We Speak Celebrity News
Kurtis Blow and The D.O.C. to Be Honored at Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards in Las Vegas
Hip-hop is giving its architects their due in Las Vegas. The Paid In Full Foundation’s fourth annual Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards take place tomorrow (October 24) at the Bellagio, with pioneering MC Kurtis Blow and West Coast lyricist and songwriter The D.O.C. set as this year’s honorees.
Kurtis Blow’s place in the foundation of the culture is unquestioned — the first rapper signed to a major label, and the voice of “The Breaks,” the first certified gold rap single. The D.O.C., meanwhile, helped write the West Coast blueprint, from his own “It’s Funky Enough” to his pen work behind N.W.A and Dr. Dre. The Grandmaster Awards exist for exactly these stories: honoring the originators while they are here to receive it.
The evening’s special honors underline the point. Nile Rodgers — whose guitar powered Chic and, through sampling, half of hip-hop’s family tree — will receive the Quincy Jones Achievement Award, while video pioneer Ralph McDaniels, the face of Video Music Box, receives the Contributor Award.
The Paid In Full Foundation built the Grandmaster Awards to direct recognition — and support — toward the pioneers who laid hip-hop’s groundwork. Tomorrow night in Las Vegas, two more of them take their bow.
We Speak Celebrity News
MC Lyte Hits the Road on ‘Road to the Hall of Fame’ Tour Ahead of Rock Hall Induction
MC Lyte is spending the weeks before her Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction doing it live. The Brooklyn MC is on the road with her “Road to the Hall of Fame” tour, a 12-market retrospective run building toward her induction on November 14 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.
Lyte enters the Hall in the Class of 2026 with an Early Influence Award, alongside fellow Early Influence honorees Queen Latifah, Celia Cruz, Fela Kuti and Gram Parsons. The performer class she joins is heavyweight in its own right — Phil Collins, Billy Idol, Iron Maiden, Joy Division/New Order, Oasis, Sade, Luther Vandross and Wu-Tang Clan among them.
The honor is overdue by any measure. In 1988, Lyte as a Rock made her the first female rapper to release a full-length solo album, and records like “Paper Thin,” “Cha Cha Cha” and “Ruffneck” set a standard for lyricism the culture still measures against. The tour leans into that legacy: an immersive retrospective mixing the songs with the stories behind them. It opened October 11 — her birthday — at Brooklyn Bowl, rolled through Chicago on October 20 and Minneapolis on October 21, and reaches Atlanta for November 9–10 dates ahead of induction night.
For an artist who quite literally wrote part of hip-hop’s first chapter, the road to the Hall could not be better named.
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