Songfacts®:

• In this song, Kurtis Blow is a benign dictator, ruling the world with temperance and equanimity. He wears diamonds and pearls, and loves the ladies, but he also fights poverty and brings people together. In the last verse, a new ruler takes over, and he cedes the throne gracefully, accepting that he's going back to his humble beginnings.
• "If I Ruled The World" is a hip-hop landmark, released in 1985 before rap went mainstream. According to Kurtis, it was the first time a sample loop was used on a hip-hop record.
  
  The drums that form the basis of the track are a slowed-down sample of "Pump Me Up," a 1982 go-go song by the Washington, DC group Trouble Funk. Most rap songs to this point were created with live musicians, sometimes mixing in samples right from the records, but there was no way to digitally create a sample loop until the Fairlight CMI was introduced in 1979. These machines cost about $250,000, so most rap producers didn't have access to them (British pop stars like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush were the first to use them). But Kurtis was signed to Mercury Records (he was the first rapper signed to a major label), and making them lots of money, so they gave him and his producers, J.B. Moore and Robert Ford, access to a Fairlight, which they used on this track. Over the next few years, these sample loops became more common as more studios got the technology.
  
  The concept of looping a drum break on a record dates back to the birth of hip-hop when DJs like Kool Herc would use two copies of a record to crossfade back and forth between the break beats. In a Songfacts interview with Kurtis Blow, he explained: "We used this machine to sample a whole section of a record. That's how the DJs used to play, they used to take the sections of a record and repeatedly play them. You'd have two records of the same song and keep the break going by looping it with your turntables. You'd play the records over and over and have just the break play for five minutes, and that's what we used to rap over - the DJ extended the break. That whole concept evolved into the studio. When we started making records we wanted to keep that funky loop going, that funky break and that quick mix so we could rap over it."
• Kurtis Blow performed this in the 1985 movie Krush Groove, one of the first films based on hip-hop culture. Run-D.M.C., The Fat Boys, LL Cool J, New Editon and The Beastie Boys are also in it. Kurtis worked on the soundtrack to the album and was also producing The Fat Boys and working on his own album at the time. They shot the film in three weeks.
• Kurtis wrote this song with two other hip-hop trailblazers: Davy DMX and AJ Scratch. Both were DJs, and Davy also did a lot of production work.
• Among the female vocalists on this song are Lisa Fisher and Alyson Williams, both of whom went on to successful solo careers.
• The full version that's on the America album runs 7:10. The radio edit was cut down to 3:55.
• While the rich man try to play Pretty Boy Floyd
  
  Pretty Boy Floyd was a notorious gangster from the 1930s. He also gets namecheched in "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five from 1982:
  
  Now you're unemployed, all non-void
  Walkin' round like you're Pretty Boy Floyd
• Nas reworked this as "If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)" in 1996 with Lauryn Hill singing the hook. In his version, he'd free those who are unjustly incarcerated and create a world where Black people aren't targeted by police and can safely raise their kids. Hill, a member of the Fugees, was just 21 when she recorded it.
  
  When Kurtis Blow heard the demo, his ears perked up. "I played it over and over, it was incredible," he told Songfacts. "I knew it was going to be a mega-hit."