Kurtis Blow Reminisces About The Origins of Hip Hop

Kool DJ Kurt reflects on the good ol' days and praises more contemporary MCs like Busta Rhymes and Eminem.

During a recent stop in Sydney, Australia as part of Kurtis Blow's 30th Anniversary Tour of The Breaks, the legendary New York rapper gave some insight on the past and future of hip-hop.
The Harlem, New York native reminisced about the beginnings of genre, first explaining that living conditions in 1970s New York triggered the birth of a movement. “New York was in a big time state of poverty during the early '70s,” he said. “Hip Hop came out of those times, just the living conditions were really really bad and the creative juices start to flow whenever there is oppression or just hard times.”
Blow credited films with making the term “Hip Hop" popular at the time, though it began on a more grassroots level. “They started calling it Hip Hop after the first couple of movies were being made like Beat Street,” he explained. “The phrase was coined back then but we also have the great Lovebug Starski and Keith Cowboy - R.I.P. - who were two MCs who actually came up with the term before the records, but the name actually caught on after the movies came out.”
Listing iconic figures like James Brown and The Isley Brothers, he recounted the push to make music. “We were the first rappers, so it was basically the music during that time that inspired us and motivated us to get out and MC," and then gave credit to contemporary rappers for their progress. In addition to respecting artists such as Jay-Z, Nas, 50 Cent and Eminem, Kurtis Blow also happens to think that “Busta Rhymes is highly underrated as a rapper.”
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Is hip hop driving the Arab Spring?

"Mr President... people have become like animals... We are living like dogs."
The words of young Tunisian rapper El General, real name Hamada Ben Amor, in his track Rais Le Bled.
It was the end of 2010 when El General - then a relatively unknown rapper - quietly posted the track, along with a simple video, on his Facebook site.
It was raw and angry - about corruption, unemployment and poverty - and it singled out then president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali directly.
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Amy Winehouse's Best Hip Hop Moments

In the wake of her untimely death yesterday, Amy Winehouse left behind her a mark on Hip Hop that not only contributed to the culture, but made her part of it. The beehive-sporting soulstress not only got props from Jay-Z and Ghostface Killah on remixes to her vintage-sounding tracks, but she had a deep love for Hip Hop that shone through in work with producers Salaaam Remi and Mark Ronson. Not only that, but her schoolgirl crush on Nas proved that she was a B-girl at heart.
With only two albums to her name (2003’s Frank and 2006’s Back to Black), Winehouse made a lot of noise for a pint-sized girl from London, England. Here, HipHopDX takes a look at some of her best Hip Hop moments.
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The Hip-Hop Divide

Remember the movie Brown Sugar? Of course you don’t. That’s because its premise—the culturally unifying love of hip-hop—is not, in itself, sufficient to sustain a movie. The same problem occurs with Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. Director Michael Rapaport (lead actor of the interracial jungle fever movie Zebrahead) professes his generational love of hip-hop without the doc-making “skills” to explain why hip-hop transformed global attitudes toward black youth or why ATCQ personified universal hipsterism during the same era that mainstream media was lionizing grunge. This rift signaled the beginning of pop music’s still-existing cultural fragmentation. ATCQ suffers a more personal rift.
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