Favorite Song No. 365: Kurtis Blow – If I Ruled the World

Kurtis Blow - If I Ruled the World

Song: ​If I Ruled the World
Artist: ​Kurtis Blow
Year: 1985
Album: America
Genre: Hip Hop
Style: ​Old School Rap
Pictured: 12″ Single
Click Here to Play the Song

Day two, song 365– it’s rap veteran Kurtis Blow. His 1985 song “If I Ruled the World” has snuck into the list. When I was a teenager I had this song on a tape that I used as an accompaniment to playing basketball. I’d set my boombox beside the court and blast it while I practiced or played pickup games. As playing basketball was something I did nearly daily during my teens, I heard that tape, and this song, a lot. I no longer have the tape, but I can still remember much of it. It included tracks from Doug E. Fresh, Whodini, the Fat Boys, Run-D.M.C., Beastie Boys, Full Force, and, obviously, Kurtis Blow.

One notable aspect of this song is the looped sample. Throughout the song you can hear a bar from Trouble Funk’s “Pump Me Up” looped over and over. At the time, that was a big deal. Today, looping a sample is a ubiquitous production technique, but if anyone had done so before this song, I didn’t know about it. I’d heard plenty of rappers rhyme over drum machines, others doing so over a house band that was playing a portion of a disco hit over and over, just like a loop, and even some tapes of rappers rapping over looped breakbeats provided live by a DJ, but before this song I’d never heard a straight up loop of a bar of music taken from another song. It’s very possible some other performer did so prior to “If I Ruled the World,” and if you know one, please say so in the comments, but for teenaged me, this was my first exposure to a sampled loop, and it was part of what inspired me to create my own music. I spent hours in my bedroom practicing to mimic the crisp scratches of Kool DJ AJ, and trying my best to create loops without a sampler by pausing and punching in the same bar over and over on a tape recorder. I wish I still had some of those tapes, but they, like the mixtape mentioned above, are long gone.

Fun story: I met Kurtis Blow once, in the early ’90s. I was sent by a magazine I wrote for to cover an event at which he received a lifetime achievement award. It was a crazy event. Other awardees included Erik Estrada and some guy who directed pornographic movies, but I was there to see, and interview, Kurtis Blow. We spoke for about an hour. Somewhere I still have the cassette on which I recorded the interview, and if I can dig it up, I’ll share it online.

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