. To me, Allen saying “Don’t Believe The Hype” meant someday, I could be on a record — even if I wasn’t a rapper.
For a 10-year-old aspiring journalist, Allen made the profession cool and respectable. He wasn’t the kind of media Public Enemy would diss on a song, and I wanted to be down with Public Enemy. So, if I was going to be a journalist, I had to be like Allen.If hip-hop endorsed a writer, it didn’t matter if my friends didn’t understand why I wanted to interview people and write about them for a living. Allen writes about race, culture and politics. I wanted to do the same, with sports mixed in.
If you wanted to use words to make a point or share a message, you didn’t have to get behind a microphone and spit rhymes for the masses. The keyboard fit perfectly for those like me, aspiring to be like Allen. It’s a big reason a lot of my academic work dating back to ninth grade, when I used an EPMD song for an English assignment, has been intertwined with my aspirations.
Hip-hop was my gateway to storytelling. And sports was always in the mix. Kurtis Blow, who just celebrated his 64th birthday on Wednesday,