Just Kids From the Bronx

Award-winning rap artist

(1961– )

When you’re brought up in a depressed neighborhood, the idea is that you want to leave the neighborhood when you are grown. Since there wasn’t a lot going on, you had to work a little harder to actually get out of the Bronx or else you’d just be stuck there. Where I lived, even though it was a bad neighborhood, it had good people in it, and with a little bit of support from the school that I went to and the block that I grew up on I could think of life goals. There was a lot of encouragement to go to places outside of the Bronx, and I think that my generation, and maybe the generation after, we were probably the last generations that wanted to move on. Nowadays, they want to be on the street and it’s more like they want to stay rather than be somewhere else.

At a certain point, I was still a good student. But instead of doing the curriculum, I was trying to be defiant against education and after a while, after I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to educate my way out of the Bronx, I started getting into music and hanging out on the streets and seeing a lot of the break dancing and hip-hop. I was about seventeen when I realized that the education thing wasn’t going to work for me ’cause I blew that, so I concentrated on doing the music thing. That’s when my brother and me, we started writing rhymes, doing parties, doing routines, and things of that nature. I spent a lot of time doing those things. We have to specialize in something and my field of expertise was gonna be entertainment.

I had a mother and father at home, but my father was an alcoholic. My mother kept us stable because she was a housewife who stayed at home. She was like the voice of sanity for my father because he was very drunk and just a little weird. I had four siblings. Two brothers and two sisters. The older ones were the two girls and they kinda ran wild, so my mother would always say, “You’re not messin’ up my life because, you know, you’re messin’ up your life if you run wild.” She was right. So I realized after a while that I was in charge of my life and I didn’t want to mess it up.

Left to my own devices, though, I wouldn’t have done the right thing, because I thought I had a certain amount of intelligence and I thought I was smarter than everybody. You know, I’m really not that smart because if I really was that smart, I wouldn’t have gone around with that wrong crowd. We were a couple of young dudes, and we’d hang out, getting high, smoking weed. We’d go around and commit these little petty crimes. I remember there was a teacher who worked in the after-school center. His name was Mr. Torres and he also taught in the sixth grade. He was short. He was maybe five-foot-five or something like that. It wasn’t like he was a big guy, but he was kind of husky. One of the gang guys really got to him so Mr. Torres said, If you don’t come to my class, if you don’t come to school, I’m gonna come and get you where you live. And I was in the fifth grade then, sniffing glue and picking pockets.

I remember it was a Sunday before the Monday when school started, and I was supposed to go and hang out with these guys, but figured that I had to stay in the house because on Monday, if I don’t go to the class, Mr. Torres was gonna come to my house and get me. So that Sunday, these three guys kidnapped two girls, took ’em up to a roof, raped both the girls, and threw one of them off the roof. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that I used to hang out with these guys all the time, but I wasn’t there. I had nothing to do with it. I had made up my mind that I was going to go to school because of Mr. Torres and deciding that basically saved my entire life, right there, because everything would’ve been totally different if I had been with those guys. Crazy!

When we were younger kids, we’d play basketball, softball, but we also played football. We didn’t have a football so we’d take a milk container and a soda bottle and wrap the soda bottle in newspaper and stuff the soda bottle inside the milk container and shape it like a football. And we’d play football on the street. That’s the way we’d pass a lot of time. That was before we got older and people started messin’ with drugs. We didn’t have football equipment, but we made our own football equipment, and we had fun doing things that regular kids were doing, but we just had to improvise a little bit.

And that same concept was basically what hip-hop was, because we had block parties and indoor parties. You’d make do. Between that and music, that’s what basically kept me from going to jail. The one thing I’m not going to say was a great achievement was that I never went to prison. I’ve been arrested, but I don’t have a criminal record. I was buying cars, but I didn’t have a license. But I hung out with the good guys and I started doing music.

It’s not like I’m the most talented guy, but I grew up in a black household where my father listened to country music, to Sinatra and to Dean Martin—we watched a lot of TV—and Mel Tormé. We listened to a lot of different types of music. Like Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin. The Temptations would’ve been more like the music we had, but format and the structure were more like the others. How they handled the mike. How they worked the crowd. Upscale entertainment. That’s how I saw entertainment in my head. That was like what it was all about to me.

The hip-hop culture is music and entertainment. Hip-hop is a term that’s used to describe it all. There was no such thing as hip-hop music. It came out of disco and all kinds of music, like jazz and anything that had that beat. It was jazz, it was rock ’n roll, it was reggae, it was R and B. It wasn’t necessarily a dance, but they created moves, and a patchwork, like a quilt. All those different styles of music. Then the rhymes went onto that quilt and over time it was called hip-hop. That’s how the whole thing started.

The main thing about the generation that I came up in, from the perspective of being a fan and the music we did, I think it’s so commendable that the people all came from the same area. From a four- or five-block radius. We didn’t just settle for what was brought to the table. Brooklyn. The kids call it Crooklyn, but we did music in the Bronx. That was our thing. We are able to go all over the world. By 1980, 1990, people all over the world were doing hip-hop. It’s a certified music genre and it’s all because we just wanted to have fun in our Bronx neighborhood. We just wanted to have a good time. And we knew that a lot of other people could have a good time, and I think that those people have a lot of enjoyment in their lives from what we started back then.