The two Chrises didn’t write their lyrics. Nicolo saw that Kris Kross were marketable - they were two cute little kids who didn’t cuss in their lyrics - but also that they also came off tougher and meaner than a lot of the other pop-rap that was in the major-label system at the time. Ruffhouse, launched in 1990, had already seen some success with Tim Dog and Cypress Hill. Most of them turned him down, but Joe Nicolo, a Philadelphia rap producer who’d recently co-founded the Columbia imprint called Ruffhouse, signed the duo. Dupri produced a demo tape and shopped it around to labels. He also convinced his father to become the group’s manager. People were paying attention.” Right away, Dupri decided that these two little kids should be a group and that he should turn them into one.ĭupri came up with the deeply impractical trademark Kris Kross look, getting these kids to wear their jeans and baseball jerseys backwards. So I said, ‘Who are you? What do y’all do?’ They said, ‘No, we ain’t no group.’ Everybody else in the mall was looking at them the same way. I thought they were some teen stars I wasn’t hip to. In Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Dupri remembers the meeting: “They were real fresh. Dupri, who wasn’t too much older than those two kids, saw a whole lot of charisma in them. That day at Greenbriar Mall, the two of them were shopping for sneakers, and they walked up to Silk Tymes Leather to ask for autographs. Dupri was the little kid pop-locking in Whodini’s 1985 “Freaks Come Out At Night” video.Ĭhris Kelly and Chris Smith, both from Atlanta, had been friends since first grade. As a kid, Dupri found work as a dancer, touring with Cameo, Herbie Hancock, and early rap groups like Whodini and Run-DMC. In the early ’80s, a very young Dupri jumped onstage to dance with Diana Ross at an Atlanta show that his father booked. Michael Mauldin, Dupri’s father, was a road manager for funk acts like Cameo and the SOS Band. Jermaine Dupri grew up fully immersed in the R&B industry. While both members of Kris Kross were kids, they weren’t really that much younger than the guy who discovered and assembled the duo. (I was born in September of 1979, the same month that “Rapper’s Delight,” the first rap song to reach the Hot 100, came out both members of Kris Kross were about a year older than me.) If you were a little kid when “Jump” came out, then these two guys immediately seemed like the coolest human beings in existence. The two members of Kris Kross, Chris “Mac Daddy” Kelly and Chris “Daddy Mac” Smith, were parts of that exact same micro-generation. “Jump” was targeted directly at the kids in my micro-generation, the ones who had never known a pre-rap world. But the real difference-maker for “Jump” was probably timing. “Jump” is a ridiculously catchy and memorable song, and that definitely helped it hit the way that it did. In its time and for many years afterwards, “Jump” was also the biggest rap hit of all time. “Jump,” Kris Kross’ debut single and only #1 hit was, in its time, the most credible version of rap music that had ever made its way to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. In terms of age and geography and subject matter, Kris Kross were outliers within rap music, but they still made music that could sit comfortably next to Public Enemy or EPMD in a DJ set. But Kris Kross also made straight-up rap music. They were a gimmicky kiddie-rap duo, and that alone made them unthreatening. Those were all built on identifiable samples, and they all represented visions of the genre that white radio programmers might’ve found approachable. Those first three rap chart-toppers were different in all sorts of ways, but they were all, in one way or another, familiar. Dawn got there with “ Set Adrift On Memory Bliss,” their take on the genre was strange and psychedelic and daring, but their hit was also built on a sample of a new wave ballad, and the group stood in stark contrast to the fiery and militant rap that sat at the genre’s vanguard at the time. Even though rap was unambiguously Black music, the first two rappers with #1 hits, Vanilla Ice and Marky Mark, were both blandly handsome white guys. When rap songs first started crossing over and topping the Hot 100 in the early ’90s, the stuff that made it to the top was carefully vetted for white consumption. The kids in my little micro-generation had never really known a world without rap the music was part of the air. By 1992, rap was easily the most exciting and vital genre of pop music. In retrospect, something like Kris Kross had to happen. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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