Boogie Down Productions – By All Means Necessary
There was so much anticipation when this album was coming out. Before this was the Criminal Minded album and I was to-ing and froing with whether to choose that instead. I remember sitting and listening to Criminal Minded non-stop when it dropped in 1987. Non-stop. Then Scott La Rock got killed and it was like, "What’s going to happen now?" BDP were just about to really blow up. And then ‘My Philosophy’ came out. I saw the music video first. I still class myself as a B-boy, I’m hip-hop through and through – the real stuff – and when I saw that video and the rhyme and everything that KRS-One came with, it BLEW ME AWAY. It blew me away musically, it blew me away with the image, the fashion, the whole representation of a Bronx crew – it wasn’t really gangster or anything like that. So the anticipation for By All Means Necessary was huge. Lyrically on 'My Philosophy', KRS-One was just awesome, really awesome. And when this album dropped it didn’t let me down – track by track, not just the knowledge he was dropping, but the production was fantastic for the time as well. There are so many great tracks on the album, so many big, big songs – it took everything to another level. To me, around this point, this was the birth of the golden era for hip-hop.