Trailblazing female rapper MC Lyte has some sage advice: “I’d never suggest to a female MC to do what I did,” she told me on this week’s “Renaissance Man.”
As a young girl dreaming of becoming a recording artist, she went with a man friend to Staten Island since the label First Priority Music, founded by Nat Robinson, was searching for a female artist to sign.
“I had my rhyme book. We went to Staten Island. It was cold as I don’t know what. We were going over on the ferry. We got there. They’d a Thunderbird,” she said. “[We] jumped within the Thunderbird, went to the home, went to the basement. There have been like nine guys within the basement all waiting for me to get there.” She opened up her rhyme book, took the mike and took control of the room. “And I assume that’s after I knew I had something.”
Looking back, she knows that her fateful trip to Shaolin could have put her at risk — although it resulted in her big break. She became the primary female MC to release an album, “Lyte as a Rock,” and certainly one of the primary hip-hop artists to play Carnegie Hall.
“I’d never say ‘go over on the Staten Island ferry on an island which you’ll be able to’t get off of unless you’re driving or you are taking a ferry’ … I’d never tell someone to go right into a basement of a house where they know absolutely nobody except the guy that brought them there,” she said. “It was only a recipe for disaster. And thank God that’s not what they were about.”
But MC Lyte, whose second season of “Partners in Rhyme” on AllBlk TV just dropped, said she never “approached being on this business as a girl,” but as a human. Nonetheless, she was a female working her magic in a male dominated world, so being considered a pioneer comes with the territory. Her influence stays with artists similar to Rapsody telling me MC Lyte made her wish to get into the rap game.
“I never considered myself the primary. I all the time thought, you recognize, hey, I’m just in it. I’m pushing the culture forward. However it wasn’t until I got older that I spotted how difficult it actually was,” she said. “So that you asked me, ‘How did I feel once I got there?’ I don’t know. The delineating moment of, ‘Oh, I made it.’ I felt somewhat achieved at the primary Grammy nomination.”
The Brooklyn native, who began rapping at 12, has also been a fashion leader and said her style back within the day was a bit edgier than the Dapper Dan of Harlem devotees. She rocked Simpsons characters throughout her clothing and favored Karl Kani and 5001 Flavors — the latter of which got her audited by the IRS because she was getting a lot inventory from them. She said it was eventually tossed out.
But perhaps her most significant role is of a really youthful elder stateswoman of hip-hop. MC Lyte has all the time been vocal about violence in hip-hop, dating back to the late ’80s when she joined other rappers for the “Stop the Violence Movement,” with the enduring song “Self Destruction.” Nowadays, she uses social media to talk out.
“I believe [rap wars and violence] has loads to do with these monikers that somewhat journalists are accountable for, you recognize, even coining this phrase ‘old skool.’ Or corny phrases of those segmented ways of the hip-hop genre. And once you begin having segments, it’s like anything when you could have teams, when you could have an Atlanta team and you could have LA, everybody’s rooting for his or her team. So it becomes very segregated,” she said adding that a bit conflict isn’t bad, but “when it gets off record is after we begin to have a problem. I come from a faculty of braggadocio. In case you can’t say you’re a badass, then you definately might as well just sit down. But then, you recognize, we’ve had incidents in hip-hop where it began on record after which it went out into the world.”
MC Lyte, whose favorite young artist is J Cole, is all about unity. And we should always hearken to her sermons about not going into strange basements, but in addition: Life.
“We’re losing too many individuals. And never just from music, just generally, across the board. It’s never been really easy simply to shoot a gun,” she said, adding, “It’s like what is de facto happening with the worth that we’re putting on lives?”
Detroit native Jalen Rose is a member of the University of Michigan’s iconoclastic Fab Five, who shook up the faculty hoops world within the early ’90s. He played 13 seasons within the NBA, before transitioning right into a media personality. Rose is currently an analyst for “NBA Countdown” and “Get Up,” and co-host of “Jalen & Jacoby.” He executive produced “The Fab Five” for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, is the writer of the best-selling book, “Got To Give the People What They Want,” a fashion tastemaker, and co-founded the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, a public charter school in his hometown.
Trailblazing female rapper MC Lyte has some sage advice: “I’d never suggest to a female MC to do what I did,” she told me on this week’s “Renaissance Man.”
As a young girl dreaming of becoming a recording artist, she went with a man friend to Staten Island since the label First Priority Music, founded by Nat Robinson, was searching for a female artist to sign.
“I had my rhyme book. We went to Staten Island. It was cold as I don’t know what. We were going over on the ferry. We got there. They’d a Thunderbird,” she said. “[We] jumped within the Thunderbird, went to the home, went to the basement. There have been like nine guys within the basement all waiting for me to get there.” She opened up her rhyme book, took the mike and took control of the room. “And I assume that’s after I knew I had something.”
Looking back, she knows that her fateful trip to Shaolin could have put her at risk — although it resulted in her big break. She became the primary female MC to release an album, “Lyte as a Rock,” and certainly one of the primary hip-hop artists to play Carnegie Hall.
“I’d never say ‘go over on the Staten Island ferry on an island which you’ll be able to’t get off of unless you’re driving or you are taking a ferry’ … I’d never tell someone to go right into a basement of a house where they know absolutely nobody except the guy that brought them there,” she said. “It was only a recipe for disaster. And thank God that’s not what they were about.”
But MC Lyte, whose second season of “Partners in Rhyme” on AllBlk TV just dropped, said she never “approached being on this business as a girl,” but as a human. Nonetheless, she was a female working her magic in a male dominated world, so being considered a pioneer comes with the territory. Her influence stays with artists similar to Rapsody telling me MC Lyte made her wish to get into the rap game.
“I never considered myself the primary. I all the time thought, you recognize, hey, I’m just in it. I’m pushing the culture forward. However it wasn’t until I got older that I spotted how difficult it actually was,” she said. “So that you asked me, ‘How did I feel once I got there?’ I don’t know. The delineating moment of, ‘Oh, I made it.’ I felt somewhat achieved at the primary Grammy nomination.”
The Brooklyn native, who began rapping at 12, has also been a fashion leader and said her style back within the day was a bit edgier than the Dapper Dan of Harlem devotees. She rocked Simpsons characters throughout her clothing and favored Karl Kani and 5001 Flavors — the latter of which got her audited by the IRS because she was getting a lot inventory from them. She said it was eventually tossed out.
But perhaps her most significant role is of a really youthful elder stateswoman of hip-hop. MC Lyte has all the time been vocal about violence in hip-hop, dating back to the late ’80s when she joined other rappers for the “Stop the Violence Movement,” with the enduring song “Self Destruction.” Nowadays, she uses social media to talk out.
“I believe [rap wars and violence] has loads to do with these monikers that somewhat journalists are accountable for, you recognize, even coining this phrase ‘old skool.’ Or corny phrases of those segmented ways of the hip-hop genre. And once you begin having segments, it’s like anything when you could have teams, when you could have an Atlanta team and you could have LA, everybody’s rooting for his or her team. So it becomes very segregated,” she said adding that a bit conflict isn’t bad, but “when it gets off record is after we begin to have a problem. I come from a faculty of braggadocio. In case you can’t say you’re a badass, then you definately might as well just sit down. But then, you recognize, we’ve had incidents in hip-hop where it began on record after which it went out into the world.”
MC Lyte, whose favorite young artist is J Cole, is all about unity. And we should always hearken to her sermons about not going into strange basements, but in addition: Life.
“We’re losing too many individuals. And never just from music, just generally, across the board. It’s never been really easy simply to shoot a gun,” she said, adding, “It’s like what is de facto happening with the worth that we’re putting on lives?”
Detroit native Jalen Rose is a member of the University of Michigan’s iconoclastic Fab Five, who shook up the faculty hoops world within the early ’90s. He played 13 seasons within the NBA, before transitioning right into a media personality. Rose is currently an analyst for “NBA Countdown” and “Get Up,” and co-host of “Jalen & Jacoby.” He executive produced “The Fab Five” for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, is the writer of the best-selling book, “Got To Give the People What They Want,” a fashion tastemaker, and co-founded the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, a public charter school in his hometown.
