Sir Vicious was not Chillin’
UTFO’s Dr. Ice somehow ended-up on The Rap Pack trading card for Kurtis Blow in 1991. Ironically, UTFO was one of the groups Kurtis criticised on ‘I’m Chillin’ in 1986.
Let us cast our minds to the halcyon days of rap music in 1986, when all you needed was a drum machine, the theme music from Inspector Gadget and a new dance named after eggs or a doll to be able to sell 10,000 twelve-inch singles from out of your uncle’s van. With so much music being released, the spirit of healthy competition thrived – after all, there’s only room at the top for one King of Rap/Kings of Rock.
There were two types of rap conflicts at this point – outright name-calling, where entire songs were dedicated to your rivals (as demonstrated by the LL Cool J vs Kool Moe Dee saga), and the sneakier, oh-so-so subtle little jabs approach where only five people in the universe caught the reference.1
Kurtis Blow, who impressively had managed to release an album every year since 1980, set off his seventh LP with the single ‘Chillin’’, which you may remember for its random Transformers hook and Go-Go beat courtesy of Trouble Funk. Kurtis was riding high from a huge 1985, where he’d performed his hit single ‘If I Ruled The World’ in the Krush Groove film, but he may also have been feeling the heat from the new wave of lyrically advanced MC’s hitting the scene.
A full one-minute and nineteen seconds into the song, Kurtis finally kicks things off:
‘Now the next little item that I wanna discuss/Is about the sucker rappers
who must be smokin’ dust/When you make the kinda records that diss females/Frontin’ on a story when it’s just a tall tale/To diss a female is a lowdown shame/But you suckers make the records cos you wanna get fame/All you radio cats – don’t play that crap/Can’t you see they’re messin’ up in the golden name of the rap?/Now all these years rappers worked so hard/to give rapping a name and all you rappers a job/But now you peasy-head B-boys get me upset/When you dissed Veronica and then you dissed Yvette/Don’t forget Latoya and the Real Roxanne/Can’t you think of something else, you know what I’m sayin’?’
UK music scribe Sean O’Hagan quizzed Kurtis about this track for New Musical Express:2
Are you criticising rap music for being anti-women?
“Wow. That’s a strong one. Hmmm. Let’s see. I guess you said it. I guess so. Dunno. I mean, I wouldn’t have put it as strongly as that.”
Well, to these ears, ‘I’m Chillin” is a pretty strong attack on the macho-rap merchants, no?
“Erm…I’m just saying that some of them make records that aren’t cool. That’s all. It get’s too much sometimes. But, the women usually answer back anyway.”
Having moved to L.A. at this point, Kurtis Blow was busy trying to break into Hollywood (having auditioned for a Jimi Hendrix film and developing his own take on Rambo titled Bamboo Cross) and clearly had his sights set on cross-over success for Kingdom Blow – complete with appearances from Bob Dylan3 and George Clinton. Was this single his attempt to prove to the fans that he hadn’t completely lost touch with his roots?
It turns out that another Bronx-born MC didn’t appreciate having his song name-checked, as Just-Ice dedicated a potion of the window-rattling ‘Cold Gettin’ Dumb II’ to his response (Transcription and bolded sections courtesy of Kevin Beacham’s review ):
“You know I’m scheming, now it will be seeming/First you played Basketball, now you’re Daydreaming/What does it take to correct your mistake/Point blank you can’t rhyme, yo, those are The Breaks/But if you wanna hear a fresh rhyme, peep out my line/Not biting no lyrics, cause it is a crime/You know it is with unbelievable measures/How far will you go before correcting your errors/Mind is in a twirl, so what you got a girl/We’d be all messed up if you ruled the world/Sweep off the dirt, concentrating on my work/My gangster style rap will hurt…jerk/Flirt with flamboyancy, please stop annoying me/Selling the elite, top choice, extra-ordinary!” He brings the verse to a close with an impressive acronym for Just-Ice, “Justice Universal Self Truth I/Concentrating Energy, never tread on lies”, leading to the final blow, “Gonna reach for my goals, rather lower or higher/You can’t rap you lollipop liar!”
This completely flew over my head at the time, since I didn’t start listening to rap until 1987 and wouldn’t hear any Kurtis Blow music until many years later so didn’t get the clear song title references. Looking back now, this also fed into the generational shift that was happening, as the new class of MCs sought to establish themselves and differentiate their voices from the old guard of the time – just as KRS-One and Melle Mel had clashed at the Latin Quarter.
Another example of these generational conflicts took place at the New Music Seminar Battle For World MC Supremacy. MC Chill told me:
‘That was the time when Roxanne Shante and Busy Bee battled each other in the finals. Busy Bee won, but clearly Roxanne Shante actually won. Kurtis Blow was a judge, and I can remember him saying, “I’mma vote for Busy Bee because he’s from the old school!”’
One thing that both Kurtis Blow and Just-Ice did agree on was their distaste for all things James Todd Smith. Kurtis name-checked LL’s ‘Yvette’ in ‘I’m Chillin’’ and called him out in an interview with Melody Maker with Frank Owen in 1986:
‘This second generation of rappers like LL Cool J, I don’t think they understand where they’re coming from – where rap started. It’s important to have a sense of history.’
Just also wasn’t an LL fan, explaining that while he ‘can’t take nothing away from him professionally. He tries to play the hard rock role and he’s not like that. Point blank – I just don’t like him, he’s a sucker!’ As with MC Shan’s ‘Beat Biter’, LL never felt the need to respond to any of them, perhaps having exhausted his aggression on Moe Dee or, more likely, being advised by Rush that answer records were only commercially viable if that target was famous enough.
After trawling through every print and video interview with Just-Ice that I could find, I’m yet to find any reference to Just-Ice and Kurtis Blow’s musical disagreement. Long-time hip-hop historian Jayquan recalls that he once asked Just about this and he responded that it was all water under the bridge and they were cool now, so maybe he was done with the issue once he got it out of his system and thus Kurtis Blow was spared a punch in the face from The Original Gangster of Hip-Hop.
In Rakim’s Sweat The Technique book, he explains a sneak diss from ‘Follow The Leader’:
‘I said, “Stop bugging a brother said dig him, I never dug him/He couldn’t follow the leader long enough so I drug him.” It was a shot at EPMD. In one song they mentioned “Dig ’Em Smack” so when I said, “dig him,” everyone in hip-hop knew I was talking about them.’
Guess I missed that one, Ra!
Sean also chastised Blow for the photo of himself on the back cover sporting swim trunks and ladies in bikinis in the same article from 8th November, 1986: ‘Shame about that new LP sleeve, though. Such a vulgar image. Must do better.’ Thanks grandpa!
‘Street Rock’ sounds like something that Arthur Baker might have thrown together during a month-long ‘ski trip’ in between remixing Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger singles. Mercifully, Dylan only contributes a few bars of Rap Skat rather than dropping a hot sixteen.
Dope piece. Considering that Just Ice was thought to be a for real killer I think Kurtis got off easy.
Das macht Spaß zu lesen ! Eine sehr geile Zeit!