MC Hammer is a well-known artist who is the author of the song U Can't Touch This MC Hammer. Many consider him the founder of today's mainstream rap.
He pioneered the genre and went from meteoric fame in his younger years to bankruptcy in middle age.
But the difficulties "did not break" the musician. He adequately withstood all the "gifts" of fate and turned from a popular rapper, spreading finances, into a preacher of the Christian church.
Childhood and youth of MC Hammer
MC Hammer is the stage name taken by Stanley Kirk Burrell early in his musical career. He was born on March 30, 1962 in the Californian town of Oakland.
His parents were believers and parishioners of the Pentecostal Church. They constantly took their child to services.
Stanley got his nickname Hammer from his baseball teammates. They named him after the famous sportsman Khank Aron. After all, Burrell had an incredible resemblance to him.
In his youth, the future musician dreamed of building a sports career, sought to join the local baseball team, but ...
It didn't work out in this area. After all, the team was already completed, and he got only the role of an employee of the technical department.
The main duty of the guy was to control the condition of the bits and the rest of the inventory. Stanley did not like this scenario, and he soon decided on a radical change.
MC Hammer's musical career
From an early age, the guy was imbued with the faith of his parents, and he decided to create the first musical group for the sole purpose of conveying the gospel truth to teenagers.
He gave the group the name The Holy Ghost Boys, the literal translation sounds like "Guys of the Holy Spirit".
Immediately after the creation of the group, he, along with his comrades, began to perform songs in the style of R'n'B. One of the compositions of Sonof the King soon became a real hit.
But soon he wanted more, began to think about independent "swimming". In 1987, he left the group and recorded the album Feel My Power, which was released in over 60 copies. Stanley spent $ 20 on this, and he borrowed this amount from his best friends.
He sold his own songs on his own and offered them to acquaintances, concert organizers, even strangers, just standing on the city streets, like an ordinary merchant.
And it gave its results. Soon, well-known producers began to pay attention to the guy, and already in 1988, Capitol Records label offered him a lucrative contract.
MC Hammer, without hesitation, agreed, and together with him re-released the debut album, changing its name to Let's Get It Started. Circulation increased 50 times.
Two years later, the artist received a diamond disc - a symbol of the fact that the number of albums sold exceeded 10 million.
But his stage colleagues were not happy with the guy's success, they even treated him with condemnation. After all, then rap was a street genre and was considered “low” creativity.
True, MC Hammer was not going to pay attention to this. He continued to build a career, and two years later he created the next album, Please Hammer Don't Hurt Em, which later became the best-selling rap album in history.
Tracks from it sounded in all charts. Thanks to the songs, the artist received several Grammy awards and other awards.
He began to play concerts regularly, and they sold out within days of going on sale. In addition, the musician in 1995 tried on the role of an actor, playing a drug dealer in the film One Tough Bastard. Then he was invited to identical roles in several more films.
But along with fame, boundless wealth also came into the rapper's life. He began to abuse drugs, which led to a significant decline in his musical career.
The number of sales of new albums began to gradually decline, and even changing the stage name did not improve the situation.
MC Hammer was later expelled from the label and ran into huge debts of over $13 million. The rapper did not give up and signed a contract with a new label, but never regained his then fame.
Personal life of Stanley Kirk Burel
MC Hammer is married and happily married. Together with his wife, he brings up five children. In 1996, his beloved was diagnosed with cancer. This made the performer rethink his own life and remember God.
Perhaps this helped Stephanie defeat cancer, and the performer himself expressed the burden of fighting this disease and the joy of his wife's recovery in a new song. True, the album, which she was part of, was sold only in the amount of 500 thousand copies.
What is MC Hammer doing now?
Currently, the performer has not abandoned music. True, he releases new compositions as rarely as he appears at social events.
He tries to devote most of his free time to his wife and children. The rapper lives on a farm in California.
There, he works as a preacher in a local church and does not forget to maintain pages on social networks. The former popularity is gone, and the number of its subscribers barely reaches 300 thousand people.
