Stylin’ with Bruno Schultz
“Now, you have to realize there was no hip hop then, my children. It was long before Africa Bambatta and the other peeps from the Bronx River Houses started to have parties with DJs and MCs. There was rap, but there wasn’t hip-hop. But I don’t want you to think that there was no stylin’ going on. Because there was and it was me making the whole party hearty. Yeah, I ran my posse just like Easy-E ran his in Compton.
Now, a lot of you have seen that Charlie Ahearn movie, “Wild Style,” but I’m here to tell you that before there was “Wild Style,” there was Bruno Schultz-before-the-Nazis style. I was a bad ass motherfucker back then in the 30s before the brothers were laying down beats and talking all that trash over them. My shit hit harder than an army tank. When I spat out my testimony, the verses were so sharp they shredded the mikes.
Called our asses, the NBH crew. Stands for Natural Born Hebrews. That era I came up in got me gone, nwa’ mean? Me an’ my homies Sic ‘Em, 4 Play and Pretty Ricky, we were crunk party animals and all the civilians and the hustlers had to respect our grind. When we dropped a mixtape, it changed the game. Wasn’t the same, old bullshit about the kind of rims niggers had on their BMWs in ‘36. We pushed it over the top, but kept it street.
Wouldn’t be no Sean John line if it hadn’t been for me and my ghetto stylin’ brothers from them Sbreazin slums. You modern day brothers think you representing, you should have seen us between the Wars. We used to have them foxes eating out of our hands and sucking on whatever else we put out at them. Yeah, we was hauling in the shorties like they were so many mountains of fish piling up in our pre-hip hop nets, my brothers. We were the kikes that controlled the mikes and we kept it tril. Them little ghetto girls and even them foxes spoke nothing but German, liked to get down with us. We’d take those high-styling German-only bitches back to the crib and before long they’d be moaning and shouting in time to us thumping them in the prettiest Yiddish gefelt you ever heard down South, down shetlel way. I’m telling you now, we weren’t jiving, we was stylin’.
That’s what it was like down Central Europe way when we was jamming in the wayback and that Nazi menace looked like as much of a threat to us as Barry Manilow was to the early rappers, the real Wild Style era brothers.
But I can’t front. You know most of the brothers and sisters perished and there aren’t too many of us left who know the beats and remember the abuse we used to take from our people, never mind the gentiles, for our wide-ass trousers and what they called our filthy lyrics. We put out some dope discs like “We So Hood,” and “Why God Love Da Jews (da goyim annoy him)” and other heavy shit than changed the rap game.
Everybody had a problem with our bling and our gold-capped teeth. Only thing kept us going was the music. Didn’t have no weed, didn’t have no uppers or downers. All we had was that Czech beer, came in steins make your forties look like shorties. No, if you want to get the straight take on those early days of rap, those jamming’ 30s, it’s Bruno Schultz who invented that thug thing.
You should have seen it when my cd “Street of Crocadildos” came out. That was a happening record and it soared up the charts like it had a butt rocket under it. We couldn’t find a big enough place to play anywhere near the Tikkun Olam Houses so we rented out a club across the river in Breslau and put on a show there. We wanted to give something back to the homies before we went out on a tour took us from Kiev to Trieste in 36 days and 35 nights.
I ain’t saying we didn’t have our beefs and our issues. We was always arguing about whether to include some German lyrics in our rhymes, which were nearly always in Yiddish, the language of the ghetto. Some of the peeps in my crew said it would broaden our audience, and I guess it might have, but it would have made us less Jewish. I wanted to keep it real. Who knows maybe German rhyming would have got us tours that took us out of Europe altogether? We might have been playing South America or someplace when the shit hit the fan here in Poland. Maybe we would have been able to sit out the War on some beach in Rio. I dunno, people that hated ghetto rap might have gone after our asses there too.
But I couldn’t see that then. And that was bad, because I was the visionary of our crew. Not that that was saying much, but it was me who had the idea of hooking up with the heavy metal acts and getting us spread out a bit more in the media. Helped out their lame ass acts too, like Aerosmith and Rush and all those hair bands, got a second taste of life thanks to the formula that I came up with when I was pushing us rhymers to work with their honky asses.
And then to hear how they tell it, its like these dudes never heard of a rapper getting his face on a major magazine cover before the 80s. But that’s just more jive, I was on the cover of Vogue and Rolling Stone about 6 times between 1932 and 1935. I even did the Time and Newsweek covers the same week in 1934. So you don’t have to tell me that it’s harder to break through to the mainstream media now and that back in our day it was easy.
I ain’t buying that shit. If there’d been TV back then, instead of just WJEW, ghetto radio, I’d have my own line of clothes now and would’ve been bigger that this faggot Sean John Puffy Combs Diddy cause I’m Bruno Schultz and it’s my flow you must know.”
