The War Begins
The feud began with Queensbridge-based producer Marley Marl & MC Shan's track "The Bridge" in late 1985. The track recited the praises of their home borough and some of its earlier rap crews, and was taken to imply that Queensbridge was where hip hop began, even though it doesn't actually say that. The lyrics that apparently raised the issue were:
- You love to hear the story, again and again,
- Of how it all got started way back when,
- The monument is right in your face,
- Sit and listen for a while to the name of the place,
- The Bridge,
- Queensbridge
Though MC Shan states Queensbridge is where his crew got started, and his birthplace, he has stated that he never meant the song to say that Queensbridge is the birthplace of Hip Hop at all, "everyone knows that hip hop was started in the Bronx." Statements can be found in the 2003 documentary Beef, which features the original battle footage.
Read more about this topic: The Bridge Wars
Famous quotes containing the words the war, war and/or begins:
“Revolution begins with the self, in the self.... We’d better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouth don’t win the war.”
—Toni Cade (b. 1939)
“Testimony of all ages forces us to admit that war is among the most dangerous enemies to liberty, and that the executive is the branch most favored by it of all the branches of Power.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)