Kurtis Blow is only ten years older than me (he was born in 1959), but he has been around as long as I have ever known hip-hop existed. His "The Breaks", from this album, was the first hip-hop song to be certified as Gold (500,000 copies sold).
I knew his name, but not his music, way back in the day. You could read about music in magazines, but if your radio stations didn't play it, or if you couldn't afford to buy it, you were aware of only some lucky writer's description (thank you, writers)...
Not sure when I first heard "The Breaks", but I do remember when I fell in love with it. In 2013, I broke up with my girlfriend Renee... a great lady, but we needed to move on... and I was living with her in Portland and when we broke up, I moved back to the Bay Area and lived in Berkeley. On College Avenue, there was a dive bar called The Graduate (the iconic film was partially set and filmed in Berkeley), and the beer was cheap and they had free popcorn.
The happy hour crowd were blue collar types sitting at the bar.. a mix of black, Latino, white... and I noticed that they were regulars. And I remember a slightly overweight black man, a few years older than me, putting "The Breaks" on the jukebox, and all five of those men getting up and dancing.
It was inspiring. Correction. It is inspiring. I am gonna get up and dance.
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