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D Scott

Thursday, December 14th, 2023 10:12am

There were a few noticeable faces missing from the Grammy's celebration of Hip Hop 50. One of those faces was KRS-One. KRS is easily one of the cornerstones of hip hop and him not being there spoke volumes. As we all know, hip hop in general has had it's issues with The Grammy's and rightfully so. Many of the artists feel that the genre and culture has been ignored for a number of years. Eminem has called them out, Jay-Z boycotted them as well as many other artists.

KRS-One is another one of those artists that doesn't take what The Grammy's have done lightly. He was personally invited by LL Cool J and he said no. From the sounds of things, he didn't even hesitate to say no.

KRS explained his reasons for turning the invite down in a recent interview. Here's what he had to say - 

“I was asked about two months ago; they asked me to do it and I turned them down,” he said. “With all due respect, LL COOL J himself called me, spoke to my wife and pretty much begged for me to be on the show but we turned him down. And reason being is because I know people don’t understand this — and I say this respectfully. KRS-One is a Hip Hop extremist. I’m not violent, a violent extremist. I’m insane with this culture. I know I must have lost my mind in this.”

He continued: “I don’t fight it, I don’t apologize for it. I recognize that my experience in this thing called Hip Hop is different from mostly everybody else’s experience with Hip Hop. […] I restrict myself in a certain way, because I know who I am in this culture. You’re in the temple of Hip Hop, this is our home. This place, this institution can never side with, come under, understand the exploitation of our culture. Never will you ever see me standing in the environment where our culture is being exploited.

“So when I got the call, I immediately said nah. First of all, it’s the Grammys? You get no respect here. None. Now we respect your existence, we know you exist. And we know that you’re the Grammys and we understand that and we respect that. But you ignored Hip Hop for 49 years. At the 50th year, you wanna call us? You couldn’t even call on 47 and gear it up to 50. You wait to the 50th year to call Hip Hop’s authentic teacha? Nah, you don’t get that privilege.”

Here's a little bit of that interview!

Careful because there's some NSFW language in this clip.

Feature photo: Reuters