One of the Founding Fathers of hip-hop DJ’ing Kool Herc told a Hip-Hop Appreciation Week crowd on Chicago’s Near South Side Saturday that they should shut their pocketbooks and wallets to music industry industrials who expect aspiring mic-controllers and producers to come hat-in-hand to them for a deal.
Herc’s comments for a panel discussion with Afrika Bambaataa on hip-hop’s earliest history at Northeastern Illinois University’s Center for Inner City Studies, which was part of the weekend Hip-Hop Odyssey conference-festival sponsored by Universal Zulu Nation, were in response to those a couple hours earlier by Bad Boy Worldwide Entertainment Group founder and CEO Sean “P.Diddy” Combs during the WGCI Music Seminar at the Hyatt Regency Chicago in the city’s downtown Loop district.
During a question and answer session of a WGCI Music Seminar panel on hip-hop moderated by The Source publisher David Mays, Combs maintained that his company was not going to invest in sending out staff from its New York City headquarters to Chicago for scouting talent. Combs, whose label is scrambling for distribution after getting dropped recently from Arista, strongly suggested that any Chicago and Midwestern acts that want a deal with Bad Boy had best “get up, get out, and get it.”
“That is an insult,” Kool Herc said, rising to his feet while Bambaataa kept to his without a word. Before the response, Herc had already complained in general that such hip-hop industrialists as Combs and Def Jam founder and chairman Russell Simmons had used the ghetto to get out of the ghetto but now were not substantially reinvesting in the very struggling communities that elevated their careers. “Why support him? Don’t buy his stuff. Don’t support people who don’t respect and support you.”
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In an aside during a pep talk from Bambaataa on political awareness, Herc said Combs was “full of shit.”
Much later in the day into the wee hours of the morning, Herc spun a loft set of something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue on Chicago’s Northwest Side at the smoke-free juice bar Square One in the Greater Wicker Park-Bucktown neighborhood that was the main locale for the current season of “MTV Real World.” The Zulu conference-festival lasted from Friday to Saturday and attracted a multicultural following of heads from both coasts and the Midwest.
