The 100 Greatest Brooklynites of All Time: 80 to 71
Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone. It’s a nice thought, really, and Lawrence Krishna Parker, from Flatbush, has spent his long and storied hip-hop career trying to see it come to fruition. One half of the legendary Boogie Down Productions—along with DJ Scott La Rock, whom the young Parker met in homeless shelter when he was 16—KRS-One is the original “conscious” hip-hopper, a perennially outspoken activist and artist, whose never been afraid to piss people off and speak his mind (he’s kind of the Noam Chomsky of hip-hop). After the shooting death of La Rock, KRS-One founded the Stop the Violence Movement, an outreach and awareness project aimed at, well, stopping the violence in African-American communities. Of course, none of this would really matter if the beats weren’t so very, very good…