Bobby, Bruce & the Bronx: The Secrets of Hip-Hop Chess

By Adisa The Bishop

Bobby, Bruce & the Bronx: The Secrets of Hip-Hop Chess is a history book about hip-hop, chess, and martial arts in America in the 1970s. As someone who worked with hip-hop musicians in Compton and established the Hip-Hop Chess Federation, Adisa (The Bishop) is an expert who presents stories and draws insights from that time.
A textbook which allows the reader to learn what the author calls “chess notations and life equations” is included, a valuable resource for those who want to achieve success of whatever kind in their life.

This book will inform and inspire you—without pseudo-cultish undervibes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adisa The Bishop
• Release date: Mar 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311253156

Adisa The Bishop

Bobby, Bruce, & the Bronx: The Secrets of Hip-Hop Chess history book about Hip-Hop, chess and martial arts in America in the 1970s. It also contains a text book which allows the reader to learn what the author calls “chess notations and life equations.” This book will inform and inspire you, without the pseudo-cultish undervibes, this is the book for you!Are you tired of life kicking you in the sack and leaving you on the ground wondering how it happened? Would you like to learn to take control of your life for a better future?

Book preview

I must give thanks and respect to some people who really looked out for me from day one with the Hip-Hop Chess Federation: my parents, RZA and Rakaa Iriscience (extended blood fam), Elaine Moskowitz, Kay Hones, Dr. Peter Goldman, Quadir Lateef, Josh Waitzkin, Mike Relm, The Mahoney Family, Zaid Shakir, Umm Hassan, Ralph Gracie, Kurt Osiander, Alan Gumby Marques, Pam Lau (and everyone on the Heroes Martial Arts Team), Scotty Nelson, Swain and Dollamur Mats, Geoff and the DeuS Fight family, Denny Prokopos, Paul Moran, Mafu Kobas, Kris Shaw and BJJ Legends Magazine, Luke Stewart at Seventh Son Tattoo, Ali Asadullah, DJ Rob Flow, Ryron, Rener, and Ralek Gracie, Denny Prokopos, Brian Coleman, Vince Bayyan, D’Juan Owens, Kamal Ahmed, Jordan Richter, Abdullah-Bin Hamid Ali, Susan Barrett, Tomie Lenear Jr., Amir Abdul-Shakur, Hannibal Tabu, Verb One, Casey Wong, Jeff Chang, Itoco Garcia, Jen Shahade, Dr. David Timony, DJ Kevvy Kev, Shaheed Akbar aka The Jacka (Rest in Peace, The Bay lost one of the realest), Eric Arnold, Ed Solis, David Frazee, Christie Z, Fabel and the Tools of War family, Shamako Noble, Rahman Jamaal, Hip-Hop Congress, Dr. James Peterson, Dr. Joseph Schloss, Tahir Anwar, Sean McClure, Josh Waitzkin, Daniel Zarazua, and Kevin Hwa. You all kept me sane and believing in the vision of HHCF when few others could see what I was seeing.

Much love to G, Mama Bev, and Leo. You three truly saved my life more than once and in more than one way. The Universal Zulu Nation must always be thanked for their tireless work in helping preserve Hip-Hop and its importance in the world. Carlos Rodriguez, Helene Ehrlich and Rene Guyiot from Reyes Muertos Army for capturing my vision in your art. Crayone, Picasso, Desi, and Reco gotta get love.

I must also thank Veronica Jones and Leo Jones Jr. Thank-you for believing in this book, in my mission for nonviolence and in my hope for the future of our children. Jamel Shabazz, Joe Conzo, Anthony Wing Kosner—thank-you for making the cover art come to life. Thanks to my editor, Casey Dawes of Self-Publishing Services LLC. Double thanks to Michele Gibson who introduced her to me and has supported my work.

We'd like to thank everyone who had a hand in the creation of the cover, and we hope you visit their site and support them in the wonderful work they do.

Joe Conzo www.joeconzo.com

Jamel Shabazz www.jamelshabazz.com

Adrian O Walker www.adrianowalker.com

Anna Watson Garcia

Carlos Rodriguez www.rmklothing.com

Crayone and Picasso www.crayone.com

Anthony Wing Kosner www.wingandko.com

www.toolsofwar.com

Finally, I have to thank Mr. Marshon King, my high school counselor at Oceana High, and Eazy-E for giving me the opportunity to be a writer. Mr. King saw a writer inside the shell of a lost boy. Eazy-E allowed me to interview him. I wrote one of the first articles on Eazy-E and NWA. We had a friendship that was odd for a suburban kid from The Bay and a gangsta rapper from Compton. Later, I went on to write for The Source, Rap Pages, Vibe, and other publications. From there I was able to lecture at colleges like Harvard, Stanford, Brown, Oberlin, and UConn over the years. I never anticipated such a future growing from your kindness. You guys changed my life forever. Every word I have ever written was because you both saw something in me I never saw in myself. You both saved my life without even knowing it. Within a few months of your initial support, I was able to focus just on being a writer. If you two hadn’t given me a shot to write, the last twenty-nine years of my life would have ceased to exist. I can never thank you enough.

The Cornerstone of the Book

In August 1972, a kid from Brooklyn named Bobby Fischer beats Russia's Boris Spassky to become World Chess Champion. He turns the chess world upside down as nobody has since.

In November of 1973, Afrika Bambaataa, an ex-gang leader in The Bronx, forms the Universal Zulu Nation. Their function is to preserve and expand the power of Hip-Hop on a global scale. They accomplish their mission.

In August of the SAME YEAR, Bruce Lee releases Enter the Dragon, changing American ideas about martial arts, race, and nonviolence.

Those three incidents changed America and the world forever in ways that no one at the time could really understand.

Here we are in 2015, and most people don’t realize that rap music celebrates chess more than any other form of music on the planet. The Kung-Fu films inspired countless DJs, b-boys, graffiti writers, and dancers.

Studies done in China and the U.S. determined that kids who supplemented their math classes with chess received grades 15 percent to 17 percent higher than those who didn’t. Chess also raises reading comprehension levels.

My father taught me chess when I was about four. I remember hating it. I remember slapping the pieces off the board in confusion about how I lost. Fast forward to the late 80s. The music of Public Enemy’s Rebel Without a Pause and EPMD mentions chess casually, and it reignites a fire in my heart for the sixty-four squares. Shortly after the release of my first book, Lyrical Swords Vol. 1: Hip-Hop and Politics in the Mix, I spoke at a juvenile hall. I went to speak on journalism as a career, but I bombed. I pulled a chessboard out to save the last of the wreckage of my presentation. To my shock, 85 percent of the kids already knew chess. I was confused about how kids knowing this ancient game so well could make horrible life choices that landed them in juvenile hall. As I left, I heard the lyrics of every rapper that ever mentioned chess. I decided to use rap as a tool not just to learn chess but to live better lives after learning the game. This was something beyond religion, beyond culture, beyond race. Only a handful of people thought what I was undertaking made sense. Even fewer would support me through the journey of actualizing. But now here it is, growing faster by the month.

By fusing three seemingly unconnected sports and arts with contemporary life skills, HHCF has been able to reach kids from all kinds of backgrounds and achieve powerful results. Our slogan has always been, Chess is Jiu-Jitsu for the mind. Jiu-Jitsu is chess for the body. This book will teach you how to learn to live the game.

There are two ways you can use this book. The best would be to read it from front to back and use the worksheets and questions in the back. The way the worksheets were made, there is no wrong answer. The only thing that can make an answer wrong is your lack of honesty. It is imperative to be brutally honest about yourself with the worksheets. The goal here to stare your flaws and victories in the face to find your true purpose. Understand these are not immutable laws or rules. They are simply a series of filters you can use to apply to various situations you may find yourself in at school, work, or life in general.

The second way to use this book is simply as a fun way to learn about connections between Hip-Hop, chess, and martial arts that you may not have previously known or considered and skip the worksheets in the back. For those who do the former, I do mention some of these ideas in the front of the book. So if the flow of the book feels slightly repetitive if you read it front to back, that is why. I'm not assuming everyone will take on the task of the worksheets.

Bobby Fischer, Bruce Lee, and Afrika Bambaataa gave the planet virtually infinite paths to raise the cognitive function, physical fitness, and artistic expression of our youth. Please know that due to certain copyright issues with rap lyrics, I was unable to share a lot of my research. My blog, however, does have many of the articles I was unable to share here. You can find them at www.hiphopchess.blogspot.com.

Hip-Hop and Chess

That Night a DJ Saved My Life…

In the Beginning, There Was Hip-Hop…

One night in 1982, my mother took me from our house in San Bruno, California, to my cousin Steve’s house in Daly City. Though we rarely speak as adults, Steve was the closest thing I had to a brother. I was a slightly athletic but socially awkward kid. I can’t say I was an outcast, but I never really fit in. I liked soccer, riding BMX bikes, skateboarding, and cartoons—maybe a little Atari 2600 gaming now and again. I mean, how could life get any better?

Steve had just discovered the beauty of girls. This put him on a mission to become the Apollo Creed of our generation. I weighed a little less than the average paperweight, but I always loved to hang out with Steve at my aunt’s house and watch Creature Features (a late night horror flick show) on KTVU and stay up half the night afraid to sleep.

The trip on that October night, however, totally altered my life's trajectory. We walked into Steve’s dark garage, and he started lifting weights. He put a new cassette that I’d never heard before in his boom box. The Cold Crush Brothers sang Punk Rock Rap. From there, one song flowed into the next. It was like I was alone sitting on his mom's washing machine next to the radio by myself.

What is this? I asked him excitedly.

He sat up from the bench press and said casually, Oh, this is a mixtape by a guy at my school named Jesse Carr. He’s a DJ. I bought it for two bucks.

You have to let me copy this tonight, I demanded.

Sure, he said without a second thought. He got back under the bench and went back to lifting weights.

My thirteenth birthday was coming up. My parents asked me what I wanted.

Two turntables and a mixer.

The day of my birthday, my moms picked me up after school and took me to Radio Shack where I got a reverb and a mixer. My dad was a serious stereo guy of his time. He knew what we needed. He told Moms I could get one big Realistic Mixer, or a mixer and a reverb. I went for the mixer and reverb. She might as well have given me a million dollars, I was so happy.

When we got home, Pops got back from work and hooked it all up. Then he scratched and showed me how the channels and fader worked. More than the equipment, I was blown away that my dad took the time to see how it all worked—cool points for life. He taught me chess when I was about four and while I was never that good, I always loved the game and learned a lot from it.

The next two years of my life were spent hunting down any aspect of rap music and Hip-Hop subculture I could find. Movies like Breakin’ and Beat Street were memorized line for line. I cried a little inside when Ramo (the graffiti writer who was run over in Beat Street) died. My life was forever changed.

The Hip-Hop music of the 1980s and early 1990s was, in my opinion, one of the most rapid artistic explosions in the history of North America. I’m not just talking about rap music. I’m talking about the dance, the graffiti, the DJing (who didn’t want to know how to scratch?)—all were happening so fast nobody knew what make of it. But there I was, hooking up turntables to mixers on our dad’s old amp. My first DJ crew, I don’t even think we had a name. But it was me, Mark Spurlock, and Ravi Chandra. We were the coldest thing alive in 1983. We all used to go to Mark's house in Pacifica and practice and share records and stuff we’d figured out how to make sound better. Mark was good at knowing all the best record spots and what was hot and why. Ravi was a true student of the game. He was quiet, but he always knew his stuff. I was just trying to keep up. One day I came by his house and told him I thought Dr. Dre’s Surgery was the best scratch record on Earth. He chuckled and said Oh yeah? and proceeded to replicate the scratch exactly as Dre did it. My jaw dropped.

Show me, I said like a spiritual disciple requests of the monk in the mountain. He did. By the time I left, I was close to it. I went home, locked the door to my room, and worked on those turntables until I had it.

I focused hard on how people were making scratches happen—the specific way they were moving the record and the crossfader to make a certain cut or scratch effect. It was an amazing time.

But I was also trying to learn how to do graffiti. I tried my hand at b-boying and strutting and tutting, but sadly, as a black man, I cannot dance. So there I was, ignoring my math teachers and trying to learn graffiti from my boy Carlos. It hurt coming to grips with my lack of skill. I began tagging (writing my name) under the name School Boy, making a pair of glasses out of the Os. I put that name all over Oceana High School. One day I put a huge pen called a 44 Magnum in my pocket to go blow up (put big creative tags on) the bathroom wall. I walked in, and the principal followed me in (wearing his slicked back hair, patented butter yellow shirt, brown tie, and slacks) and headed to the stall next to me.

Hi School Boy, he said casually.

I wrinkled my forehead and said, What are you talking about? with what I hoped was a confused look in my eye.

With a tone that got close to yelling, he cut in. Don’t pretend it’s not you. I’ve seen it all over the school. I know it's you. I’m gonna tell your parents, and you are gonna clean this school up.

Without a pause I asked, "You really think it's me?

Yes. I do, he said meeting my eyes. We searched one another's eyes like gunslingers digging for signs of weakness.

I gave him nothing.

You know what? I asked. I’m real offended you would pick me out of all the other students of this school to be tagging. I love this school. But since you are so sure it’s me, frisk me now. Frisk me!

I put my hands up, like he was a cop. Spread my legs, but my eyes never left his.

Keep in mind, I had a gigantic pen in my pocket. So if he searched me, I was doomed.

His posture softened. "Jason, I’m sorry. This particular kid keeps putting his name everywhere, and I can’t seem