On this episode of Questlove Supreme, Questlove and Team Supreme members Sugar Steve and Laiya sit down with hip-hop’s legendary founding father, Kurtis Blow. “First rapper on a major label. First rapper to get a gold plaque. First rapper to cover a song. First rapper to make a love ballad. First rapper to tour overseas...First rapper on Soul Train,” Questlove reels off, as Kurtis laughs, “I didn’t know I did so much stuff!” Kurtis Blow’s impact on hip-hop culture is indisputable, and Questlove has “a gazillion questions” for him, starting from his early days emceeing disco parties in the Bronx all the way up to The Hip Hop Nutcracker.
Kurtis Blow was born in Harlem, New York, and was starting to party right at the height of the disco scene. At clubs, everyone wanted to dance like James Brown, he tells Questlove, so they’d wait for “the break of the music, the most important part of the song. That's when everyone did their best dance moves. That's when we created the circle.” Kool Herc “had an incredible playlist” of funky soul music with great dance breaks, but he’d “play a whole song, and you have to stand up waiting for the break to come.” But Grandmaster Flash wanted to extend the break, so he started getting copies of the same record and looping the break for three or four minutes. Because of those long breaks, it made MCs more important, Kurtis says; “instead of standing on the side of the turntables just making announcements, we went out front and started rocking the crowd...telling stories and rapping in rhythm, and using crowd response. ‘Throw your hands in the air,’ and all of that stuff. That’s how it really came on.”
In 1978, Kurtis and Russell Simmons opened up a club in Queens called Night Fever Disco. “That's where I really got good as a DJ. DJing in the club for a year. Then we actually used propaganda, and Russell started putting my name on fliers: ‘Queens' number one DJ, Kurtis Blow,'” he laughs. By then, he was in the studio making a record, hoping to get signed. “I think I got my record deal because ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was so hot...every taxi, every boombox, every record store was playing it 24/7,” he recalls. But he had to take his record to 22 different labels before he finally got a bite. One guy, named Cory Robins, liked it enough to take it to the higher-ups, who turned it down. “Cory quit his job because of this, and he went and started his own label. Two years later, he signed Run-DMC.” Finally, at UK label Mercury PolyGram Records, John Stains signed Kurtis. “I became a British artist,” Kurtis says, and his first single, “Christmas Rappin’,” came to America as an import. "Crazy deal," he laughs.
After “Christmas Rappin’” and “The Breaks” came out, he started touring with bands like Kool and the Gang and The Commodores, essentially introducing hip-hop to tons of audiences who had no experience with it at all. Did he feel a lot of pressure to excel, Questlove asks, because he was basically representing this new art form, this new culture, worldwide? Kurtis says yes: “During that time, if you didn’t have a good show, people...would not go out and buy your record...it was so very important for us to rock the house.” He credits his time in New York clubs and block parties as the key to his success, “just being used to handling a microphone and mic control...it was so important.” But he never got tired of explaining hip-hop to people. “As a communications major...I love to talk,” he quips.
But that’s only part of the incredible story of Kurtis Blow’s life and legacy in hip-hop. Listen to this episode of Questlove Supreme to hear how a broken arm led to the formation of Run-DMC, how Prince helped bankroll the “King Holiday” song Kurtis produced about Martin Luther King Jr., what got him interested in working on the hit touring show The Hip Hop Nutcracker, and so much more.
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