Late afternoon before Independence Day. It’s ass-hot outside. Inside it’s like the seventh circle of Hell. The overplayed refrain of Nelly’s current chartbuster would’ve been prophetic and perfectly fitting for what was about to jump off inside the four-hundred degree hot Green Room of New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom had it not been for the latest street heater, “You Don’t Really Want It” from KRS-ONE’s “Prophets Versus Profits,” a thirteen track heat-seeker strictly for the streets that was put together with the assistance of longtime associate Mad Lion. Shaking down the sound system and beating at the doors to the interview while construction crews loaded in pyrotechnics for that evening’s pre-fourth of July trunk full of funkfest featuring the Blastmaster himself.
“I’m not attacking, I’m defending,” toweling down his face, stressing to the circle of reporters and infrared camera beams sucking up every atom of oxygen hanging in the air, dangling on every word, that this isn’t a confrontation of his own choosing. “When people hear my response, they gonna say, Kris is picking on Nelly. That’s why I did a thirteen-track piece that explains my whole point of view.” His “whole point of view,” he elaborates, goes far beyond Nelly and takes aim at the recording industry. “The issue is about the commercialization of a culture. When I see corporations ripping off my culture, my people, I’m gonna sit back and just say, I want to concentrate on the music?”
That said, and knowing his tenacity in hyper-alliterative combat, he doesn’t stray far from his first target in the food chain. “To me, it’s so obvious. If you don’t have street credibility, you don’t sell records. You can sell records on the hype of being a street credible person but when you go to St. Louis they say, Nelly, don’t represent us!” The more he perspires (he’s filling buckets beneath his dreads), the more some of the lyrics of his heyday come back to me in the form of a heat-induced hallucination particularly, “I take this rap shit too seriously!”
By his own admission, Kris has had three major battles in his long, prolific career – MC Shan, Melle Mel, and PM Dawn (which he professes was a whole big misunderstanding, “He overstepped another boundary and he had to get taken there”) – and his maturity is manifested in the depth of his concerns when he dissects Nelly’s lyrics. “He says, ‘Fuck forty acres and a mule, I want forty acres and a pool.’ Any Black man that buys that is a sellout. There’s a raging debate going on right now about reparations for African Americans. Disrespect Malcolm, Martin, Medgar, everybody, in one line, total disrespect! You damn right I say ban that album!” He nods to the back of the room for water and lets the silence settle in before he flips the script and assumes the role of inquisitor. “Ladies and gentlemen, you all have a responsibility to make things better. How are you today making it better for those tomorrow.” Everybody looks around the room at each other shitfaced in grade school again, sweat rings around their armpits.
AD LOADING...
Somebody tosses him a bottle of water and lets the air outta the balloon. “How do we expect to be successful if we not even thinking about our children? When I look at my nine-year-old son and I’m writing a record, I’ma write, ‘I got these bitches on the block. We gonna pop the Glock on these ho’s….?’ Are you crazy!” The balloon bursts in a gale of laughter. Undaunted and unrelentless, he blows up another. “Listen to the Nellyville album, listen to the depiction of women in the album from a father, by the way. Nelly has a kid and tells me if that’s what a Black father is supposed to tell his people and his children to go purchase.” Everybody’s holding their breaths collectively while he stares down the room before launching like Mussolini from the balcony. “Do you not see your daughter walking by? Do you not see your son? Do you not see other people’s kids? Do you not see racial profiling? Do you not see when you get on TV with a rag on your head, looking like a Crip or a Blood or other gang member which, by the way, is a whole nother thing because they even dissing gang culture, empowered by corporate America.” The room eases up when it’s obvious his ire has shifted to the domain of the producers, marketers, and distributors of gazillion unit-selling artists like Nelly that, according to him, feed off the culture without giving back to the community that has, at times, resembled a South African mining bonanza when the sales in other genres have sagged.
“The record company just seems to collect all the money and the publishing and the artist get no more than fifty cents. I waited nine years to make one dollar at Jive records.” I resist the temptation to capitalize on his momentary strategic pause with an obvious pun of my own out of fear of getting jack-slapped. “All them albums that I’m known for and respected for, fifty cent I got. I knew I needed to get ripped off so that I could have a career and that’s every rap artist. We took deals we knew was gonna rip us off because we loved hip hop. Big Daddy Kane sacrificed. Chuck D-Public Enemy-sacrificed. Run-DMC-sacrificed.” It’s this sort of sacrifice, Kris implies, that younger artists like Nelly should recognize and respect. “Nelly wasn’t there in the seventies when we had nothing. There was no hip-hop, it didn’t exist. I was a kid getting free cheese and milk, rapping in the park for fun. He wasn’t there when Afrika Bambatta said hip hop is about peace, love, unity and having fun. Yet he’s enjoying the fruits of all those people’s labors. That’s a thief, a cultural thief. And he’s allowing Universal to do it.” How you ask? The Teacher responds and informs that “an album sells for $10.25 wholesale. He gets thirty-five cents, but he’s gonna get up there and say, I’m winning cause I sold ten million records. Yet KRS gets four dollars an album. Who the hell is winning? Thirty-five cents or four dollars? This idiot gets thirty-five cents a record, but think it’s something to brag about.
I venture in about his upcoming album, “Kristyle,” scheduled to drop in September. “I pushed it back to 2003 because Dre said he wanted to help me produce it.” Dre. As in Black Liberace? Beads of perspiration tobbogan down the furrows of my forehead into my eyes. I sting, and squint like, Huh? “Caesar Augustus ruled the whole of Rome at thirty. Jesus Christ attained God at thirty. I’m thirty-seven, I’m late, we’re late. People run countries at thirty.” He stands to leave and chuckles in staccato rapid fire like it’s beside the point. “That’s Dre. Dre got way more credibility than Nelly.”
