KRS-One: How Hip-hop came to be and how the Brooklyn Public Library was part of it all. Part One

Lawrence Parker has lifted up millions of people by introducing them to Hip-Hop culture, but first, he had to be rescued by the Brooklyn Public Library.? Lawrence Parker, known as KRS-One, was born in Brooklyn in 1965, but in 1974, he and his younger brother Kenny found themselves living with their mother on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx.?

When Lawrence Parker was eight years old, and his brother Kenny was seven, the two boys noticed a new sound coming out of the recreation rooms in the apartment basements on Sedgwick Avenue.? A teenager Cynthia Campbell was encouraging her brother Clive to hold parties and play records.? Clive loved the music of James Brown.? Playing James Brown on a record player made Clive the Disc Jockey, or DJ at his sister’s parties.? He quickly noticed that the part on the record that Cynthia’s friends loved the most were the wild music breaks between James Brown’s singing.? Clive figured out how to drop the record player needle down on the record and just play the crazy drum and rhythm beats in these breaks over and over.? Cynthia’s friends loved to dance to the musical breaks, and soon Clive was holding larger and larger dance parties in the city parks near Sedgwick Avenue.? As the Master of Ceremonies at these dance parties, Clive decided he would use his nickname, DJ Kool Herc.?

Hanging at the back of these dance parties were eight-year-old Lawrence and his seven-year-old brother Kenny.? As soon as the breaks began Lawrence and Kenny would start dancing along with the other kids.? Kool Herc called the kids B-boys and B-Girls, short for Break Boys and Break Girls, the kids who danced to James Brown’s musical breaks.

At first DJ Kool Herc just saw himself as the teenager who changed the vinyl disks on the record player’s turntable.? Then he began to see that to keep the party going, he would have to be a Master of Ceremony, to make announcements between the music to keep the dancers excited about the show.? DJ Kool Herc got himself a microphone so he could be heard by the large crowds of dancers.? The kids of Jamaican immigrants in the Bronx knew all about the Master of Ceremony, or MC, they had a similar role at Jamaican parties.? Kool Herc was also a graffiti artist and he introduced bubble lettering and graffiti art to the people who attended his dance parties.

Life on Sedgwick Avenue was dangerous for Lawrence and his brother Kenny.? Gangs fought each other for control of the streets and the police seemed to make life miserable for everyone. Larry remembered: “hip hop was illegal and immoral.? You couldn’t break or b-boy, you couldn’t dance outside in the street, its called loitering and you’d be arrested, and many were.?? You couldn’t bring your equipment outside and play because you would be loitering, you were trespassing, you were disturbing the peace, so to speak and that was illegal… Everything we did was wrong.? We had baggy clothes, some of them were ripped. Baggy clothes, big shirts, dreadlocks hair, baldhead, we were wrong…Everything in the main stream had a value to it that connected you to the main stream, the dress was for your job, your speech was for your boss, your employer, your degree was so you could function in society.? We were the ones who said we don’t want to be part of none of that.”

?Then Hip-hop began to transform this bad situation. MC’s decided that their musical events would be about even more than dancing.? They began to create a Hip-Hop world that would be known for “Hip-Hop, Peace, Love, Unity and Safely having fun.”? MC’s saw that they had a responsibility to move young people from gangs and violence to a community where people loved and cared for each other.? They believed that for the first time they were creating a community that would put Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream into reality.? Hip-hop would judge people not by skin color, but by how they treated others: Hip-hop fans were known for being kind and loving.? Lawrence remembered that during the 1970’s gangs melted away, people stopped hurting each other.? They wanted to become part of Hip-hop world.???

?Lawrence remembered, “When hip-hop was just cultural, there were rules.? There were codes, you were judged based on your distance from or to the code.? We had a term called “down by law” if you was “down by law” it meant you had a certain immunity in the community.? The community trusted you, the community knew what you were about.? The community wanted you to rise and represent them. You was down by law…“Down” means to be part of,? to join with? “Are you down with me? I’m down with you.” We are together.? The law in hip-hop is respect.? Respect leads to credibility and authenticity.? “This real dude right here, we want him to succeed because he is part of us, or she is part of us……The people who are true to hip-hop are true to that concept of community. “I’m not doing this for my own good only. Sure I gotta eat.? But I don’t eat until you eat… The MC says “There are principals I have to stand on. And I would feel stupid going against [them].? I can’t even walk down the street if I say, look or dress like that.? Because there is a community I have to deal with.? I’m speaking on behalf of them, they brought me up here to talk to you…. we’ve got some principles to uphold.? My grandmother means a little something to me.? My father’s plight means something to me.? I don’t know about just money. Let me see what’s up with this peace, love, unity.? Can we get more knowledge, what about these kids? …Hip hop is about peace, love and unity and safely having fun, can we codify that?? Can we codify that and say that’s what we all mean.? We are all gonna meet on peace, love unity and joy. Anything that goes against that goes against hip-hop.”

?By 1979 Hip-hop made two other important discoveries beyond playing dance breaks, b-dancing, and having MC’s introduce songs.? Instead of just letting the vinyl records spin on the turntable an MC, Joseph Saddler, calling himself Grandmaster Flash interacted with two record players.? He invented a way of mixing musical breaks from two records together, he found short music beats he knew the dancers would like and repeated them and mixed them. Using his fingers, he spun the records forward and backwards and scratched the records as he played them, all creating new musical sounds that his audiences loved.? The second discovery was rhyming rap.? MC’s discovered that their audiences loved when they did more than just announce the next song using their microphones.? Audiences really enjoyed it when MC’s rhymed their announcements.? MC’s encouraged people in the audience to come up and try out a rhyme on the audience.? Soon MC’s started telling stories that rhymed along to the beat of a dance break. Rapping was born, but it was just a part of the larger Hip-Hop world of peace, love and unity.

?Right in the middle of this exciting time in the lives of Lawrence and Kenny Parker changed.? In 1975 at the ages of nine and ten, their mother Jaqueline moved the family from the Bronx to Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.? Since he was new to the neighborhood, Jaqueline introduced him to the Brooklyn Central Library, knowing that Lawrence loved books.? He remembered: “My mother…, she used to bring me right here [to the Brooklyn Central Library], we used to walk through those doors in the early Seventies. We would go through those doors right there and my mother would show me, and she would say this is the gateway out of all this madness.? This is what she told me.”?

?Times were hard for Lawrence.? During this time, he and his mother argued a lot.? He failed eighth grade, tried to take it again and once again failed. Jaqueline struggled to earn enough money to afford food for the family. Lawrence noticed that “The lack of money is the root of all evil…The lack of money makes you do all kinds of things to get money, poverty is the root of all evil …when people don’t have they’re going to start scrounging and your whole psychology starts to wig out because you can’t eat. You can’t sleep, you can’t hide, there’s no safety when you’re impoverished… and now when you’re in this condition you’re almost like in a demonized state, physically mentally spiritually all the way down.”

?At the age of 16, Lawrence remembers: “My mother had made some rice, and that was dinner, a pan of rice, and me and my brother ate all of it, she came home and the rice was gone.? Yelling, screaming, throwing stuff, threw us out the house. I had already made up in my mind, I’m out of here. I spoke to Kenny about it, I said look let’s try to get you back in.? He opened the door and she said, I am not letting you back in here I’m over it, I’m sick of it, I’m done, he opens the door and she gives me and Kenny two dollars and a bowl of spaghetti, Kenny takes the spaghetti, and I take the two dollars. I even had a bag prepared in my room. So, when my mother gave us the spaghetti and the two dollars, I asked her, ``Can you just give me my books.” Part Two: from homelessness to the power of imagining success