Scott La Rock

Scott Monroe Sterling was born on the second of March 1962 at the Castle Hill section of the Bronx, the son of a New York City Sanitation Department driver and a Bronx public-school teacher. The Sterling household was working-class Black at the East Bronx. He attended the Bronx High School of Science — among the most selective specialised public secondary schools in New York — and completed the bachelor's at the Castleton State College in Vermont in 1984 on a basketball scholarship, with a degree in social work.

He returned to the Bronx on graduation and worked as a counsellor at the Franklin Armory Men's Shelter on the Grand Concourse — a city homeless shelter for adult men in transitional housing. He met at the shelter the resident named Lawrence Krisna Parker — subsequently known as KRS-One — in late 1985. The two formed a friendship around hip-hop music and DJ practice at the shelter and across the Bronx party circuit through the spring and summer of 1986. They named themselves Boogie Down Productions after the colloquial South Bronx name for the borough.

They recorded their first single Crack Attack and South Bronx for the small B-Boy Records label at the Power Play Studios in Long Island City in late 1986. The 1986 South Bronx single — answering MC Shan's Queensbridge anthem The Bridge — produced the foundational moment of the so-called Bridge Wars between BDP and the Marley Marl-Juice Crew. The album Criminal Minded — recorded at Power Play Studios in early 1987 and released in March 1987 — established BDP as one of the principal voices of late-1980s East Coast hip-hop. The album sold over five hundred thousand copies in its first six months.

Scott La Rock was shot and killed on the twenty-seventh of August 1987 outside the Highbridge Garden Homes on University Avenue in the Bronx, intervening in a dispute between fellow BDP rapper D-Nice and an unrelated party. He was twenty-five.

He is honored here as the co-founder of Boogie Down Productions.