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| Salt-N-Pepa: 25 Years in and Still Fly |
I think in 1979 or 80 I first heard Punk Rock Rap by the Cold Crush Brothers. I've written about this before, but I have to restate it, kind of like the movie Brown Sugar, I knew I was Hip-Hop and Hip-Hop was me. At that moment everything kind of shifted. When we were kids we would stand on the porch and perform songs for the neighborhood and people would stop by and listen. My sister would be the lead singer, I'd play the piano, which were actually the bricks outside of the window and Lil Willie and his brother T would play the tennis rackets, I mean guitars. We would play songs like Call Me and random songs from Parliament Funkadelic, but then came Punk Rock Rap and Rapper's Delight and all of a sudden the guys got to be the lead. Things changed. In the early 80s we moved out of the projects, into better...projects and I met guys that would go on to become best friends. Unfortunately we still didn't have much, but we had milk crates and music. Which basically means that we had basketball and Hip-Hop. But in the early 80s Grandmaster Flash and The Message was preaching and I wasn't quite getting the moral, but I did get a transmission from NYC that told me to grab some cardboard and try to do something called break dancing. I became our crews Mr. Wave, I was serious with the moves and respected. Beat Street became our movement and Hip-Hop was officially a part of everything we did. At this time I first heard a song called The Show and for the next 8 years one of my favorite emcees was Doug E Fresh, the human beat box.
