Still # 1

After 15 years, KRS-One refuses to slow down.



Stack blaster: Edutainer KRS-One.

Listening to The Sneak Attack, KRS-One’s latest album, I’m cracking up. I’m not sitting still — because this album just won’t let me. I’m standing in front of my stereo, lapping up every word like a hungry animal. I’m riding my adrenaline rush with a continuously pumping fist and the "MEGA BASS" button. I’m all choked up. After 15 years, at age 35, Lawrence Krisna Parker, also known as "the Teacha" KRS-One and mastermind behind Boogie Down Productions, has done it again.

Using hip-hop as a vehicle for teaching has proven disastrous for other MCs. But KRS is now on his ninth album — this one produced mainly by himself and brother Kenny Parker and with a rougher, more broken-glass edginess than his last few releases. When he breathes life into his lessons, he also convinces you that no one else loves hip-hop the way that he does.

An unrivaled ability to simultaneously pique interest in knowledge and crush all competition is why KRS has always managed to bounce back strong in the cutthroat musical arena. "Hot," the first single from Sneak Attack , epitomizes this synergy: "I don’t even sound like the rest of you kiddies/ I study the ways of God/ You studying titties/ And ass/ I pity your class/ ’Cause you come out with a blast/ But you’re trash/ So you really don’t last."

But what, exactly — when KRS has enjoyed hip-hop icon status for over a decade and is living a comfortable life with his wife and four kids in Englewood, NJ — is fueling this intensely palpable hunger to drop a lyrical bomb on us every few years? Why hasn’t he lost interest? Maybe because we haven’t.

As with falling in love or religion, everyone seems to know when Boogie Down Productions happened to them. "Oh my God, the first time I heard Criminal Minded, I was in high school and…," the story usually goes. But my relationship with BDP started in 1990 with Edutainment, three years after the groundbreaking artifact Criminal Minded. Having grown up in a small city in Connecticut with little hip-hop culture (except on weekend family visits to New York), hip-hop happened to me like, well, a sneak attack.

I copped Edutainment by the suggestion of a homegirl of mine. The first song, "Blackman in Effect," changed my perception that hip-hop was not a viable, relevant form of expression. It also shitted on every history lesson I had ever had. "Egypt was the land of spiritual blessing/ Egypt was the land of fact, not guessing/ People from all over the world would come/ To learn from Egypt/ Egypt number one," rhymed Kris authoritatively. With hard facts, which he insisted each listener research for themselves, Edutainment pulverized the notion that Europe was the originator of philosophy and the sciences, filling in the blanks for thousands of black youth like me who felt inferior in school when we learned, year after year, that our only valuable contribution to civilization was made by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Far more than just an album, Edutainment was a gateway. Even after I dropped out of high school, it led me straight to the library where I found authors like historians Cheikh Anta Diop and Henry Louis Gates. It led me to P.E., Brand Nubian, X-Clan, Tribe and De La. For most of the BDP fans I know, however, Edutainment was just business as usual. It was Criminal Minded that permanently altered rap music when KRS employed a 16-bar rhyme style and adroitly merged a hip-hop and dancehall reggae delivery with the hardcore swagger of a gangsta — something no one before him had done.

KRS’ ascension from homeless teenager to rap icon and then activist and lecturer is the stuff of hip-hop legend. Before his first single in 1986, "South Bronx," with partner-producer Scott La Rock (whom he met in a shelter), he lived on the streets for eight years straight. During that time, the library became a reliable buddy of his. Later, he would springboard the Stop the Violence project with the single "Self Destruction," which raised $600,000 for the Urban League. He also, along with BDP, launched HEAL (Human Education Against Lies), an album and project whose proceeds would go to buying books that deflated historical myths and lies and distributing them to children worldwide.

Now, Kris is lecturing at Ivy League schools as well as public high schools. He’s promoting the study of the (eight) principles of hip-hop culture at his Temple of Hiphop in Fort Lee, NJ. He founded Hip-Hop Appreciation Week, which has taken place every third week in May for the last four years. This year, HHAW took its cause worldwide with the International Hip-Hop Conference for Peace at the United Nations, which I was able to attend.

It’s not that KRS doesn’t know he’s a remarkable individual. He is known for tooting his own horn. On "Attendance" (Sneak Attack), he boasts, "Who was the first to teach at Yale?/ Who was the first to hit that hip-hop reggae on the nail?/ Who was the first to say Stop The Violence and teach that real bad boys move in silence?" That self-congratulation — along with the fact that, after partner Scott La Rock died in ’87, KRS has been accused of making himself the face of BDP — has been critics’ biggest complaint. The thing is that his ego is part of what makes him so prominent an artist. He confidently says he’s the best and we believe it because he doesn’t fail to deliver.

Granted, KRS is not without flaw. He’s made comments and then retracted them later. But, like any intellectual evolving in the public’s eye, he’s entitled to opinion changes. And if he reads half of the amount of books he claims to, it’s only natural that he continuously reform his beliefs. His biggest fumble for me was when he did a Sprite commercial with MC Shan a few years ago which trivialized Gil Scott Heron’s "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."

Controversy is nothing new to KRS. In the fall of 1995, he came to Temple and gave a speech in which he took Farrakhan and his Million Man March to task for excluding women. With a microphone set up in one of the aisles, a handful of Nation of Islam defenders dogged him out one after the other. And no doubt he must’ve gotten much flack from various groups for calling God a woman on "Health, Wealth, Self," from his 1996 release KRS-ONE. In concert, he rowdies his crowd by asking, "how many intelligent people in the house tonight?" — a contrast to the many MCs who claim originality and then command their audience to raise their middle fingers or to rattle off obscenities.

It’s not like he can’t paralyze any of these rookie cats in a freestyle battle, if all he wanted to do were compete; KRS’ hunger is still furious enough to entertain without educating. It’s not like he couldn’t have had guests on Sneak Attack. But he doesn’t. In a recent interview, he told Elemental Magazine, "My goal has always been for 100,000 people to go buy the record and change the world. Rather than a million people to just throw it somewhere and say, ‘Yo, this was a hot album.’"

For 15 years, he’s used his gifts to uplift. That’s why, in 2001, KRS-One is still #1.