MC Hammer

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Stanley Kirk Burrell grew up in a three-bedroom housing project apartment in East Oakland, California, with eight siblings and a mother who worked as a secretary. His father ran a poker room and managed a casino. At eleven years old, the boy was spotted in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot doing splits while a beatboxer kept time, selling stray baseballs to anyone who would buy them. Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley hired him on the spot as a clubhouse assistant and batboy. That chance encounter gave the kid a nickname, a mentor, and a front-row seat to professional sports that would shape everything that followed. The teenager who earned the nickname "Hammer" by resembling Hank Aaron would become MC Hammer, the first hip-hop artist to achieve diamond certification on an album. He would amass thirty-three million dollars and then lose most of it. He would earn a Grammy, spark a cartoon, sign with Death Row Records, declare bankruptcy, become an ordained preacher, and launch a search engine. What makes his story worth telling is not the rise or the fall but the restless reinvention that never stopped.

• 2. The Kid in the Clubhouse

  ›

  Reggie Jackson took credit for the nickname. Describing the boy's role to outsiders, Jackson put it simply: the person running the Oakland A's communication with the absentee owner in Chicago was a thirteen-year-old kid. Jackson said he called him "Hammer" because the boy looked like Hank Aaron, whose own nickname was "The Hammer". Milwaukee Brewers second baseman Pedro Garcia also started calling him "Little Hammer" for the same reason. A third nickname followed. Oakland Tribune writer Ron Bergman remembered that Burrell served as an informant for Finley inside the clubhouse, earning him the handle "Pipeline". Finley himself gave the boy a hat embroidered with the letters "Ex VP", short for Executive Vice President. Rollie Fingers would announce his arrival in the clubhouse by telling everyone to be quiet because Pipeline had arrived. Burrell held that position from 1973 to 1980, the exact years he appeared in the team's records as the official batboy, though he later clarified to ESPN's First Take in 2010 that it was actually his brother Louis Burrell Jr. who served as the true batboy while his own job was to relay play-by-play calls to Finley during every summer game. The distinction mattered to him. He was Finley's eyes and ears, not a ball boy. Burrell graduated from McClymonds High School in Oakland in 1980. After failing to make the final cut at a San Francisco Giants tryout, and feeling discouraged by college courses in communications, he joined the United States Navy and served with Patrol Squadron FOUR SEVEN at NAS Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, reaching the rank of petty officer third class aviation storekeeper before his honorable discharge three years later.

• 3. Building From the Trunk

  ›

  Before a major label entered the picture, Hammer borrowed twenty thousand dollars each from former Oakland A's players Mike Davis and Dwayne Murphy to start his own record label operation. As CEO of Bust It Productions, he sold records from his basement and out of the trunk of his car. The debut album Feel My Power appeared in 1986 on his independent Bustin' Records imprint, produced by Felton Pilate of Con Funk Shun. It sold over sixty thousand copies and was distributed by City Hall Records. That number was remarkable for a self-distributed, car-trunk operation, and it caught attention in Bay Area dance clubs. In spring 1988, a DJ at 107.7 KSOL Radio named Tony Valera started spinning the track "Let's Get It Started" in his mix-shows. Club play followed. Hammer then launched into seven-day-a-week rehearsals with a growing troupe of dancers, musicians, and backup vocalists. It was a live show at an Oakland club that produced the big break. A record executive who, as the New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll put it, "didn't know who he was, but knew he was somebody" signed him to a multi-album contract with Capitol Records at a one-million-seven-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar advance. Capitol recouped quickly. The revised version of Feel My Power, re-released under the title Let's Get It Started in 1988 with additional tracks, sold over two million copies. Sitting in a leopard-print bodysuit before a concert during this period, Hammer answered critics who called him more dancer than rapper: "People were ready for something different from the traditional rap style. The fact that the record has reached this level indicates the genre is growing."

• 4. Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em

  ›

  Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em was released on the 12th of February 1990, recorded and mixed by Felton Pilate and James Earley in a modified tour bus while on tour in 1989. "U Can't Touch This" sampled Rick James' "Super Freak" and charted at only No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, yet the album itself sat at No. 1 for twenty-one consecutive weeks. That was the first time any recording had achieved that span of dominance on the pop charts. The follow-up hit "Pray" sampled Prince's "When Doves Cry" and Faith No More's "We Care a Lot", peaking at No. 2 in the United States and No. 8 in the United Kingdom. The album went on to sell more than eighteen million units, becoming the first hip-hop album to earn diamond status and, to date, remaining the genre's all-time best-selling album. Hammer had first performed "U Can't Touch This" on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1989, prior to its release, through his friendship with Arsenio Hall. During 1990, Hammer toured Europe, including a sold-out concert at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. PepsiCo International sponsored the follow-up tour, with Pepsi CEO Christopher Sinclair traveling alongside Hammer during 1991. The backlash was also beginning. Digital Underground placed Hammer's photograph in the CD insert of their Sex Packets album and labeled him an unknown derelict. Q-Tip called him out in "Check the Rhime". LL Cool J called him an "amateur" on Mama Said Knock You Out. Ice-T pushed back against these dismissals on his 1991 album O.G. Original Gangster, saying Hammer was dissed by people who were simply jealous. A Mattel doll, lunchboxes, and a Saturday-morning cartoon called Hammerman followed in 1991, extending a commercial presence that his critics called overexposure.

• 5. The Costs of Spectacle

  ›

  Too Legit to Quit arrived in 1991, also produced by Felton Pilate, and sold over five million copies, peaking in the top five of the Billboard 200. The title track hit No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, and "Addams Groove" reached No. 7 in the United States and No. 4 in the United Kingdom. Boyz II Men joined the tour as an opening act in 1992. The stage show carried fifteen dancers, twelve backup singers, seven live musicians, and two disc jockeys. When the tour manager Khalil Roundtree was murdered in Chicago during the run, Boyz II Men dedicated future performances of "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" to him. That moment became a turning point in the group's own career. Hammer's tour, however, was cancelled partway through its run because the spectacle cost more to stage than album sales could support. Despite multi-platinum certification, Too Legit sold roughly one-third of what Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em had earned. The "2 Legit 2 Quit" video, ranked among the most expensive ever made, featured a final scene in which James Brown enlists Hammer to retrieve Michael Jackson's famous sequined glove. Hammer later told The Wendy Williams Show in July 2009 that Jackson had called him directly after seeing the video to say he approved. By the time The Funky Headhunter arrived in 1994, co-produced with Stefan Adamek, Hammer had pivoted toward the harder sound of gangsta rap. The album peaked at No. 2 on the R&B charts and was eventually certified platinum, but it alienated the audience that had made him famous. Hammer lost favor with fans and gained little traction with the gangsta rap crowd. Inside Out followed in 1995 and peaked at only No. 119 on the Billboard Charts. Giant Records dropped him. He then signed with Suge Knight's Death Row Records in 1995, where Tupac Shakur was already signed. Death Row never released the album Hammer recorded there, though he and Shakur did record together, most notably on the track "Too Late Playa" with Big Daddy Kane and Danny Boy. After Shakur's death in 1996, Hammer left the label. He told Trinity Broadcasting Network that he had been in Las Vegas with Tupac the night Shakur was shot.

• 6. Bankruptcy and Reinvention

  ›

  On the 1st of April 1996, Hammer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Oakland, California. He had amassed approximately thirty-three million dollars at the peak of his success and spent most of it. The debt at its worst exceeded thirteen million dollars, the result of a large payroll, unpaid loans, dwindling sales, and, by Hammer's own account, friends and associates who used and then betrayed him. The bankruptcy case was converted to Chapter 7 on the 23rd of September 1998. The discharge was denied on the 23rd of April 2002. His Fremont, California mansion sold in 1997 for five million three hundred thousand dollars, a fraction of what it had cost to build. Hammer told Ebony: "My priorities were out of order. My priorities should have always been God, family, community and then business. Instead they had been business, business and business." By the late 1990s he had become an ordained preacher and hosted a Christian ministry program on Trinity Broadcasting Network called MC Hammer and Friends. In 1998, his album Family Affair, released on EMI, introduced artists he had signed to his Oaktown Records label. The album sold roughly one thousand copies worldwide. It also contained a song written for Hammer by Tupac Shakur titled "Unconditional Love". Hammer danced and read the lyrics to that song at the first VH1 Hip Hop Honors in 2004. A tax dispute with the U.S. government followed years of financial difficulty. On the 21st of November 2011, the federal government sued Hammer in Federal District Court in California over unpaid taxes for the years 1996 and 1997. The amount owed was seven hundred seventy-nine thousand five hundred eighty-five dollars. On the 17th of December 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected Hammer's appeal. A 2017 episode of the Reelz series Broke and Famous reported the situation was eventually resolved, with Hammer's net worth at the time standing at one and a half million dollars.

• 7. Dancing and Legacy

  ›

  BET ranked Hammer the seventh best dancer of all time. That ranking reflects a specific kind of achievement: Hammer was the first rap artist to build a fully choreographed live show on the scale he created, with a rotating roster of trained dancers, live musicians, and backup vocalists performing under a unified visual concept. He drew on the styles of James Brown and the Nicholas Brothers, incorporating splits, leaps, and slides, while creating his own movements including the "Hammer dance" (also called the "typewriter dance"), "the bump", the "running man", and "the butterfly". The elaborate stage production attracted heavy airplay on MTV, which at the time had a predominantly white viewership and had aired very little rap music before Hammer's videos arrived. During a 1990 visit to Yo! MTV Raps, one of the dancers Hammer held auditions for was a then-unknown performer named Jennifer Lopez. At the height of his career, Hammer insured his legs for a sum described in a 1990 Maria Shriver interview as running into the millions. A knee injury later halted his dancing career for a period. In 2006, Hammer and Michael Jackson both appeared at the funeral service for James Brown, where Hammer danced in Brown's honor. After Jackson's death, Hammer told Spinner: "Michael Jackson lit the fuse that ignited the spirit of dance in us all. He gave us a song and a sweet melody that will never die." In 2022, Bobby Brown claimed on his A&E show that he had worn the oversized pants that Hammer made famous first, a claim tied to his videos for "My Prerogative" (1988) and "Every Little Step" (1989). Hammer's answer to that question, whether implied by the dates or spoken directly, remained in the same territory where his whole career had played out: the intersection of spectacle, commerce, and an argument about who started what.