45. KRS-One - Step Into A World (Rapture's Delight) (Jive. 1997. From the LP I Got Next)
Raven Mack: I think by this point in personal history, I had adapted to a red-eye drinking longhaired horseshoe-playing lounger, so hyper-boom bap KRS style had become a little much for me. Don’t get it mixed… I still liked getting buckwild and loud, but KRS by this point had become sort of redundant, becoming the other end of his “old school artists don’t always burn” line from the previous decade. The Return of the Boom Bap is a great record, easily the greatest non-BDP thing KRS ever did, and this song, to me, sounds like it should’ve been on that album, because it has that hype feeling and nostalgic flow, whereas a lot of his other stuff off the later KRS albums bored the fuck out of me.
KRS is strange, getting caught up in some weird hip hop god complex, starting that church of hip hop or whatever he was all about at one point, and getting too hung up on politics. I think whenever you have someone from a sensory-based music form – rock-n-roll or hip hop or whatever – get all caught up in politics beyond the most basic of outlooks, to the point where they’re trying to convince you Clean-shaven Dirtbag #1 is WAAAAAY better than Clean-shaven Dirtbag #2, they have completely lost touch with whatever it was that made them successful music fuckers in the first place. Music should be an escape from bullshit like that. If I wanted to be aware, I’d go look at my bank balance and sit in the corner of the kitchen where the floor is sagging from probable termite damage and think about how I just got ripped off of $1300 for a job I did for some fat lady who wears too much make-up. I don’t want to be aware.
I could go into the whole “historical perspective” of using the Blondie rapture bit in this song and how that original Blondie dabbling in hip hop culture was the first exposure a lot of the world (meaning white people) had to the rappitty things what with the loud booms and people twisting around on their heads on top of cardboard with spraypaint cans rattling out a scary urban jungle jingle in the background. But that would be too smarky and smirky and dorktastic of me. I think if you haven’t heard most of the shit on this list, the best suggestion I can give you is you should seek it out (or get a dub from me when you come by the house), just to dig into this music. I’m sure there’s a ton of people in that whole Whole Foods organic food non-chemical dishwasher detergent Bush is the new Hitler set that would love love love upon some KRS One music from over the years, that may have never heard of him before. And if one overly-conscious hippie kid secretly starts bumping Criminal Minded when nobody is around to hear, then this stupid list will have been worth it.
Mike Dikk: I honestly had no recollection of this song before this list came up. Things like that happen every once in a while, but the situation of me not remembering this song is especially weird because I owned this CD. I remember where I bought it, I remember where I listened to it, and I remember other songs on it, but for some reason, this song really escaped me. It’s made even weirder by the fact that this was the big single off of that record and everyone around me had no problem remembering it. I feel like I’m on some Project Monarch shit and one day I’ll hear this song at just the right moment and assassinate some prominent figurehead. This song is my Catcher in the Rye or my Frankie Goes To Hollywood “Relax”.
I actually objected to this song being so high on the list because I really don’t remember it at all, but then I asked a few random people and they all told me it was a pretty big deal when it was new. I couldn’t tell you either way because someone or something doesn’t want me to remember this song.
Because of these circumstances, I really can’t comment about how I felt about the song when I first heard it, and how it fits in with the rest of the list. I know if I were to personally pick a KRS One solo song to be on here, it would have been “Mad Ism”, but that doesn’t work either, because that was really a Channel Live song. Not to spoil it for any Channel Live superfans, but that song didn’t make it, but up until last week, I thought it was on the list and I was anxiously waiting for it to show up, but it’s not here at all. That kind of pisses me off, because I would have pulled hard to get that song on this list and now I’m stuck here trying to put together 300 words (that’s my self-made minimum word count for these entries) about a song I don’t even remember. Lucky for me, I just went over my 300 word quota and I can stop writing any minute now. Oh before I go, I wanted to say Debbie Harry was pretty hot back in the day. Thanks for reading.
Download: KRS-One - Step Into A World (Rapture's Delight)
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