Learning From The Teacha

Sitting in the classical music section of J&R, surrounded by people who don’t know each other, who have never met each other, everyone surrounding one man and a small recorder, listening to hear him speak, to hear what he has to say, to see the inner workings of his mind. KRS-One sits center stage, on a wooden stool, teaching his personal sermon, and I, holding the recorder, to his right, asking for his words.

I sat with KRS-One, one of the most important MCs in the history of rap, after a show he played with new collaborator, Buckshot, and the intention was to speak primarily about his new album, Survival Skills. However, the discussion took some turns from there, and there were issues covered that I never expected to come up.

“I’m done with music, really. I’m more into sound,” KRS starts, as an orchestra plays a thundering forte in the background, causing laughs from those around us. “I love classical.” He laughs, as if to say, “There’s no coincidence.”

But sound! That’s what he’s into? What does that mean?

“Sound moves you in certain ways,” he continued. “The clanging of pots can move you, the ringing of the dinner bell can move you, the cracking of a soda and the pouring of it, you know, can move you…I hear everything!”

He’s like a chef tasting ingredients. In fact, KRS tells us, he is a chef and he has a great salmon dish he could make for you some time, but here he’s cooking with sound, and thoughts, and skills, and words.

With his new album, he is bringing sounds to the table that he has never brought before—making new recipes and flavors from the ingredients he has discovered. And his job has changed as well, as he’s become older, wiser, and more aware of the things he has accomplished.

“For twenty three years, I’ve been an emcee, which is a community performer,” KRS explains. “Now I’ve become the Master of Ceremonies, the M dot C dot. I do more hosting now, I do more teaching now, I’m not really rocking the mic…I mean I still do shows here and there, but that’s not my direction, in that sense. I’ve mastered that, and as anyone will tell you, once you’ve mastered something, you always want to bring yourself down to a primitive, I don’t know, ignorant level, and start the whole thing over again.”

KRS-One is a man who loves to talk and when he speaks people listen. A crowd begins to gather, and they moan, grunt and speak with approval at the things he says. He says we need to see him in a different light. He takes questions from the crowd. Themes emerge.

"Why doesn’t technology help us, KRS?" And he picks up on that. “Because humanity creates things beyond itself…We have a problem with having a brain. What the brain does to us, is it puts an automatic weapon in the hands of a kid.” A man gasps, shocked by this revelation, and the Teacha keeps on speaking. “Look at humanity first.”

KRS stops. The things he says, after a long career of teaching and rapping, have taken on a heaviness, before he even speaks them. He knows this, and he knows his name and influence make it so that he has to think about what he says first. “Most people believe that civilization is this: we have light, computers, car, medicine, tools. People judge their civilization on that, when in fact that is not civilization at all. Civilization is an advanced stage in human interaction…I’m not going to club you over the head anymore...I need you.”

He mentions Socrates, the social contract theory, love. Civilization, in his eyes, is simply needing, living and working together, working for the benefit of everyone, not just oneself. The crowd gasps more. I think, Well, what about the album?

“Now look out there,” KRS points out to the streets of New York City and to City Hall. “On that Wall Street there, that is nowhere near civilization. The mere fact that you have traffic lights proves that we are unable of being civilized. Why can’t you drive your car, wait at a corner for the next car to go, then take your turn?”

One voice—“Because nobody’s teaching that.”

“No. Because humanity are animals.”

There it is! Survival Skills! KRS-One continues speaking, but there’s a point that he has made right there that must be stopped and reanalyzed. That there, that paranoia is the deep fear and frustration that has plagued this artist for the past 23 years. It is the frustration that has bothered him, but also propelled him into his persona. He fears us—humans—because he thinks we will destroy civilization and he has made it a key point of his to try and stop us all from doing that.

So now, he’s got a new album, Survival Skills with a new artist, his boy Buckshot. He’s found a brother, raised in Brooklyn, like he had been, whom he’ll work with, and the message is pushed forward with the same fury as ever. But the method now is different—it’s still angry, but more patient, it’s still confrontational, but now it’s giving a solution: skills. KRS-One wants us to learn the skills to save civilization.

“Civilization is what we need. In fact, civilization is a survival skill—but we got away from it because we rely too much on technology,” KRS says. “This is another way of getting the same old message out there: civilization over technology, hip-hop over race…we’re advocating that true civilization is beyond race, beyond class, ethnicity, gender—we’re using these things to kill each other!”

Silence. That’s the first time the man has mentioned it, the very genre he has mastered, and made his. He talks about it like the ancient rockers talk about rock ’n’ roll in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. He talks about it like a religion or a culture—even like civilization itself.

“[Hip-hop] is a shared idea,” he says. “Hip-hop is what the world would be without neo-colonialism…Hip-hop unites us with our humanity—writing, reading, speaking, dancing—the psychic ability of hip-hop, the fact that he could be from another culture, you, another culture, me, another culture…technology cannot do that.” Civilization can. And hip-hop is doing that, according to him.

For years, KRS-One seemed to many others (including myself) as a sort of prophet of hip-hop. He’s seen as an artist, a teacher and a writer, but every time I saw him as original. I always felt that it was originality that made KRS special, and important, and worth listening to.

I am reminded of his song “Ah Yeah,” where he lists off a group of people and he proclaims to be the return of them. I understand that for the first time. I see KRS-One as Marcus Garvey, Malcom X, Jesus, Moses and others. I see him as Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison as well. He is a replacement prophet, but that only makes who he is more powerful.

“Take a look at the album cover.” KRS explains, after I ask him what the album means to him and his legacy, “It’s us going up a mountain. It’s me holding Buckshot up, as I climb this mountain. Or is it? Look at the cover again. Is it Buckshot grounding me? Look at Buckshot’s intensity. Is it Buckshot saying, ‘Wait! The people still need you!’?”

KRS-One is not finished, but when he is, he will move on, and he’ll be replaced by another. It’s what he did when he came in to fill the void, and when he leaves, another will surely come in and fill the void he leaves.

It might be Buckshot, and this may be the most important album you’ve ever heard, but it might also be somebody else. It could be anyone, and in the words of the Philosopher himself, “The solution is you.”

He is not new, he is repetition, and he is human, like the rest of us, but he is what we need and have needed for over 23 years. He’s brought us hip-hop as a culture, and now he’s back to teach us some Survival Skills. He’s been the Blastmaster, and the Teacha, and now he’s teaching a new generation. He is both brilliant and insane, because that is what we all need. He is a man that wants to talk, and until nobody wants to hear it anymore, he’s going to keep talking. Right now though all he hopes is that someone is listening to him and not pretending to listen like those little schoolchildren with their teachers.

-Andoni Elias Nava