Kool Moe Dee Did the Impossible
Straddling eras is almost unthinkable, Moe Dee it first.
Recently Fat Joe, French Montana and Remy Ma took the stage at the Prince-themed BET Awards. The rappers paced back and forth performing their hit “All The Way Up” in front of a Japanese-themed back drop…but my thoughts were elsewhere.
Twenty four years ago, a young, hungry hustling MC bogarted his way into the beatmaking, crate digging collective DITC, and took the Hip-Hop world by storm with “Flow Joe.” We first heard Fat Joe on Diamond D’s classic Stunts, Blunts, & Hip-Hop and anticipated his release from that moment on.
Fat Joe dropped Represent in 1993 and, ten albums later, hasn’t stopped.
Many of the younger brothers I know, kind of look at Fat Joe as a joke. They say he has marginal skills, so on and so forth. That type of stuff used to bother me but now I just present the case.
“‘Lean Back’ will still rock a party. That song is twelve (12) years old…and he’s still making hits. Not many people can say that.”
They named a slew of rappers, but none of the ones mentioned have been able to stay relevant like Fat Joe. He’s an anomaly. But music hasn’t really changed all that much in the last ten or so years. If you look at the time of the first Hip-Hop recording in 1979 and fast-forward ten years to 1989, there’s a world of difference. And only one person was able to navigate that successfully — Kool Moe Dee.
Let’s get a little bit of history.
If you followed our previous post, you’ve seen us discuss different eras of Hip-Hop here and here and several other places, so we won’t go into all of that this time. (Hyperlinks can be your friend). But suffice it to say, for this writing we will emphasize the world of change that took place between the first recorded raps to the so-called first Golden Era of Hip-Hop.
Think about it. (Recorded) Rap music as we know it came into existence six years into the actual advent of what people call Hip-Hop. DJs had cut up breaks, developed followings, added MCs, gained notoriety, sold customized tapes via the local cab services — there were dozens of DJs that became rap crews that we have never heard of — all before the world heard “Now what you hear is not a test…” Very few crews made it out of the world of non-recorded Hip-Hop and into the era of recorded rap. The pioneers, the Furious Five, & the Funky Four did. But they were the exception.
For awhile, those worlds still functioned congruently. Groups like the Fantastic Romantic Five and the Cold Crush Brothers were still able to maintain a level of respect and fame despite not having any popular recordings. Whatever innovations that they brought to the changing world of rap was either transmitted via recordings of their jams or lost.
Which is what makes The Treacherous Three so special. I can’t talk up the significance of “New Rap Language” enough. We talked about it in brief here and layed out an argument for why the song was so unique but what we have to take into consideration here is we were a mere months outside of “Rapper’s Delight.” “New Rap Language” was essentially one of the first rap records and eons ahead of it’s time due to the song's “fast rap.” The person responsible for the “fast rap” style was Kool Moe Dee.
I thought it would fuck people up. People started saying — oh yeah Moe Dee the guy with the fast rhymes . A lot of Emcees don’t know that you write rhymes in the same cadence that you speak combined with the way that you breathe… …To me the whole point of being cool was to be smooth. Kool Moe Dee
The Treacherous Three would have other hits like “The Body Rock” and “Heartbeat” and they remained a fixture at the jams until a new era came in.
I can’t front. Seeing Kool Moe Dee and Special K next to Run DMC was like seeing my old uncles next to my younger, cool cousins. Run DMC looked like us. Sounded like us. (at least the “us” that we wanted to be). Their energy matched ours. So seeing Run DMC on Mike Holman’s Graffiti Rock buttressed against 2/3 of the Treacherous Three was definitely a changing of the guard.
The Treacherous Three were in the 1984 summer release “Beat Street” also, but that was pretty much it for them. The world belonged to Run DMC and to a lesser degree Whodini. The sound that Larry Smith ushered in became the sound and new artists who were strictly recording artist took over.
We’re talking four years into recorded rap.
I think Bruce Cooley was the person that broke “Go See the Doctor” in our section of Park Hill. The difference between that era and this era was back then you listened to a song, beginning to end, then decided if you liked it or not. Now, before a person even listens, they ask, “who is this?” That usually determines if they will like it or not. So I never asked. I liked the song, asked to record it, he handed me the 12", and I saw the name ‘Kool Moe Dee.’
What’s important to note is Kool Moe Dee then, as well as now, was someone who analyzed the game and adapted to it:
To be honest, the only reason I got a second wind the first go ‘round, is because I changed my whole lyrical style up and made a record called “Go See the Doctor.” The hardest record for me to ever do because I had to take it all the way down and say [slowly and clearly] “I was walking down the street, rockin’ my beat, clappin’ my hands and stompin’ my feet.” I’m cringing through the whole shit. Kool Moe Dee
Although Moe Dee was cringing, his analysis was right. The song was not only unforgettable it was funny:
But don’t blame me if it turns into a foot extended from the middle of your body
And the next time you see a cute hottie
You won’t be able to screw
The only thing you can do
Is kick her
So go take karate
(I later learned that Teddy Riley produced this record…but you can read more about that here)
The year was 1986. A year later, Moe Dee dropped the self-titled album Kool Moe Dee…and it had a couple of joints on there. I know that “I’m Kool Moe Dee” got spins on a state of fresh, WBLS, and our personal favorite “Do You Know What Time It Is?” was in heavy rotation.
But it was Moe Dee’s next release, How Ya Like Me Now, that garnered the most attention. That joint came out in the Fall of 1987 with the lead single being the title track. The video had us open. But it was the next single that introduced Kool Moe Dee to a new audience.
Again, I have to be honest. I liked the song…HATED the video. HATED. The video almost made me change my mind on the song. But I just chose not to watch it. I thought the video would have been better had Moe Dee showed us what he was talking about in his lyrics — Harlem.
Good thing he wasn’t relying on me. Because people loved that video. Moe Dee won instant fans. He even gained women fans (a rarity back then…trust). It was around this time that the public learned of Kool Moe Dee and LL Cool J battling.
If you lived outside of the Tri-State area, that was a three song battle that had LL demolishing Kool Moe Dee with “Jack The Ripper.” But according to old rap lore, in the real world, LL was ducking and dodging Moe Dee from Harlem to Texas. InshAllah, at some point we can sit them both down and get an oral history of that battle.
Whatever the case may be, here we had Kool Moe Dee, someone from what was considered the old school at the time, battling one of rap’s greatest stars (of the mid to late 80s).
Moe Dee clocked a few more hits. The last two I can remember were “They Want Money” (produced by the then popular Teddy Riley), “I Go to Work.” (remember the video where he was fighting the Ninjas) and of course Kool Moe Dee was on one of the greatest rap posse cuts ever created, “Self Destruction.”
(Low-key, “How Cool Can One Blackman Be” from 1991 was pretty aight too. I don’t remember “Rise N Shine” or any other releases.)
Recently there have been two projects that have brought Kool Moe Dee back into the public conversation, one that I pray happens and the other…I’m still rather distraught by.
A few years back I saw the Kickstarter for the 30th anniversary of Graffiti Rock. I haven’t heard much about it since back then but I pray that it happens. I just recall seeing stills of various people being interviewed who played a role in that one-off, but still legendary 1984 show. One of those photos was of Kool Moe Dee.
The other project…Macklemore’s “Downtown” still gives me the heebie jeebies. I’ve read the interviews where the always articulate Moe Dee describes why he did it and what the environment was like…but watching the video, man, watching the video all I could think was “exploitation.”
Of course, there was a whole lot of internet squabbles about why no one else has done anything with Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mel, and Kool Moe Dee and, while there is some validity to that argument, all I can say is “that (Macklemore)was not it.”
Kool Moe Dee is national treasure and we shouldn’t only hear about him when a faux rapper taps into our feelings of nostalgia, using our artists as a novelty in his desire for credibility. I don’t know Macklemore’s heart — just that video. I would hate for that to be the last thing that we hear about Moe Dee.
I think that it’s important that people who profess their love of Hip-Hop recognize that Kool Moe Dee did what no one from his era could do; gained fame in a world before recorded rap, maintained popularity through the backing bad rap and electro rap era, resurfaced after the stripped down DMX period, gained a new audience during raps so-called first Golden Era, and almost made it through the conscious late 80s-early 90s. That’s five veritable generations of rap. Most people barely survive a year. So when we talk about the annals of great MCs, if we don’t mention Kool Moe Dee, we either don’t know history…or just don’t care.
