words in, Blow's voice interrupts him and objects: "Don't you give me all that jive about things you wrote before I's alive." Instead, Blow wants to give his own version of the story of an encounter with Santa Claus, "a red-suited dude with a friendly attitude." Blow brings Santa to a party, and Santa hits the dance floor, impressing everyone: "Every young girl tried to rock his world, but he boogie oogie oogied till he had to go." Then Santa leaves presents for everyone on the block and returns to the north pole. As the song begins, a stuffy British voice starts to read "A Visit From St. Blow signed a two-single deal with Mercury Records, which made him the first rapper ever on a major label.īlow's first single, 1979's "Christmas Rappin'," only came a few months after Rapper's Delight.
Soon after Rapper's Delight hit, Simmons and Blow capitalized. While studying communications at New York's City College, Blow became friendly with an industrious young classmate named Russell Simmons, and Simmons became his manager. He was a natural-a slender and handsome young guy with a deep, resonant voice and a breezy charisma. Walker started out as a breakdancer and a DJ, but he moved to the microphone around 1977 and rechristened himself Kurtis Blow. Kurtis Walker came from Harlem, a 15-minute train ride away from those South Bronx parties, and he got involved long before Rapper's Delight. In 1979, the indie-label owner Sylvia Robinson put together a group that she called the Sugarhill Gang-three rappers who'd never performed before they headed into the studio to record 15 minutes of rambling stories and glorious nonsense over the bassline from Chic's disco smash "Good Times." (Sampling, as we know it today, didn't exist then, so Robinson hired a house band to replicate the Chic record.) Rapper's Delight was a global novelty hit, going to #1 in a couple of countries and introducing the world to an entirely new sound. The only recordings of those parties are on the cassette tapes that were dubbed and handed out among friends. For years, nobody invited these DJs and MCs into actual recording studios. This was a local underground phenomenon, and it's not even clear that the people involved realized they were creating a whole new style of music. Before long, Herc and his peers were playing parties all over the Bronx, cutting between the best parts of records and bringing along friends who, rhyming into microphones, would shout out different neighborhoods and get people to dance. The beginnings of rap music are the stuff of local myth and oral tradition, but most people trace the beginnings to August 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc played a rec-center birthday party at a South Bronx highrise. It took more than six years for anyone to realize that there was money in hip-hop.