Faces of BK Hip-Hop Fest: Young Guru's Crusades and Crates Run Deep

In Young Guru’s words, he is “the real homie.” The author of this story and “His DJ/Engineer Majesty Young Guru” have known one another for 26 YEARS – and mind you, he’s not an old person.

To say that Young Guru has evolved in every sense of the word since those early days back in Wilmington, Delaware, is an understatement. To some, he’s the best case scenario for a young, Black man from a small but tough town, with a high IQ, and a penchant for Hip-Hop music.

Young Guru was always smart. We met as young kids in a math and science enrichment program for gifted, minority students. We were the cream of the crop of our community, and coming from a good family and school background, he was the cream on top of the cream. Even then, you could tell he would be something, someday.

He has become something. After attending Howard University in the ’90s, he moved north some years ago to Newark, New Jersey, rubbing elbows with the right people, and becoming something of a go-to name for celebrity DJs.

And, sometimes, people call him when they need a sound engineer to put his signature touch on, say, albums like The Blueprint 3. As his work ethic, networking, and maybe a little fate would have it, he landed with Jay-Z and is still a longtime family member of Roc Nation.

What you should know about the homie Young Guru is that he is also a freedom fighter – for the plight of poor people, and young people in bad neighborhoods, and gang members who need a mediator, and children in South Africa and America who want to learn, and the locally disenfranchised who need a stronger voice than their own.

What you should also know about Young Guru is that he knows Hip-Hop. He “showed and proved” that earlier this week at the 2012 Brooklyn Hip-Hop Fest’s “Show and Prove Bowl,” where he DJ’d a nearly hour-long set of Old School rap favorites, making them sound fresher and deffer than ever. The next day he spoke on a panel at the Brooklyn Bodega Education initiative – dropping knowledge as always.

He gets that natural from back home, from those days in our rough, little, Hip-Hop-laced city. (And we’re damn proud.)

AllHipHop.com pulled Young Guru to the side at “Show and Prove” to talk to him about his evolution from our childhood days in Delaware to the international stages he now graces with people like Jay-Z, Kanye West, and more. Check the video below: