Kurtis Blow Promotional Portrait
Publisher
Mercury Records
Publisher
PolyGram Records, Inc.
Signer
Kurtis Blow
Subject
Kurtis Blow
Visual image
Kurtis Blow
Date1980
Mediumpaper (fiber product)
DimensionsOverall (HWD): 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.32 cm)
Credit LineMoPOP permanent collection
Object number1999.221.3
Text EntriesKurtis Blow (Kurtis Walker, b. 1959) became the first rapper to be signed by a major record label, Mercury Records in 1979. His first single “Christmas Rappin’” sold more than 400,000 copies and became a holiday staple. With his second release, “The Breaks”, in 1980, Blow earned the first gold record ever for a Rap artist and launched the careers of The Fat Boys and Run-DMC. He went on to accomplish many other firsts including being the first Rap artist to star in a national television commercial (Sprite, 1986), making the first Rap video (“Basketball,” 1984), and acting in a soap opera (One Life to Live, 1991). He is also the founder of the International Hip-Hop Museum.
CopyrightThis work is issued under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License. For more information, go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
On View
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