These are the breaks! - Kurtis Blow in Stereo

Kurtis Blow

Released: 1980

Mercury Records

What is the first rap record you’ve heard? If you’re in your mid-20s and spent most of your life in Jakarta then Snoop Doggy Dogg, Biggie, bor the forgotten (quite rightly) Coolio were most likely to feature on your list. Yet for the wider world and New York City in particular, the first full-scale Bronx approved rap record was 1980’s Kurtis Blow. Sure, Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 radio hit Rappers’ Delight was the first universally accepted rap record to successfully make a crossover appeal yet ‘The Breaks’ put hip-hop on the map as well as coining the term ‘break’ for the first-time.



With hip-hop culture and rap music spreading around the American East Coast as well as slowly reaching other parts of the world in early 1980, a popular jive talkin’ rapper by the name of Kurtis Blow who already made a name for himself as a break-dancer and DJ in his native Harlem and Queens picked up the mic and made the transition to MC and in an even more important timeframe for this fledgling music genre, Kurtis Blow caught the ears of Mercury records and soon signed up to release his signature record and single on this label: The Breaks.

The Breaks contain all the elements in this new culture which still rings true to when you think of rap music. Although The Breaks rely on live musical instruments as opposed to loops from a turntable, the track features deft rhymes with various homophones of the word ‘break’ (“If your woman steps out with another man/("That's the breaks that's the breaks)/And she runs off with him to Japan/And the IRS says they want to chat/And you can't explain why you claimed your cat/And Ma Bell sends you a whopping bill/With eighteen phone calls to Brazil/And you borrowed money from the mob/And yesterday you lost your job/Well, these are the breaks/Break it up, break it up, break it up”),an insanely funky rhythm guitar going on in the background as well as a few extended drum beats (the hip-hop term of the word ‘break’) in the middle of the record for the break-dancers to go crazy to. This single track became a staple for other hip-hop DJs to sample for many years to come as well as it being used and referenced in other areas of popular culture (featured on the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City OST to name but one).

The album itself is also a classic in the genre with the tracks using mostly the same formula as The Breaks with delightful variations to each track. In fact the first five tracks of the original LP (and the last 2 from the CD) are all personal favourites of mine and not even the major-label-induced two weak tracks of the album ‘All I Want in This World (Is to Find That Girl)’ or the rock-induced ‘Takin’ Care of Business’ take much off Kurtis Blow (the album) from being a classic and elevating Blow himself to the likes of Afrika Bambaataa, Kool DJ Herc and Grandmaster Flash as the first pioneers of hip-hop.