Creativity Quote by Kurtis Blow

There is a whole era of hip-hop self-mythology packed into that casually misspelled sentence. Kurtis Blow isn’t writing poetry here; he’s doing what early rap pioneers had to do constantly in a culture that was still being dismissed as a fad: establish proximity to other people’s fame, legitimacy, and insider history. “I used to date Latoya” reads less like romance than like a credential, a quick stamp that says: I was there, I had access, I moved in rooms you only read about.

The name “Latoya” does the heavy lifting. If listeners assume La Toya Jackson, the line borrows the Jackson family’s celebrity gravity without needing to brag outright. That’s the sly part: the claim is big, but the tone is almost throwaway, like it’s not even worth embellishing. “For awhile” keeps it plausible, human-scaled, not tabloid-operatic. “Close freind of the family” widens the halo from a fling to a network, implying trust and intimacy, not just a date or two.

The subtext is status management. Blow came up when rap fame didn’t automatically translate to mainstream respect; proximity to a dominant pop dynasty becomes a way to argue, silently, that hip-hop and pop stardom already shared a social world. Even the informal, slightly messy phrasing works: it signals off-the-cuff authenticity, the kind of “I’m telling you how it was” energy that hip-hop has long treated as its own currency.