January 23, 2008 - 67. The Breaks

ARTIST: Kurtis Blow

ALBUM: Kurtis Blow (1980)

I've overslept. Now I'm rushing. Discombobulated and cranky. Skip breakfast. Get outside. Raining. No umbrella. Reach the subway stop. Soaked. Almost slip leaping down the steps to the platform. Train isn't running. Technical difficulties. The silver-lining folks would say that an attitude shift would make me see the sun. But these aren't those types of days.

Supreme rapper Kurtis Blow rhymed about the when-it-rains-it-pours-occasions in "The Breaks." In his version your woman leaves, the IRS is knocking down your door, you've lost your job, your phone bill has hit the roof, and the mob is after you. Life really can't get worse.

In hip-hop the break is a defining element. In the '70s Kool Herc, a godfather to the culture, noticed that when he was DJing parties, the dancers went crazy on the floor when the raw instrumental took center stage and everything else faded out. To keep this short interlude going, Herc began looping breaks together to create an extended play for the dancers to do their thing. It became their vacation. B-boys and b-girls released the tension mounting from their urban environment by rocking during the break.

Blow, a former b-boy, crafted his song to feature several of these interludes. He stops rapping about the struggles of life and lets dancers take their frustrations out on the dance floor. He gives us time to forget about the world and lose ourselves in expression.

The breaks of life are inevitable, but it's how we handle them that dictates how we'll survive them. Think about the brown and black kids in New York who found creative ways, such as the four elements of hip-hop, to battle their broken-glass world and in the process sparked a global culture.

As the song of life continues to spin, a break will eventually come when we can air our aggravations, release our creative juices, and prepare ourselves for the next challenge. We must press on. Until the break.

From The Message: 100 Life Lessons from Hip-Hop's Greatest Songs by Felicia Pride. Copyright c 2007. Published and reprinted by arrangement with Thunder's Mouth Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved.