“Danny asked me who I’d been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T,” wrote Bob Dylan in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One. “He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. A few years earlier, Kurtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn … had asked me to be on one of his records and he familiarized me with that stuff. Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C. These guys … were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were all poets and knew what was going on.” All of that is true. But that still doesn’t excuse Dylan’s 10-second appearance on Blow’s “Street Rock” and his rookie-rapper mistake of trying to fit way too many words into each refrain.
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