Studio 88-9’s DJ Mo Wilks interviews legendary Hip Hop king, Big Daddy Kane!

What’s good Boston DJ, Mo Wilks inside Studio 88-9 with a Hip-Hop pioneer who’s definitely got the juice, having fun doing my homework for this great artist.  He’s a lyricist, lyricist, fast or slow, he’s definitely got the smooth flow. An icon, Hip Hop’s first sex symbol and fashionista.  He’s going to be appearing tonight over at City Winery, Boston, which is on Beverly Street right down by the TD Garden.   Welcome to the, the phone and the mic, the King Asiatic Nobody’s equal.  Big Daddy Kane.  How are you doing, King?

I’m great. I’m great. Wonderful.  Yeah.

So, you’re going to be in town tonight with a full band.

Absolutely.  Absolutely.  Yes, we are coming to do real big live instruments and everything.

Now.  I’ve known you to do stuff on stage with definitely DJS.  Is there a big contrast with the band?  What can people kind of expect from your show?

Well, it’s going to be a whole different vibe, a whole different energy.  We’re trying to bring back those James Brown elements, you know, OK, original kind of vibes.

I mean, hip hop celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.  So happy anniversary.  And you were there for at least 70% of that going back, at least to the mid-eighties.  Did you think as the song goes, ‘Hip Hop would get this far’ and do these many things?

Absolutely, by all means.  Yeah, I started it actually late eighties.  But, I always, I, it was like, I, once I saw how big Run (DMC) and Whodini was getting to hear people say that it was just a fad.  Those are the, you know, same sayings that they had about rock and roll.  So, I knew that hip hop was gonna be just as big or even bigger.

And you’ve worked with some amazing names.  I mean, Barry White,Patti, LaBelle, Quincy Jones, what was it like to work with such a producer like Quincy Jones?

Well, that was amazing because I must submit that.  Quincy actually produced me, you know, it wasn’t a type of thing where, you know, he made a beat and I came in and rhymed.  It was like, he said, “what you know about Dizzy Gillespie?, what you know about Sarah Vaughn? and then was sitting there looking in on Black encyclopedias, which I also didn’t even know existed at that time, you know, and reading up on these artist before I even wrote the rhymes, you know, and he’s telling me nicknames that he used to call Dizzy and stuff to him.  And Ella Fitzgerald used to talk about to incorporate that.  So, I can actually say that he really truly produced me when we worked together.

There are a lot of parallels between like the early Jazz Bebop and Hip Hop, huh?

Yeah.  He, he noticed that like he was comparing, he was comparing like my fast flow to Ella Fitzgerald the way she scats and he was saying that the reason why the way she scats was so different than others is because most people follow a piano or a bass.

But Ella followed the horn.  So that, yeah, so that became my new rhyme for Busta Rhymes because the way his flow changes so much so that I call Buster ‘Fella Fitzgerald’.