📍St. Albans, Queens, NY, USA
1968 – 1985“James Todd Smith was born in Bay Shore, on Long Island, in January 1968, and after a violent start to his life, his mother, Ondrea, took him in 1972 to live with her parents in their house in St. Albans, a quiet, middle-class Black neighbourhood of tidy houses and lawns in south-east Queens, home to jazz greats like Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald. His grandparents, Eugene and Ellen Griffith, gave him a stable, loving home, and he grew up close to them. He began rapping at nine, after hearing the Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight, and he filled notebooks with rhymes. When he was about eleven, his grandfather, a jazz saxophonist, bought him turntables, a mixer and an amplifier, and his mother bought him a drum machine with her tax refund. In his grandparents' house, he spent hours making demos, mixing them himself and sending them to record companies all over New York. He took the name LL Cool J, short for Ladies Love Cool James, and became known around Queens for his confidence. In 1984, at sixteen, one of his tapes reached Rick Rubin, a student at New York University who had just started Def Jam Recordings with Russell Simmons. Rubin signed him, and his single I Need a Beat was the label's first release. His debut album, Radio, in 1985, made him one of hip-hop's first superstars, and he went on to win two Grammy Awards, star in television's NCIS: Los Angeles, and become the first rapper to receive a Kennedy Center Honor. He often credits his grandmother's house in St. Albans for the start of it all.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today