The story behind Kool G Rap and DJ Polo’s 1990 track, ‘Streets of New York’
For their second album, 1990’s Wanted: Dead or Alive, Kool G Rap and his late musical partner DJ Polo began strong, with the opening track and lead single, ‘Streets of New York’, setting the tone for the album, which became a hip hop classic in its own right.
The song is powered by a sample of ‘Gotta Learn How To Dance’ by the Fatback Band, a piano and saxophone being the most prominent instruments at its heart. Lyrically, G Rap’s knack for exploring the social ills of the New York he knew so well is vividly on display.
The man can paint the clearest of pictures with his words, his verses touching on themes of extreme poverty, prostitution, substance abuse, domestic violence, and naked police corruption. “That’s how it is,” G Rap ends his song, “in the streets of New York”.
Speaking to Complex in 2014 about the making of the track, G Rap explained that it was inspired by all the things he saw in New York as a kid growing up in the ’70s. He saw “dope fiends on the corner, dudes with puffy hands from shooting so much dope,” he explained, before recounting some even more gruesome memories.
“I’ve seen that shit a lot, man,” he said, “I’ve seen dudes with no eyes in their sockets. I’ve seen a chick with a fucking slit across her throat”.
G Rap claimed he was always “a part of the streets”, and that his experiences of them were poured into this song, but lyrics can only do so much work, and a song is only as good as it sounds. To truly bring this story to life, the beat needed to be right, and producer Large Professor was on hand to help with that.
G Rap recalled that he first met Large Professor through Eric B, and that he was blown away by watching him work. Creating music on his SP1200 drum machine, Large Professor was, by G Rap’s estimation, “like a one-man band” who could “chop shit up like he was on a typewriter”.
For his part, Large Professor was a great admirer of G Rap’s skills, too, celebrating his ability to tell tales so vividly within his verses, as he told Complex himself in 2012, while discussing the classic track.
He called G Rap “dope”, because he always had “ideas already in mind” when he arrived at the studio to get to work, which meant work on the beat could begin quickly, which served ‘Streets of New York’ so well. That particular track was “one of the strongest”, Large Pro insisted, the “one that everyone was feeling”.