At the same time, Diggs formed another group, D.M.D. If you add in a few other elements, that’s our country, bro!” The dual philosophies of martial arts films and the Five-Percenter Muslim teachings of his native New York were what pushed Diggs, in 1984, to corral Jones and fellow cousin Gary Grice to form their own rap group Force of the Imperial Master, which was changed to the less distinct All In Together Now less than a year later. He also took the implicit message of the multicultural trio to heart, as he later told Andscape: “ were all working together against the oppressor who was poisoning the people. “It was through these films that I was able to see and feel from a non-Western point of view,” he explained. The duo quickly adopted a regular weekend habit: They’d go to the movies, leave, fight each other with the moves they learned, hop the train back home, fight some more, run into other MCs, fight them, and then get into rap battles with said MCs.īut it was Enter The Dragon in particular-and another movie by director Lau Kar-leung, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin-that changed Diggs’ life. By 11, he was cutting up in rap battles across the East Coast, and whenever he was in New York, crashing with his family in the Stapleton Houses projects on Staten Island, he’d kill time seeing kung fu films with his cousin Russell Jones at the scuzzy Times Square theaters. Diggs spent much of his early years traveling across the United States, but when he first heard rap music at a block party, his life found a new purpose. These converging movements-hip-hop, kung fu, and the unabashed culture mixing-would come to define the life and life’s work of Robert Diggs, who turned 4 years old in 1973.
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