SameOldShawn: So Kurtis Blow -- you ended up writing a profile on him, and that put you in contact with his manager. But I was reading an interview with you, and there was another part of that story that you were talking about, where you were attempting to write a rap for him, and that was part of bringing you into contact with him

Bill Adler: Yeah. I interviewed Kurt in 1980 for the Daily News, and I don't think I met Russ then, but I started to hear about him. I met Kurt's songwriters -- I met J.B. Moore and Robert Ford, who'd written and produced Kurt's records

In early '83, I sold People Magazine on the idea of doing a story about rap music, this burgeoning scene. My idea to begin with was, I would just do kind of a survey piece -- here's this scene in New York, it's taking place in a variety of different places, there's a variety of record labels, there's more than a handful of stars, and blah blah blah. Even so, as much as I knew about the scene then -- which wasn't terribly much, but I knew something, I knew more than my editors at People Magazine -- but I thought to myself, this guy Russell Simmons, I should give him a call

Russell scooped me up, and I ended up spending one of the great nights of my life with him. We went to a variety of clubs downtown in New York, and then we ended up at the end of the night at Disco Fever in the Bronx. And that, then, was the epicenter of the rap world, the hip-hop world at the time. It was an after-hours club, and it was just tremendously energetic. Just a really wonderful place

I decided in the aftermath of that evening that the story for People would be about Disco Fever, that I would let this particular spot stand for the culture at large. They went for it, and the piece was published, as I said, I don't know, March '83, maybe May of '83. Not only had this place made an impression on me, but Russell himself had made this tremendous impression

So all of a sudden, it's 1984, Ronald Reagan is running again for President, and I was never a fan of Ronald Reagan. The thought that he would run again just made my gorge rise. And I had this million-dollar idea about how to keep him from taking office. I would write an anti-Reagan rap and give it to Kurtis Blow, who I knew didn't write all his own rhymes. Kurt would record it, and we would rap Ronald Reagan out of the White House. That was my brilliant idea. And history records just how successful I was!