Blake "KEO" Lethem - OTL #55: MC Serch & KEO Excerpt #2 lyrics

KEO: It got lumped together. I think famously like, you know, Henry Chalfont's voice on this documentary is saying "There are four elements of hip hop... They're rocking the mic, rocking the floor." You know, initially, graffiti was first. By 10 years before, you know, Kool Herc's first party or whatever. So, dudes in graffiti listened to all types of music, and hip hop came from all forms of music. It came from rock and Afro-cuban and flower children and gang bangers and f**in' Black Panthers all coming together in this melting pot of New York. And you know, West Indian DJ culture coming in. So I look at hip hop as being a sub-genre or an off shoot of graffiti, other than graffiti being a part of hip hop, because all of the original DJs - Grandmaster Flowers, he wrote Flowers. He went to Erasmus High School. He was a graffiti writer first and foremost. Famous graffiti writer. Herc - famous first generation graffiti writer. All these cats were in graffiti first. And graffiti had a certain way of dressing, a way of talking, a way of competitiveness... You were out to burn the competition, it was all about style and you were battling all the time. And that carried over into everything they did. The graffiti writer DJ - he DJed in a certain style to battle and to burn other crews, right? No other musical genre calls another group a crew. That came from graffiti. No other musical genre really focuses on the competitive battling the way that graffiti does. You hear about it in blues a little, "cutting heads", whatever, but for the most part that came from graffiti writers. So when they dance, they dance aggressively and competitively, and they talk about "you bit my style" - that's all graffiti. That's where all of that comes from. Calling yourself a name like Flash or taking on a pseudonym, or King so and so, Master-this, came from graffiti. The whole attitude, the style, everything. So while some graffiti writers had no interest in hip hop, when it became called hip hop, others invented it