The Ringer - The 1996 Rap Yearbook2021-08-06T06:15:00-04:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/221140752021-08-06T06:15:00-04:002021-08-06T06:15:00-04:00Daisies, Aged: A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and the End of the Native Tongues Era
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<p>In 1996, the two most prominent groups from hip-hop’s most prominent conscious collective released tense works that reacted to the evolving genre around them—and signaled the end of the crew as fans knew it</p> <p id="RnOIZM"><em>No year in hip-hop history sticks out quite like 1996: It marked the height of the East Coast–West Coast feud, the debut of several artists who would rule the next few decades, and the last moment before battle lines between “mainstream” and “underground” were fully drawn. </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/3/25/22350034/the-1996-rap-yearbook"><em>The 1996 Rap Yearbook</em></a><em>, a recurring series from</em> The Ringer<em>, will explore the landmark releases and moments from a quarter-century ago that redefined how we think of the genre. Today, we’re exploring the leaders of the Native Tongues collective at their respective crossroads.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="EU0ZBI">Nineteen-ninety-six was one of hip-hop’s most polarizing years, capturing the tension of a genre in conflict with itself and the world at large. The year saw hip-hop expand through <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/4/30/22410278/bone-thugs-n-harmony-crossroads-eazy-e-anniversary">the emergence</a> of <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/8/3/22606976/ugk-ridin-dirty-retrospective-anniversary">new figures</a> from <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/4/19/22391296/master-p-ice-cream-man-anniversary">different regions</a>, but it also saw tragedy as 2Pac, who <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2021/2/12/22279018/tupac-shakur-2pac-all-eyez-on-me-history-death-row">dominated the conversation that year</a>, was murdered amid a sensationalized bicoastal dispute. MTV may have embraced hip-hop’s impact on its bottom line by this point, but much of society still viewed it with disdain. Meanwhile, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 changed the entertainment industry by <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vjqm/this-1996-law-was-meant-to-save-radio-instead-it-decimated-popular-black-music">further consolidating outlets for music</a>. More mergers and acquisitions meant fewer opportunities for <em>any</em> music to be played. The business aspect of hip-hop had been elevated, meaning there was more money involved and more pressure to succeed. And while success was always the goal, commercial success<em> </em>was being embraced in ways that didn’t square with anyone who saw conflicts of interest in hip-hop. What happens when the whole game starts resembling the glitz and glamour of the Notorious B.I.G.’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phaJXp_zMYM">“Big Poppa” video</a> thanks to less-talented imitators? Suppose hip-hop stumbles during its ascent, only to be found <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydFWvRT55u4">floating face down in the mainstream</a>? These growing pains were culture shocks to folks with reservations. The price was going up, but at what cost?</p>
<p id="XauBau">De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest were successful, but on their own terms: <a href="https://youtu.be/q_GgEzqn1p8?t=15">They might blow up, but they’d never go pop</a>. Their subversive ambition and sharp perspectives pushed hip-hop in new directions as it blossomed at the start of the 1990s. As key members of the Native Tongues collective, they added variety to hip-hop by following their eccentricities and broadening the notion of what it could be. They changed with every album, challenging themselves and listeners alike. De La Soul used its second album, 1991’s <em>De La Soul Is Dead</em>, <a href="https://youtu.be/Sr-7cAlNnwc">to kill the lazy hippie narrative</a> that sprang from their debut, only to go <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNI43VqiK6c">even further left</a> on 1993’s <em>Buhloone Mindstate</em>. A Tribe Called Quest was on a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iNp1Fd1l-w">continuous journey</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDKrJhNOygA">to chart</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P800UWoE9xs">new musical ground</a>. Each album, from 1990’s <em>People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths</em> <em>of Rhythm</em> through 1993’s <em>Midnight Marauders</em>, added new layers to hip-hop as the group not only reinvented themselves sonically, but outdid themselves in the process. But everything changed for the groups in July 1996, when De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest released albums that stand out as emblems of a genre at a crossroads. </p>
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<p id="YMPfsE"><em>Stakes Is High</em>, released on July 2, is De La Soul’s most antagonistic act. Being outspoken wasn’t new to them—<em>Buhloone Mindstate</em>’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al4IBwobMi8">“Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” and its accompanying video</a> skewered rap superstar posturing with precision—but now they were being direct about it. <em>Stakes Is High</em> called bullshit on the clichés De La Soul saw trending upward in hip-hop and expressed unease about where the genre and world were headed. As for A Tribe Called Quest, expectations were high for the group on the heels of <em>Midnight Marauders</em>. <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em>, released on July 30, found the group adjusting to shifts within hip-hop culture, their personal lives, and themselves. A Tribe Called Quest had charted new territory once again, but it was ominous this time: <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em> marked the beginning of the end for the group during the ’90s. </p>
<p id="kV53I2">Both <em>Stakes Is High</em> and <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life </em>featured new dynamics that significantly impacted their sound. Prince Paul, who helped produce De La Soul’s first three albums, stepped back as the group took over production duties. A then-unknown J Dilla (who, going by Jay Dee, also produced <em>Stakes Is High</em>’s title track) was one of the new ingredients to <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em>. Both albums showcase pioneers reckoning with a changing climate: They begin by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypMOqLhrVLg">dismissing</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_KFlGnh4R8">inferior MCs</a> within the first 10 minutes and conclude by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwErfuvotjU">zooming out</a> as the artists assess their own lives, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVNIZK1tRuo">difficulties and all</a>. And both <em>Stakes Is High</em> and <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em> remain two of the most important albums released in 1996 because they capture the tension and change rippling through hip-hop that year.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="wBaJa6"><em>Stakes Is High</em> was personal for De La Soul. Their future was uncertain following <em>Buhloone Mindstate</em>’s underwhelming commercial performance in conjunction with hip-hop’s rapidly changing landscape. In the 2016 <em>Mass Appeal</em> documentary <em>De La Soul Is Not Dead</em>, the group recalled Lyor Cohen telling them while they were on tour that it was “about to get rough” for them in lieu of the album’s underperformance. He wasn’t alone in this thinking. “Dave’s cousin was like: ‘Yo, stakes is high for y’all,’” Posdnuos <a href="https://youtu.be/8i346sS-_8Q?t=1326">remembered</a>. “It was a crucial place of not knowing if we was going to continue or we going to be forced to go get regular jobs and become common folk,” Maseo <a href="https://www.okayplayer.com/news/secret-history-of-de-la-soul-stakes-is-high-20th-anniversary.html">told <em>Okayplayer</em> in 2016</a>. </p>
<p id="03jYid">It’s easy to reduce <em>Stakes Is High</em> to an indictment of contemporary hip-hop considering how blunt De La Soul is throughout its 68 minutes. On “Supa Emcees,” Posdnuos and Dave recall the lost art of MCing, as they knew it, while vowing to uphold the mantle. “I got questions about your life if you so ready to die,” Dave says on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrTjrmjIPp8">“Long Island Degrees,”</a> a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to Biggie’s debut album. It comes off pedantic at times, but the anxiety fueling the album came from a genuine place. It’s not unreasonable that artists who immersed themselves in a culture as teens, advanced it, then watched it change into something they didn’t recognize—and, in some cases, objected to—by their mid-to-late 20s respond with skepticism. They spoke up the way they did because they felt like they had to. “Hip-hop has a mechanism of self-correction and self-policing,” says journalist and author Rob Kenner, who directed <em>De La Soul Is Not Dead</em>. “There are antibodies and when a pathogen is introduced into the body, the antibodies go to work, cleanse the system, and develop immunities. I think that’s what we saw on those records, like: ‘Really? That’s what you’re doing?’ If you care about someone, you don’t hold your tongue.”</p>
<p id="YpkJ3H">That’s what inspired the repudiation of materialism heard on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONtXSlRjcMk">“The Bizness”</a> and mockery of the drug lord and Mafioso fascination heard on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlWNBbKnvW8">“Itzsoweezee (HOT).”</a> All of the “champagne-sippin’ money fakers” and kingpin aliases were less of a problem until they started multiplying. The critique reaches its summit on the title track, where Dave lists his grievances over Dilla’s masterful blend of <a href="https://youtu.be/l3S1naGY9EQ?t=487">an Ahmad Jamal sample</a> and ambient dice game noise: “I’m sick of bitches shakin’ asses / I’m sick of talkin’ ‘bout blunts, sick of Versace glasses / Sick of slang, sick of half-assed award shows / Sick of name-brand clothes / Sick of R&B bitches over bullshit tracks / Cocaine and crack, which brings sickness to Blacks.” </p>
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<p id="HVoUOo">The stakes were high for hip-hop, Black people in America, and De La Soul themselves—because they cared. Despite the foreboding energy flowing through <em>Stakes Is High</em>, it ends on a bright note initiated by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooIH9ERXGFk">a joyous Commodores sample</a>. The buoyant <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFhQsUFuC7E">“Sunshine”</a> makes it clear that they just want to forge ahead for the sake of the art, all angst considered:</p>
<blockquote><p id="UDTfND"><em>De La is the crew that you must hear, but please don’t rush the stage</em><br><em>‘Cause even though them stakes are really high, we’re really not here to raise</em><br><em>We’re just here to move your mind and soul with perpetuated ease</em><br><em>It’s just about the show until it’s time to go and get with the young ladies</em></p></blockquote>
<p id="7yQEqN"><em>Stakes Is High</em> isn’t as highly regarded as <em>3 Feet High</em> <em>and Rising</em> or <em>De La Soul Is Dead</em>, but it’s every bit as daring and still among their best work. The edge of the message is a reflection of the urgency and precarity around the album. De La Soul wasn’t looking for static, they were just being true to their name.</p>
<p id="yHuUpa">Much of the tension and change that influenced <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em> was internal. Michael Rapaport’s 2011 documentary <em>Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels</em> <em>of A Tribe Called Quest </em>detailed the growing divide within the group, which began after the completion of <em>Midnight Marauders</em>. Phife Dawg, who died in 2016 from complications associated with diabetes, had moved to Atlanta after the release of the 1993 album. Q-Tip found Islam, formed the production team the Ummah with Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Dilla (after boosting his profile as a producer via his work with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxce_qvhi5I">Nas</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhMer3gYTe0">and</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyMnON6tzpM">Mobb</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51qX7C3KAXE">Deep</a>), and gave his cousin Consequence, who’d previously been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVMxWoqGdn0">on the periphery</a>, a more prominent role. A Tribe Called Quest leapt forward on <em>The Low End Theory</em> and <em>Midnight Marauders</em> on the strength of the chemistry between Phife and Q-Tip, which was an evolution of their friendship. With Phife’s relocation and Q-Tip, through the creation of the Ummah, perhaps looking beyond A Tribe Called Quest, the cohesion at the core of the group’s success was fractured. </p>
<p id="oclNoQ">At the same time, A Tribe Called Quest was working around the fiber of hip-hop changing, compositionally. Its rising popularity, coupled with more money being generated, led to more legal claims over sample use. “The bulk of us relied on sampling and our drum machines to make the music,” Muhammad says. “Having to chop up the drums instead of letting it rip from the beginning changed the feel. It’s such a subtle thing, but you hear that in the <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em> album.” On top of internal discord and augmenting their musical approach, A Tribe Called Quest was dealing with the weight of their position as hip-hop’s preeminent group following the accomplishment of <em>Midnight Marauders</em>—all while easing into their mid-20s as hip-hop grew into something vastly different from what it was when they broke through. From the overall tone to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats,_Rhymes_and_Life#/media/File:Beats-Rhymes-and-Life-Cover.jpg">the artwork</a>, there’s an unmistakable heaviness to <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em>. </p>
<p id="bqqL8S">“In that heaviness is maturity. In that heaviness is spirituality, complete life change,” Muhammad says. “You go from this world of partying, while taking this responsibility of being true to the culture and wanting to put good into the music. Wanting to unite people and wanting to talk about the challenges people from our community are facing. Life is changing and you’re connecting on a religious plane that doesn’t wholly align with all of the actions that take place when you’re not. Then, you’re doing that while trying to navigate the difficult changes happening within relationships that really matter to you.”</p>
<p id="nIsXrS">Songs like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn8-_ntBtqM">“The Pressure”</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4HhKO5X4g">“Mind Power”</a> bear that sense of responsibility as Q-Tip and Phife shatter phony rapper facades. “Now I got hip-hop acts posin’ like fat cats / Lex and Rolex, Moet and a top hat / But what about your contract, slick? Is you proper?” Q-Tip asks on the former. “Denouncing tough guy wannabes that look smoother than silk,” Phife announces on the latter. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07428hCoBLQ">“What Really Goes On”</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeysGkd6m4U">“Keeping It Moving”</a> address the East Coast–West Coast issue, which A Tribe Called Quest was dragged into following <a href="https://hiphopdx.com/news/id.59143/title.busta-rhymes-explains-why-a-public-2pac-q-tip-truce-never-happened">an apparent misunderstanding between them and 2Pac at the 1994 Source Awards</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/yfoPsIOj50M?t=63">a line from Q-Tip’s “Queens Representin’” freestyle</a> the following year that Westside Connection <a href="https://youtu.be/ho7NcLiIpJc?t=245">took umbrage with</a>. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S-BLK2gc7w">“Get a Hold,”</a> with its <a href="https://youtu.be/r6uZKUrH9jE?t=101">eerie</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/r6uZKUrH9jE?t=84">sewn-together samples</a> and creeping bass line, has a thick layer of gravitas to it. “Stressed Out,” the album’s parting thought, is about seeking refuge after being painted into a corner by life.</p>
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<p id="jIGawB">The playfulness of A Tribe Called Quest’s previous albums gave way to something more high-minded and world-weary. “We didn’t take ourselves too seriously, and then I think I was guilty of taking myself way too seriously,” Q-Tip <a href="https://www.spin.com/2008/08/spin-interview-q-tip/">admitted to <em>Spin</em> in 2008</a>. <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em> has good moments, but “good” wasn’t enough for A Tribe Called Quest. “For that time, it was only a good record because they were just coming off <em>Midnight Marauders</em>, which was the pinnacle,” says journalist, screenwriter, and producer Cheo Hodari Coker, who profiled the group for the <em>Los Angeles Times</em> in 1996. As Questlove <a href="https://babylonfalling.tumblr.com/tribecalledquestlove">wrote in <em>The Source</em></a> upon their breakup in 1998: “By this time most attitudes were, ‘If Tribe ain’t moving the world with each release, then we won’t stand for nothing less.’” One of 1996’s most surprising developments was A Tribe Called Quest aiming to push hip-hop further along the righteous path and stumbling in the process.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="50Y2T6">The releases of <em>Stakes Is High</em> and <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em> were supposed to mark a new era for the Native Tongues. The movement, which included Queen Latifah, Monie Love, Black Sheep, Chi-Ali, and numerous affiliates, had splintered by 1996—as had the core of the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest. Long gone was the camaraderie of De La Soul’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhTa1q0mqdg">“Buddy” remix</a>, which was the mainstream launchpad for the Native Tongues ethos back in 1989. The ensuing years saw glimpses of the strained relationship surface on record: “Or some tongues who lied and said, ‘We’ll be natives to the end’ / Nowadays we don’t even speak,” Posdnuos said on <em>Buhloone Mindstate</em>’s <a href="https://youtu.be/guBCLlPfufg?t=110">“I Am I Be”</a> of <a href="https://youtu.be/gypMOjJI_zE?t=107">his relationship with Q-Tip and Afrika Baby Bam of the Jungle Brothers</a> at the time. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=rSYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96&dq=de+la+soul+vibe+magazine+1996&source=bl&ots=UhCagaFNH0&sig=ACfU3U3q8K4cxid6qqmlOhTnkKfySvo4MA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi06PzmkuPwAhUGmuAKHdNMCGgQ6AEwEnoECBAQAw#v=onepage&q=de%20la%20soul%20vibe%20magazine%201996&f=false">A 2007 <em>Vibe</em> story</a> recalls a 1996 meeting between A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and the Jungle Brothers while the former was recording <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em>. The pillars of the movement sought to set any acrimony aside and clear the air. And on “Stakes Is High,” Posdnuos declared: “The Native Tongues has officially been <em>reinstated</em>.”</p>
<p id="vHe3r2">It was intended as a rallying cry, and the <em>Stakes Is High</em> booklet <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Signatures/comments/9efh7g/any_ideas_who_this_could_be_found_on_the_jcard_of/">features a mini–Native Tongues reunion</a>, but there was very little collective output for the remainder of the ’90s. <em>Stakes Is High</em> is the last album De La Soul released during the decade. They, along with Q-Tip, appear on the Native Tongues remix of the Jungle Brothers’ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7kK-J-CehA">“How Ya Want It We Got It,”</a> from their 1997 album <em>Raw Deluxe</em>. Tribe was officially done the following year. “I don’t think we all really got cool again until like four years ago,” Mike G of the Jungle Brothers told <em>Vibe</em>. “From ’96 to 2000, there was no real communication.” The only thing that meeting produced was fleeting optimism.</p>
<p id="XTcz1X">“So in that meeting, which was the last big meeting the Native Tongues had, we all were hopeful that it was a beginning,” Muhammad says. “But it took Tribe nearly another 18 years to even overcome our own differences to record <em>We Got It From Here...Thank You 4 Your Service</em>. So because we were dealing with our own internal obstacles, it wasn’t feasible for us to even build something after that because we were still trying to get our footing. So it was a hell of a cheerleading line on ‘Stakes Is High,’ and we were hopeful, but we just could never get to it.”</p>
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<p id="THM6oG">There was no Native Tongues resurgence, but <em>Stakes Is High</em> and <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em> featured kindred spirits and extended family who continued the legacy. Dilla helped to map out the sound of both albums, setting up his own path to greatness before his death in 2006. Common and Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def) appear on <em>Stakes Is High</em>’s “The Bizness” and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqAgv6W4Du0">“Big Brother Beat.”</a> Consequence went on to work with <a href="https://youtu.be/cpbeS15sHZ0?t=120">self-professed A Tribe Called Quest successor</a> Kanye West. In 2004, Common, Bey, Q-Tip, and De La Soul were all summoned by ardent Native Tongues enthusiast Pharrell Williams for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q4FHKciKdI">the Native Tongues remix of N.E.R.D’s “She Wants to Move,”</a> which interpolates the Jungle Brothers’ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7_1Xb5Uc8U">“I’ll House You.”</a> “There wasn’t another Native Tongues, but there were a lot of offshoots and that was confirmation for me to keep doing what I do,” Muhammad says. </p>
<p id="yYbnve"><em>Stakes Is High</em> and <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em> are perfect snapshots of hip-hop in transition. In-house culture wars and generational strife aren’t new, so understanding the friction of earlier adjustment periods is crucial to understanding how hip-hop got to its current state. The growth of hip-hop into a ubiquitous force, along with the progression of the internet, has made it so that niche artists and legacy acts can thrive on the support of audiences they’ve worked hard to build. Despite the bulk of its music being absent from streaming services <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/arts/music/de-la-soul-digital-albums.html">due to a dispute with Tommy Boy Records</a>, De La Soul crowdfunded its most recent album, 2016’s <em>And the Anonymous Nobody</em>. The erasure of regional and ideological lines made it so that they could <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X8wCcVYom0">collaborate with 2 Chainz</a>—and have it make sense. Hip-hop snowballing into <em>the</em> popular music and culture made it so that De La Soul can commiserate over the Tommy Boy situation with former labelmate turned podcaster N.O.R.E. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsv1R3PrGAU">on a platform founded by Diddy</a>. It’s why they’ve done <a href="https://www.nikesb.com/the-vault/pink-box/de-la-soul-high">two</a> <a href="https://www.nike.com/launch/t/dunk-low-sb-de-la-soul">collaborations with Nike</a>. It’s why Q-Tip can <a href="https://www.kennedy-center.org/video/center/hip-hop/2018/q-tip-announces-the-kennedy-center-hip-hop-culture-council/">create a hip-hop culture commission for the Kennedy Center</a>. And it’s why Muhammad and Adrian Younge <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhuSvKMTSgE">can score Netflix’s adaptation of <em>Luke Cage</em></a>, which Coker wrote, produced, and oversaw.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="dZYcuR">The concern heard on <em>Stakes Is High</em> and <em>Beats, Rhymes and Life</em> was justifiable because the change was aggressive, but in many ways beneficial in the long run. “I think what was happening was that these groups were saying: ‘Look, no one is mad at anyone making money, just don’t dilute the spirit of the culture,’” Coker says. De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest may have questioned the upside of hip-hop’s transformation back then, but no one should blame them for channeling their wariness into art when resistance made them who they are.</p>
<p id="OThB57"><a href="http://twitter.com/@JRK316"><em>Julian Kimble</em></a><em> has written for </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, </em>The Undefeated<em>, </em>GQ<em>, </em>Billboard<em>, </em>Pitchfork<em>, </em>The Fader<em>, </em>SB Nation<em>, and many more.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2021/8/6/22610585/tribe-called-quest-beats-rhymes-life-de-la-soul-stakes-is-highJulian Kimble2021-08-03T06:15:00-04:002021-08-03T06:15:00-04:00How UGK’s ‘Ridin’ Dirty’ Went From Afterthought to a Crown Jewel of Southern Rap
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<p>Twenty-five years ago, UGK released their magnum opus, ‘Ridin’ Dirty.’ Largely ignored in its time, it’s gone on to become one of the most influential Southern rap records ever. Here’s how.</p> <p id="OQogfP"><em>No year in hip-hop history sticks out quite like 1996: It marked the height of the East Coast–West Coast feud, the debut of several artists who would rule the next few decades, and the last moment before battle lines between “mainstream” and “underground” were fully drawn. </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/3/25/22350034/the-1996-rap-yearbook"><em>The 1996 Rap Yearbook</em></a><em>, a recurring series from</em> The Ringer<em>, will explore the landmark releases and moments from a quarter-century ago that redefined how we think of the genre. Today, we’re exploring the UGK’s certified classic, </em>Ridin’ Dirty.</p>
<p id="0EioAv"><em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> opens in prison. Not in the fictional, part-of-a-lyrical-narrative or dramatic-skit sense. Literally. The first minute of Pimp C and Bun B’s third album as UGK—which reimagined the sound of the South and should’ve immediately garnered the Port Arthur, Texas, duo the renown and reverence they know today—was recorded inside a Mississippi penitentiary.</p>
<p id="MUfBxb">Smoke D, who guested on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/25LdAY7Z3L4f4vxQDmZOsR">“Front, Back, & Side to Side,”</a> began serving time for manslaughter and drug trafficking sometime after the release of UGK’s sophomore album, 1994’s <em>Super Tight</em>. During recreation hours, Smoke strolled the prison yard holding a portable DAT recorder roughly the size of a Walkman. (Bun B claims he and Pimp C <a href="http://thenostalgiamixtape.com/creative/the-bun-b-episode/">sent the recorder</a>, but in <em>Sweet Jones: Pimp C’s Trill Life Story</em>, Smoke told Julia Beverly he smuggled it in.) Guards probably believed he was singing along to the tape in the machine, but Smoke was recording an audio documentary, rumbling in his resonant Southern drawl about everything he witnessed and soliciting commentary from an animated fellow inmate. He mailed these dispatches to Pimp C, who played them while driving around Texas, en route to work on <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>.</p>
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<p id="w3cgwU">Pimp C always envisioned <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> as a movie. He initially planned to pull clips from the Max Julien and Richard Pryor movie <em>The Mack</em> for skits. But UGK’s label, Jive, was either unable or unwilling to clear dialogue from the film, which offered sharp social commentary via a story about an Oakland pimp. The label’s negligence or stinginess (or both) was a blessing in disguise to the group. Pimp realized Smoke D’s recordings about never getting “no peace” in prison better aligned with the aim of <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>. He and Bun were only a few years removed from moving cocaine in Port Arthur to pay for the studio time that yielded their 1992 debut, <em>Too Hard to Swallow</em>; they’d lost friends to homicide and felony sentences. Smoke’s penitentiary monologues reminded listeners of the consequences for serving on corners or supplying them.</p>
<p id="Wswjau">“<em>Ridin’ Dirty </em>specifically was a very insular conversation directed at a specific group of people that didn’t necessarily have anyone speaking to them, or for them,” Bun told <a href="https://thesource.com/2017/05/01/celebrating-two-decades-of-ridin-dirty/"><em>The Source</em></a> in 2016. “When you were in the streets, you lived this lifestyle and you made that choice, so while we couldn’t do anything about that, the best thing we could do was make sure you were navigating the streets correctly.”</p>
<p id="w12ZW1">UGK first gained national recognition by narrating the realities of that lifestyle. On “Pocket Full of Stones,” which appeared on the platinum-selling <em>Menace II Society</em> soundtrack, they play swaggering crack dealers. But listen closely and you’ll hear them rap about the dehumanizing toll their product has had on its users in unsparing detail. That single appeared on <em>Too Hard to Swallow</em>, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=KRAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA21&dq=ugk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiK06ibhonyAhUUqJ4KHb9gBtkQ6AEwBnoECAcQAg#v=onepage&q=ugk&f=false">which became Billboard’s no. 1 “Heatseekers” album in the south-central U.S. in November 1992</a>. In many ways, though, <em>Too Hard to Swallow</em> presaged the first act of UGK’s career: They would be a massive regional success continually thwarted by their record label. Even before Jive released <em>Too Hard to Swallow</em>, the label reproduced songs to avoid paying for sample clearances. <em>Super Tight </em>spent more than six months on the Billboard Top R&B Albums chart, but Jive’s stinginess and seeming disrespect would continue.</p>
<p id="rUQrap"><em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> was released on July 30, 1996. Despite scant marketing from Jive, zero music videos, and virtually nonexistent journalistic coverage, the album sold 67,200 copies in the first week, peaked at no. 15 on the Billboard 200, spent 13 weeks on the charts, and eventually went gold. Though far from a bicoastal success, Pimp C and Bun B realized their group name in Texas and throughout the South. <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> made them Underground Kingz.</p>
<p id="pTtZST">On <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>, the duo blurred the lines between grim, day-in-the-life documentary and the brightest moments of a vibrant, color-saturated Blaxploitation flick. They were at once (purportedly) wealthy yet weary hustlers, unfazed pimps torn up by relationships, and lyrically gifted rappers who threatened homicide while wondering why God doesn’t smite murderers. While Pimp and Bun chronicled the psychological, carceral, and potentially fatal tolls of street life, they repped the Houston subculture born out of it: creeping <a href="https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/slabs-swangas-custom-cars-houston-hip-hop-culture-2019-5%3famp">candy-painted slabs</a> that shimmer like constellations; actuator-popped trunks with subwoofers blaring the warped and sluggish haze of DJ Screw tapes; perspiring double cups brimming with kaleidoscopic admixtures of soda and codeine cough syrup. The low-end-heavy productions from Pimp C, N.O. Joe, and Sergio were as thick as the lean, slowed fusions of Southern soul, funk, and blues that were the sonic equivalent of murky bayou water mixed with red Texas dirt. These suites scored intoxicated, postcoital cruises at “3 in the Mornin’,” meditations on mortality (“One Day”), and spiritual crises (“Hi-Life”). Never preachy or moralizing, Pimp and Bun’s “insular conversation” has resonated for a quarter-century and become the jewel in the crown of UGK’s logo.</p>
<p id="1jz919">In 1996, though, coastal biases and label acrimony ensured <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> was far from a coronation. We’re lucky it came out at all.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="x5O8Ce">If Pimp C <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2KdsPGSUXbSZyq4oiDOqAe?si=09257bb23255408a">“told you [Jive] numbers”</a> in the ’90s, you would’ve thought he was lying. <em>Super Tight</em> reached no. 95 on the Billboard 200, but, according to <em>Sweet Jones</em>, Jive never paid UGK any royalties. Pimp and Bun made some money touring in ’94 and ’95, but the pair often relied on cash from features. Rather than returning to hustling, Pimp remained at his mother’s home and leveraged his minor recognition as a producer to work with groups like Louisiana’s X-Mob on songs like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8kPjYZOR_w">“Watcha Gone Do”</a> and Critical Condition (see <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Critical-Condition-CC-Water-Bound/release/4708924"><em>CC Water Bound</em></a>, on which Pimp has six tracks). </p>
<p id="gzWqf6">Meanwhile, Bun developed a working relationship with N.O. Joe, the New Orleans native who migrated to Texas to score acclaimed albums from the Geto Boys (<em>Till Death Do Us Part</em> and <em>The Resurrection</em>) and Scarface (<em>The Diary</em>), as well as songs from Rap-A-Lot artists like Big Mike. Joe ushered in the richer, organ-heavy sound that bumped like Texas’s answer to Dr. Dre’s synth-laden G-funk. After months of recording and bonding over bottles of Bull Ice malt liquor, Bun confessed to Joe that Pimp C greatly admired Joe’s production. The feeling was mutual. Joe recognized Pimp’s producing talent in the more musical suites on <em>Super Tight</em>, several of which featured contributions from Meters guitarist Leo Nocentelli. When they finally spent time together at Pimp C’s birthday party in 1995, Pimp and Joe forged a friendship over their fondness for funk and soul artists like (of course) the Meters, Donny Hathaway, and Solomon Burke, with whom Pimp C’s father had once played trumpet.</p>
<p id="R3lIgb">Jive reportedly gave UGK a reasonable advance for <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>, but they blew through the bulk of it on recording sessions in New York and Chicago. When Pimp and Bun returned to Port Arthur, they played the demos for Pimp’s mother, who was their longtime road manager, biggest champion, and harshest critic. She said the demos were “the worst shit I ever heard in my life.” </p>
<p id="pDUJIy">Forever angry with Jive for their perceived exploitation and inadequate funding, Pimp C considered scrapping <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>. Fortunately, N.O. Joe agreed to work on the album for a fraction of his going rate. He believed in UGK and essentially became its third member during the <em>Ridin’ Dirty </em>sessions. Before they began, though, Joe had to convince Pimp to continue.</p>
<p id="D5TkhI">“C got into it with Jive and was like, ‘Fuck that! We’ll just do our shows. Fuck this album!’” Joe says today, delivering one of many flawless, high-pitched Pimp C impressions. “I said, ‘C, the longer you sit here with this record, the longer you’re under contract.’”</p>
<p id="XR28oz">UGK blows copious amounts of West Coast weed (courtesy of <a href="https://www.discogs.com/B-Legit-The-Hemp-Museum/release/713290"><em>The Hemp Museum</em></a> docent B-Legit) and pours up from seemingly bottomless pints of codeine on <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>, but recording sessions were relatively sober and studious affairs. “A lot of this stuff was done during the daytime—minimal weed smoke, really no drinking. Clean,” Joe says. The trio kept a regimented schedule, recording 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday at three studios: John Moran’s Digital Services studio, Joe’s home studio, and Skip Holman’s studio in Katy, a Houston suburb. “They may have gone outside and smoked a little bit, but those sessions were not about weed, liquor, and bitches.”</p>
<p id="KrQWml">N.O. Joe and Pimp C quickly developed a constructive synergy. If one party felt a bass line needed to be scrapped or reworked, the other didn’t argue. The pair brought in session musicians to replay portions of Curtis Mayfield, Bootsy Collins, and the Fatback Band songs to create the warm layers of their open, live-sounding productions. Corey “Funkafagez” Stoot supplied guitar and bass, Nocentelli returned to play on “Diamonds & Wood,” and keys came courtesy of several players, including Holman. For songs that didn’t feature replayed samples, Pimp and Joe used bits of live music they’d accumulated in their respective careers. For this part, Joe had runs on a Hammond B3 organ that he’d recorded in New Orleans, bass lines that needed only an additional fill-in from one of the session players. If you’ve ever wondered why the drums on <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> have a distinctive swing, why they feel more human and less digitally rigid than other rap albums in the mid-’90s, that’s because Joe played many of them live on his MPC and left them unquantized. Apart from the pitch-perfect, Ronald Isley–like singing from Ronnie Spencer—the veritable Nate Dogg of Texas rap—Joe and Pimp, who’d been a lauded tenor in his high school choir, also handled much of the singing on the hooks.</p>
<p id="EcL1Di">“C would bring all his ideas to the table, along with what I had, and we combined stuff. We went record for record. He would bring in the skeleton of a track, and then I would finish it. Or I’d let him hear part of a record, and immediately he would come up with [a hook]. He’d go into the vocal booth and lay it out,” Joe explains. The only two beats on which he and Pimp C didn’t produce were “Good Stuff” and the eerie, jangling “3 in the Mornin’,” which both came courtesy of Sergio. Fearing that he might overshadow Pimp C, who was then trying to assert himself as producer, Joe says he tried to preserve as much of Pimp’s sound as possible and declined to take a coproduction credit on many songs. </p>
<p id="YPtzgW">“I never imposed a lot of N.O. Joe stuff because I know he had a signature sound, so I kept some of his high-hats and a lot of the stuff that he did,” Joe says. “Then I incorporated my stuff within it. That made it a polished UGK record. That’s what made it stand out. Everything that was missing from the earlier records was put together right on this one.”</p>
<p id="eIwWuM"><em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> sounds best when driving in your car, when each song seems to sync with every turn and traffic light. That was by design. Following a few weeks of recording, Pimp C and N.O. Joe spent an entire week riding around in their respective cars, laboring over the track sequencing. The two compared notes daily, eventually finalizing the track list.</p>
<p id="YDMF98">“We tried to make music people could actually live to, not just party to,” Bun B told <em>The Source</em>. “Pimp’s interpretation was that the record was a weekend in the ‘hood. On Friday, you got your hustling done, Saturday you partied, and on Sunday, you reflected.”</p>
<p id="KbJ9kZ">Viewed through this lens, <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> begins on Sunday with “One Day.” One of the magazine ads Jive ran for <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> called “One Day” a “smash single,” but it didn’t chart anywhere. Perhaps Jive didn’t push it to radio DJs. Or maybe those same DJs were running back <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/4/30/22410278/bone-thugs-n-harmony-crossroads-eazy-e-anniversary">“Tha Crossroads,”</a> Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s multiplatinum requiem that, like “One Day,” borrowed from the Isley Brothers. Radio play notwithstanding, “One Day” works brilliantly in the context of <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> and sets the tone for the album. Soulful and somber yet knocking, it encapsulates the feeling of confronting mortality and the precarity of freedom too often and too young, and moving through the world without being able to mourn long enough before another friend is killed or incarcerated.</p>
<p id="1p75Kl">“One Day” opens with a verse from 3-2, a fixture in Texas rap (see: Convicts and Blac Monks) who sampled the Isley Brothers’ “Ain’t I Been Good to You” for an unreleased song that inspired Pimp to do the same. 3-2 details life as a teenage drug dealer and the fatalism that leads him to believe he’ll be buried next to the liquor store before he gets to see a world beyond it. Bun follows with reports of the perils facing Black men in New York and California before lamenting the death of his friend, Pots, who died over a “funky-ass dice game.” In the final verse, Pimp’s lyrics cut the deepest, as he grieves for Bo-Bo Luchiano, the group’s onetime hype man, whose son was killed in a house fire: “And when I got on my knees that night to pray, I asked God / ‘Why You let these killers live and take my homeboy’s son away?’” On the hook and between bars, Spencer’s floating, Isley-esque tenor and falsetto deepen the song’s funeral sadness. Spencer’s inclusion was Pimp’s idea.</p>
<p id="LB3I8Q">“C had the ear like that. He was the brains for the song ideas and hooks,” Joe says. “Bun was more of the MC. He was the killer. I remember C used to say, ‘I’ll put Bun with any of these hoe ass n----s out here! You can’t fuck with Bun. Bun will rap circles ‘round you n----s!’”</p>
<p id="caahIZ">Pimp gave Bun that song with “Murder,” which plays like retribution for the pain of “One Day.”</p>
<p id="iZN1XG">Little more than a deep, rubbery bass line and a fusillade of crushing percussion, the beat exists as a backdrop for Pimp and Bun to assert that Southern rappers could be as lyrically intricate as their East Coast peers. Pimp comes out blazing, rapping about “cocaine numbers” while jumping from Benz to Cadillac. Halfway through he begins to swagger, leaning on his vowels in an almost exaggerated drawl as if to remind people he’s from “South Texas, motherfucker.” Bun never switches. With a barrage of interlocking internal and end rhymes, he jacks tricks, moves weight, and well, commits murder. Though Bun had the option of punching in his vocals with the then-recent advent of Pro Tools, he recorded syllabically stacked and overflowing bars like this in one breathless take:</p>
<blockquote><p id="SDKhCQ"><em>We can sell more fuckin’ yayo, get the scale, no</em><br><em>Other bullet duckers can shove us out of this game</em><br><em>They better buck us, ’cause the cluckers, they love us</em><br><em>Make them glass dick suckers shake they jelly like Smucker’s</em><br><em>I hit like nunchakus, ’cause Short Texas bring the ruckus</em></p></blockquote>
<p id="1N58SJ">If <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> has a primary musical influence, it’s DJ Screw. In the early ’90s, the Houston native became infamous for pitching down, slowing, and chopping rap records into hallucinogenic swirls. If <em>Twin Peaks</em> had been set in Houston, Screw tapes would’ve jammed in the Black Lodge. Many of Screw’s tapes, which he sold by the thousands from his home, showcased local rappers. Before recording <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>, UGK recorded a Screw tape <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQgxiRtPLLc">(<em>Chapter 182</em>)</a> and even tried to convince perplexed Jive execs to commission a Screwed version of the album. Though it almost goes without saying, Jive passed.</p>
<p id="TUBcih">“Diamonds & Wood” was UGK’s brilliant compromise, the closest they came to a Screw track on <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>. A woozy, funky, and warbling crawl built around an interpolation of Bootsy Collins’s “Munchies for Your Love,” the hook features the soft croon of Reginald Hackett, who N.O. Joe met at a Guitar Center, and a screwed sample of .380’s “Elbows Swang”: “I flips down the ave, you know I’m looking good / I’m banging Screw, diamonds up against that wood.” Though the instrumental lends itself to boasts and musing on mack life, Pimp and Bun spend most of the song weary of homicide and incarceration, plagued by the guilt of selling drugs to their community. In the last line of his verse, Pimp C reveals that riding around stoned and listening to Screw is his only escape: “I’m smoking the skunk and popping the trunk to make me feel good.”</p>
<p id="KSE4MH"><em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> isn’t all lows. “Pinky Ring” and “Good Stuff” are basically horny and pimped-out fantasies, the rise of Goldie in <em>The Mack</em>. But the flash and flesh are only distractions, short-lived highs. “Good Stuff” plays between the twin bluesy codas of “Hi-Life” and “Ridin’ Dirty.” On the former, Bun articulates the socioeconomic factors informing every aspect of the dope game in Texas with the same granular, novelistic detail David Simon focused on Baltimore in <em>The Wire</em>. “Ridin’ Dirty” serves as both Pimp and Bun’s final words of caution. Pimp warns against snitches and wire taps, and Bun tells those working with “them birds” to beware of illegal search and seizures. </p>
<p id="kqGjuQ">Jive’s marketing team fundamentally misunderstood the album’s fairly overt subtext. “If you ain’t <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>, you ain’t goin’ nowhere,” read the magazine ad they ran in <em>The Source</em>. Maybe that explains why they didn’t commission any music videos for <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>, or maybe Pimp C’s long-distance tirades to Jive executives in New York deterred them from digging deeper into their coffers. While other Southern rappers—like the Geto Boys, UGK’s violent and twisted Texan progenitors, and Outkast, Atlanta’s astrologically entwined mack philosophers—received national recognition, UGK had none. They weren’t interviewed for <em>The Source</em>, <em>Rap Pages</em>, or <em>Vibe</em>, the major rap publications in the mid-’90s. <em>Vibe</em> printed the sole extant review in their December 1996–January 1997 issue. To call <em>Vibe</em> unimpressed seems charitable: “Nuthin’ new here, though a few standout tracks raise UGK above gangsta boredom.” <em>The Source</em> had reviewed <em>Super Tight</em> favorably, granting it three and half out of five mics in 1994, but <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> was conspicuously absent from their reviews section. <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> also wasn’t included in <em>The Source</em>’s <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_PgG50yMuSeM/SnQ1alfQTvI/AAAAAAAAAD8/nUZUVIruMRI/s1600/best+albums+1996.jpg">“Best Albums of the Year”</a> list from their January 1997 issue, which included Outkast’s <em>ATLiens</em>, Goodie Mob’s <em>Soul Food</em>, and Geto Boys’ <em>The Resurrection</em>. In 1996, UGK and their now-undisputed magnum opus was practically written out of history. It succeeded on merit alone.</p>
<p id="QvE2pO">“Nobody knew the record was out,” Joe says. Shortly after the release of <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>, though, Joe heard customers mention the album at his local barbershop. “In a month’s time, everybody was like, ‘Oh my god, that record’s jammin from top to bottom, n----. I can’t take it out my deck.’ It just snowballed from there … [Jive] threw the record out in the sea to drown, but it came to the surface.” </p>
<p id="RplztZ">Joe attributes <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em>’s resonance today to the perfect union of music and message.</p>
<p id="4EO8Jg">“The tone of the music and the soulfulness of it, the combination of dirt and clean … it also had a positive message. It wasn’t just about, like, ‘I did this here and I got away with it. I was a dope dealer all my life and blah blah blah.’ It dealt with the ups and downs of life, coupled along with the music. It was just a perfect match,” Joe says. “UGK was more conscious.”</p>
<p id="MhBQo2">In 2007, Pimp died of a codeine overdose (DJ Screw also died of a codeine overdose in 2000). Though UGK’s profile rose significantly in the wake of their appearance on Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’” and the last UGK albums recorded during Pimp C’s lifetime, he didn’t live to see any <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> retrospectives. Today, as UGK’s stature and import grows with each year, <em>Ridin’ Dirty</em> remains too relevant. The list of rappers who continue to promote and struggle with codeine addictions is too long to list. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="93GZ5F">“It’s not about what the album did for us, it’s about what the album did for other people,” Bun told <em>The Source</em>. “It’s no surprise this album still makes sense years later. We tried to tell the truth, and the truth remains.”</p>
<p id="QLQ35k"><a href="https://twitter.com/TheeMaxB"><em>Max Bell</em></a><em> is a writer from Santa Monica, California. His work has appeared in NPR, the </em>Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>SPIN<em>, and more. </em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2021/8/3/22606976/ugk-ridin-dirty-retrospective-anniversaryMax Bell2021-07-07T06:30:00-04:002021-07-07T06:30:00-04:00Looking for the Message in Nas’s ‘It Was Written’
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<p>Twenty-five years after it was widely panned at the time of its release, the Queensbridge MC’s second album is hailed as a classic. But what did the discourse at the time get right—and what did it miss?</p> <p id="Xwnc3I"><em>No year in hip-hop history sticks out quite like 1996: It marked the height of the East Coast–West Coast feud, the debut of several artists who would rule the next few decades, and the last moment before battle lines between “mainstream” and “underground” were fully drawn. </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/3/25/22350034/the-1996-rap-yearbook"><em>The 1996 Rap Yearbook</em></a><em>, a recurring series from</em> The Ringer<em>, will explore the landmark releases and moments from a quarter-century ago that redefined how we think of the genre.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="kqMVum">There is a generous reading of “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0QnGI4OgY8ReggLWvEXdgD?si=af89b5e257454e5f">Street Dreams</a>.” It goes like this: The third verse—the adolescent vantage point on the 10-foot hustlers in gold ropes who dole out pocket money and advice, the Jordans and gold chains discarded as childish distractions, the years “wasted” on idle talk and dice games in project stairwells—qualifies the rote crime tales from the first two, excuses the unfathomably corny hook, and sets the whole thing up as a fugue state to be punctured by the violent skit at the song’s end. It becomes a cautionary tale, a naive fantasy set against grim reality. </p>
<p id="oHg9ax">To take this view is to believe that Nas’s second album, <em>It Was Written</em>, is not unlike his first, the cockily brilliant, instantly canonized <em>Illmatic</em>. You’re invited to picture a prodigy leaning on a windowsill—maybe <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/26Izh06V7txOWIEaPGd080">cuffed to a radiator</a>—observing every skirmish and robbery beneath him, rendering them in lurid detail and obsessing over their consequences. Yet that’s not how the album was received at the time, at least by its harsher critics. They argued that the record was grotesque evidence of Nas selling out, aesthetically but also morally. A true-school genre savior cashing in with cynical radio plays, trading <em>Illmatic</em>’s beyond-his-years wisdom for an affected mafioso shtick. (It could be noted with some amusement that <em>The Source</em>’s four-mic review describes it as a “more mature” persona.) </p>
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<p id="Uze4qU"><em>Rolling Stone</em> <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/it-was-written-251275/">gave the album</a> two stars, criticizing Nas for trafficking in rap that prizes “authenticity, not articulation” and calling the lead single a “crossover con job.” However cynically you choose to read the rollout, it worked. While <em>Illmatic </em>hit no. 12 on the Billboard 200 and took nearly two years to be certified gold, <em>It Was Written </em>spent four weeks at no. 1 and was double platinum just a couple of months after its release. </p>
<p id="5KstVm">Since that release 25 years ago this month, <em>It Was Written</em>’s reputation has been rehabilitated, though these original complaints frame the discussion, even in its most impassioned defenses. This is unavoidable: Its poppiest songs are without exception its worst, and—especially on the A side, when they appear as tracks 3, 5, and 7—they creep in like intrusive thoughts, refusing the record any of the rhythm that its better moments deserve. What scans differently today is that pulp-crime undercurrent. It can be overused (such as in the first two-thirds of “Street Dreams”), but with some remove, whatever credibility-straining maneuvers Nas pulls just make <em>It Was Written</em>’s songs more desperate, more claustrophobic, more immediate. It brings to mind a question Nas asks on one of the album’s best—and most undeniably menacing—<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1tJRS17TxD5bwdTk8ehP93?si=af701556cbfc491b">songs</a>: “Why shoot the breeze about it / When you could be about it?” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="UpIkZV">In his autobiography, Rakim tells the story of his first session at Marley Marl’s home recording studio. This would have been 1985. Though he was considered a prodigy of sorts on Long Island, Ra was still in high school. Marley was already a legend, and this apartment, on the second floor of the Queensbridge Houses, is where the Juice Crew members would eventually cut many of their records. But instead of standing at the mic that was set up for him, the young rapper was lazing on a sofa while he laid vocals. </p>
<p id="F15gnu">“That was dope,” Ra recalls Marley saying of his first take. “Let’s do it again with a little more energy.” But he did it the same way. This, he insisted, was simply how he rapped. Another take, then another. They came to an impasse. MC Shan showed up—MC Shan!—and, after a quiet commiseration with Marley in his kitchen, took over the session. Shan tried to reason with the teenager: “Marley knows what he’s talking about. A little more energy won’t hurt you.” Rakim held firm. History would vindicate him—the song they made that day became <em>Paid in Full</em>’s “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/3miZDfDnP7SmOXAJXWdFmz?highlight=spotify:track:7FWaqDbIq3OGZsC04CfuV9">My Melody</a>”—and Rakim tells this story as a parable about trusting your instincts, your vision, yourself. </p>
<p id="U1zzEF">Nas, who grew up in Queensbridge, idolized Rakim. You hear this in the way his <em>Illmatic </em>style makes Ra’s latticework internal rhymes denser, more riddled with knots, and more multidirectional; you hear it acutely in tiny threads of <em>It Was Written</em>, like when he raps that “a provocative plan could bring a knot to my hand.” (In 2004, Nas would even make <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1JU2h6fVetFCJfm84ldO34">a song about</a> Ra, though the older rapper was <a href="https://theboombox.com/rakim-nas-unauthorized-biography/">uncomfortable</a> with the gesture.) But he also looked up to Marley, the local hero. With <em>Illmatic</em>’s compounding pressures—its rapturous acclaim and its commercial stagnancy—weighing heavily on him, Nas sought out the latter, hoping to make “a street album” with him, <a href="https://www.complex.com/music/2016/07/nas-the-making-of-it-was-written">as he told</a> <em>Complex</em> in 2012. By this point, though, Marley had relocated from Queensbridge to Chestnut Ridge, an hour away, and there were days Nas couldn’t be bothered to make the trip. Songs sat half-finished; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0MKJr7O_cg">some</a> ended up on radio shows or on mixtapes with grafted-on verses by rappers Nas didn’t know. Deterred, he decided he couldn’t work like this, abandoned the plan, and prepared to start over.</p>
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<p id="L0GhQS"><br>At this time, Nas had just agreed to be managed by Steve Stoute, the ball of kinetic energy and business aphorisms who would one day have Puff <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/158DIbrVt4YbqNnWyRCS3P">break a bottle</a> of champagne over his head. (The story—<em>a</em> story—goes that Stoute, dogged as always, showed up to Queensbridge looking to sign Nas, only to have a gun pulled on him by Nas’s brother, Jungle. But Stoute persisted, and soon inked the deal. “He wanted it more than anybody else,” Nas would later say.) Stoute also managed the Trackmasters, the production duo of Tone and Poke who had a tangential Juice Crew connection through their work on Kool G Rap’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/4uyN0RPkkXprTutUi7HBNE"><em>Live and Let Die</em></a><em> </em>and the <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/6KHBdhukTqNyfW5ki5RpvA">second Roxanne Shanté album</a>, but were better known for beats that were glossy, clean, and diametrically opposed to Nas’s image. But with no other obvious routes to follow, the gnawing fear of a sophomore jinx in his gut, and lacking the resolve to follow through on his original vision for the LP, Nas dove into the Trackmasters sessions headfirst. </p>
<p id="Mkl7S2">The duo ended up producing seven of <em>It Was Written</em>’s 14 tracks, but oversaw the entire process. They coaxed Nas into their comfort zone, offering him first their grimier beats, like the acid-dipped “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6DWdTk7UaZ6LIYYCFvmgX7?si=9b65cbe429f348e9">Shootouts</a>,” before pitching him the radio singles, “Street Dreams” among them. This unlikely trio crafted an album that de-emphasizes its grittier elements in an apparent effort to be more legible to the widest possible audience, and to avoid Nas seeming out of step with a New York that was bending toward Wu-Tang and the Notorious B.I.G.</p>
<p id="Bcrnrt">There were doubters. When Stoute took the mixes of <em>It Was Written </em>to the studio to be mastered, Q-Tip—the Queens native and A Tribe Called Quest frontman who produced “One Love” on <em>Illmatic</em> and had just overseen <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2020/4/24/21233604/mobb-deep-the-infamous-history-retrospective-prodigy-havoc-interview">Mobb Deep’s masterpiece <em>The Infamous</em></a>—said that Stoute was “killing [Nas’s] career.” What is interesting to consider, though, is that whatever identity Nas claimed on <em>Illmatic </em>was itself the product of careful calibration. After his 1991 breakthrough on Main Source’s “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4PvcavllGpo6lB8VkIgXIZ?si=c6b4fc62407544f0">Live at the Barbeque</a>,” he reveled in a reputation as a bit of a shock rapper—the natural by-product of a debut verse in which he bragged about “snuffing Jesus.” If you’ve ever wondered about the slight tonal disagreement between Nas’s raps on “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6DPrhGVJ1WTZvM9fKptnGe">Represent</a>” and DJ Premier’s apocalyptic beat, it comes because the verses are relics from the more playful <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWaXUoEC9aU">demo</a>, a song whose beat is more suited to lines about wearing “nothing less than Guess” and pissing in your elevator. And when Nas’s skeptics read his immediate post-<em>Illmatic </em>output as unnecessarily reactive to those other emerging New York acts, they forget that one of the signature mafioso albums, Raekwon’s <em>Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...</em>, includes a <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1kHPOtD1fo3kWOgcs0oisd">showstopping Nas verse</a> that is repurposed from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4qYox-Gb70">another early demo</a>. </p>
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<p id="pPhtYr">There are points on <em>It Was Written </em>that are as dazzlingly written and delivered as anything in Nas’s catalog. The shootout skit that ends “Street Dreams” gives way to “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4dSLfdnCy43DPJiqpoZoKe?si=8506f2d309184b88">I Gave You Power</a>,” the Premier-helmed track on which Nas personifies a gun. It is a serviceable concept that could easily become overwrought, but by the beginning of its madcap third verse, the song has earned a wrenching pathos: You hold your breath when Nas raps about the gun owner’s hand reaching into the hiding place where it lives; you feel that owner’s palm trembling as he grips it. On the opening song, “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1AHfovSnGPVYKaahRtA0U6?si=759ed46bcc634c47">The Message</a>,” Nas is as dense and virtuosic as ever: see the way Nas sets up, from the first line of the second verse, the rhyme scheme that he’ll eventually drill down on, briefly abandon, and eventually pay off with the word “Datsun,” all while telling a breathless story about brief hospital stays and unsolvable shootings. </p>
<p id="8IOgoS">And not all of the album’s polish is bad. It is notable that, on virtually all of the solo songs (and on its superb <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2Ja3UauMDeQnq4sI8a64Ys?si=9c6ffd6d9f324507">posse cut</a>), the best verse comes last—evidence of a careful approach to the songwriting, and a reliable way to maintain some forward motion even when the dregs fuck up the flow. The exception is “Take It in Blood,” but this does not mean that song loses steam toward its end. Instead, like “The Message,” it’s a maze of staggering detail and pinpoint rhymes, impossible to find your way into or out of. It invites the kind of rewinds that wear grooves into your brain. Combine this subtle elegance with the album’s B-side that, one song aside, is hollowed-out and venomous—Mobb Deep’s Havoc helms “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7lPJ5PrQnQRurUZIzMCQib?si=90523123aba34ba0">The Set Up</a>” and “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0wBLOFRJTBo2elusmfZhu3?si=63bdfdaba3364806">Live Nigga Rap</a>”; “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/77VyB3Lg1YMnjSSvutM4Al?si=20a18e2aaa4d4b3e">Suspect</a>” is a dead-eyed threat—and <em>It Was Written </em>seems like a monster, a deeper dive into the horrors of Nas’s youth formatted for the big screen. </p>
<p id="Z7UUTU">But you cannot simply write off that one song on the B-side: “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4HphiT6pmqBZiNHkyJCgBQ?si=fb3540d1aba94ea0">Black Girl Lost</a>,” which features Jodeci’s JoJo, is adult-contemporary radio’s version of ’90s R&B-rap hybrids, silky smooth but mawkish in the worst way. The track nearly derails the album just as it seems to be recovering from that stop-start sputter of an opening (and some would later <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1MJzfvy1RSwqL0eZU0qubf">openly mock</a> Nas for having made it at all).</p>
<p id="jL215V">Those earlier pop forays are not as disastrous as “Black Girl Lost,” but they come close. Writing for the short-lived but massively influential magazine <em>Ego Trip</em>, Elliott Wilson <a href="https://themotto.substack.com/p/elliotts-1996-reasonable-doubt-review?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter">described</a> the Trackmasters’ beat for “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2dJwnskDT5AHUso6o1Acnp?si=7ea280a7f8a14a14">Watch Dem Niggas</a>” as having an “N.O. Joe–like synthesized laziness.” At first read, this scans as a mid-’90s New Yorker’s flat rejection of what was happening in the South, but to listen to “Watch Dem” is to hear, unmistakably, a photocopy of a photocopy of the style Joe turned out so reliably. And then there’s the almost comically cheesy, Dr. Dre–produced “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2gXI6TBLhmCNy09NioMHdI?si=c26dfbd7e5524903">Nas Is Coming</a>,” a heralded union of the West and East Coasts that evokes the very worst music made on each. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="XL5Wsw">What tantalizes on <em>It Was Written </em>are the moments of near-perfect coalescence that hint at what a consistently focused Nas over the Trackmasters’ best sheen might have unlocked in each other. All that labyrinthine writing on “The Message,” for example, is laid over that <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2vdId18EePzFhwfp4ryqFq?si=1075fd1e782a4b0f">Sting sample</a>; “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5PQmSHzWnlgG4EBuIqjac2">If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)</a>” marries <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/59doiD6SCKnxLaV5i9dkYX">Whodini</a> to <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/4z6F5s3RVaOsekuaegbLfD"><em>The Score</em></a><em> </em>in a crystal-clear mix for radio. The most curious example of this, though, comes in the second verse of “Watch Dem,” when Nas’s animated delivery embodies the merger while his lyrics literalize it. The song is otherwise pedestrian, but here he raps about doing 90 on the freeway, drunk, with 10 grand in cash and a gun beside him. A “death wish,” he says. But when he checks his watch—a Movado, he notes—he sees that it’s 7 o’clock, “the God hour,” the Five Percenter ideology bleeding through the way it would for a native New Yorker in this era. The implicit argument is that “Street Dreams” and “Suspect” do not come from different neighborhoods, but the same one—one that Nas had been documenting from his teenage years on. </p>
<p id="k97A8G"><a href="https://twitter.com/paulxt"><em>Paul Thompson</em></a><em> is a writer based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in </em>Rolling Stone<em>, </em>New York<em> magazine, and </em>GQ<em>.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2021/7/7/22566167/nas-it-was-written-retrospective-anniversaryPaul Thompson2021-06-24T09:40:58-04:002021-06-24T09:40:58-04:00Go Sell It on the Mountain: Jay-Z and the Myth of ‘Reasonable Doubt’
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://richardachance.com/" target="_blank">Richard A. Chance</a></figcaption>
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<p>On Jay-Z, ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ and how hip-hop’s greatest mythmaker had to get some things off his chest before he could get started</p> <p id="9GyFMB"><em>No year in hip-hop history sticks out quite like 1996: It marked the height of the East Coast–West Coast feud, the debut of several artists who would rule the next few decades, and the last moment before battle lines between “mainstream” and “underground” were fully drawn. </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/3/25/22350034/the-1996-rap-yearbook"><em>The 1996 Rap Yearbook</em></a><em>, a recurring series from</em> The Ringer<em>, will explore the landmark releases and moments from a quarter-century ago that redefined how we think of the genre. Today, we’re looking at one of the most heralded debuts in hip-hop history, </em>Reasonable Doubt<em>.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="BGA7TZ">Rule no. 1 of hustling (the new testament, not the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYb_8MM1tGQ">original commandments</a>) is don’t tip your hand, but Jay-Z seems unable to help himself when it comes to <em>Reasonable Doubt</em>. The man’s still in love with his debut and can’t bear to quit flirting. It started around the album’s release, when reporters or talk show hosts or DJs would ask him what his plans were for the next project. The answer was that he didn’t have any, at least not on the mic. “It was my intention to make it my last,” Jay later wrote in his autobiography <em>Decoded</em>, meaning the album was designed to be his one and only opus, upon which the then-26-year-old would transition to the throne of label management and tastemaker. Of course, that’s not what would happen, but that kind of intent with a project must, at some level, breed an indomitable attachment to it—one that only making something that may or may not be your only creation can. </p>
<p id="NputCJ">The love affair continued into the mid-2000s. In ’04, after a fruitful but increasingly tense partnership with his two other Roc-A-Fella Records cofounders, Damon Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke, Hov sought an even higher perch as CEO and president of Def Jam Recordings. As the epic goes, he offered to turn down the Def Jam position and tack on the rights to all his other previous releases in exchange for his <em>Reasonable Doubt</em> masters. “It meant everything to me because it was my baby,” was how Jigga described his rationale <a href="https://www.xxlmag.com/jay-z-look-at-me-now-originally-published-august-2005/">to <em>XXL</em> months later</a>. They couldn’t come to a deal, so Jay went on, scorned, but also (conveniently) richer. In ’06 he went so far as holding an anniversary show for the LP; even in recent years he’s been known to make a point of performing early material. There’s also the <em>RD20</em> documentary he commissioned at Tidal <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/7416568/jay-z-rd20-reasonable-doubt-documentary-tidal/">in 2016</a>, a nifty bit of S. Carter Enterprises–sponsored propaganda masquerading as nostalgia. Just a few days ago, a judge ruled in Hov’s favor after he sued <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/jay-z-roc-a-fella-records-dame-dash-reasonable-doubt-nft-lawsuit-1186875/">Damon Dash</a> for attempting to sell the copyright to the album as a non-fungible token. </p>
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<p id="Z94Exf">All of which is a long-winded way of saying that Jay-Z has spent the better part of three decades protecting and mythologizing <em>Reasonable Doubt</em> in a fashion that oozes both doting and Machiavellian concern, each of which are antithetical to the defining feature of his unequalled public persona: total and supreme nonchalance. When has he been bothered? Even his moments of vulnerability that have helped oil the increasingly corporate machine are always placed at a distance. (See: “I can’t see them coming down my eyes / So I got to make the song cry.”) And yet for a rapper who has triple-entendre’d his way to the top (and then out) of rap’s food chain, there is something about this album that he refuses to be anything but attached to. The question of why invariably gives the game away. </p>
<p id="ermiME"><em>Reasonable Doubt</em>, which was released 25 years ago Friday, serves as a kind of codex to understanding the birth and rise of the most dominant character in the history of rap music. He may have first imagined it as an ending, but only that project could have ignited the series of flares that have come since. It is the one thing that Jay-Z had to make if he was going to make anything at all.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="NNjyGV">“I did the same thing to Big,” DJ Premier told me over the phone in late May, as if numb to the splendor of name-dropping Christopher Wallace while describing a pact with Jay-Z. “I charged him 5 grand. At that time I was getting $25K, $30K a cut. That was a big deal back then. And I think I told [Jay] $4,000 a pop per song. I remember I told Big the same thing. I said, ‘Yo man, blow up and go platinum I’m charging you double of what I charge.’ And he said, ‘No problem.’ And when we started working on <em>Life After Death</em>, he gave me what I wanted. When Jay-Z and them went to Def Jam and got them big checks, he paid me what I wanted [too]. No hesitation.”</p>
<p id="Kmrpq0">Premier, who produced three tracks on <em>Reasonable Doubt</em>, has known Jay since the late ’80s, when Big Daddy Kane would invite the young MC to open his shows and accompany him on tour. Hov was merely the understudy of Brooklyn rapper Jaz-O, trying to burst through the scene with the double-time cadence made popular by groups like Das EFX and Fu-Schnickens. Preemo could see that he was a different breed, dexterous enough to master any style, with a mind ahead of his years. “Even though he was younger, he was really there absorbing the same music the same way all of us DJs did: MCs, graffiti art, writers, and B-boys and B-girls,” says Premier.</p>
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<p id="NAy79I"><br>Jay’s double life—between stage and street corner, cypher and trafficking—is well-trodden ground, reflected not only in his music but at the core of his image. The extent to which he incubated and developed his craft in a world prepped to ensnare him is often ignored in deference to the crime-hungry gaze of popular culture. There is a well-known tale that Jay likes to recount about the ribbing he received from his fellow dealers when word first spread that he was plotting a move to the music industry. Nobody understood why he’d forgo a higher income on the corner for the chance at a life behind the mic. “I couldn’t really explain to them how much I loved it,” he told <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/06/16/533216823/jay-z-the-fresh-air-interview">NPR in 2010</a>. (The fundamental trick to everything Jay-Z is that there are 99 layers of bullshit wrapped around every statement of truth, so when Jay tells you that he “couldn’t really explain to” his crew how much he cared for rap, it’s a bit like a game of polygraphic Russian roulette in that <em>he really could be telling the truth</em> but it would be a fool’s errand to actually believe so.) </p>
<p id="8OkCFf">Premier, for his part, remembers a young man who cared as much as anyone he’d ever seen about getting better, as he soaked up knowledge, styles, and craft. He watched him process all that information and combine it with the events of his life to create something grander than anyone could have expected. It took time; <em>Reasonable Doubt</em> dropped eight years after they met. Jay bounced off one record label and created his own. He did a lot of living. But by the time he was ready to show his full form he had mastered something wholly distinct.</p>
<p id="M08GuM">“When he came out with <em>Reasonable Doubt</em> he knew how to speak in code. It was really for the streets to understand, it wasn’t really made for anybody else,” says Premier. “It was like if you speak Spanish, you understand what they’re saying is Spanish. He spoke code to the streets.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="FYFCew"><em>Reasonable Doubt</em> is an incredibly dark album, but furtively so. By the mid ’90s, the era of the foot soldier in gangster rap had fallen mostly by the wayside, replaced by the gleaming idol of the kingpin, occupied first by Kool G Rap and later by the Notorious B.I.G. To flex one’s bona fides as a low-level participant in the drug game was no longer enough. If you were going to incorporate dealing into your identity, coat your public persona with your proximity to the streets, then you had to have “run the show,” as Jay <a href="https://genius.com/11015">so aptly put it</a>. The album was not rapturously received. <em>The Source</em> famously gave the record a good-but-not-great four mics, and it peaked at no. 23 on the Billboard 200. On <em>Reasonable Doubt</em> the trappings of the boss ethos and lifestyle shroud a pervading gloom in plain sight. It is a boastful record, but also one that cannot escape its own guilt. And like all things Hov, separating fact from fiction becomes a tedious impossibility.</p>
<p id="Zcnuk7">He has more than enough cash on hand to bail out “a big Willie” in the Mary J.–infused album opener “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” but money won’t fill the hole in his heart a track later on the absolutely silky “Politics As Usual,” as introspection hemorrhages into self-disgust and resentment. (“They built me to be filthy / On some I-do-or-die shit.”) Jigga doesn’t just shine, he illuminates the whole show on “Dead Presidents II,” but there is no light bright enough to expunge the image of a brother’s bullet-riddled torso, his eyes unable to emit anything but a pained and begging “pray for me.” In “D’Evils,” perhaps the darkest run of words ever uttered by the rapper on wax, Jay becomes a literal grief eater (“In time I’ll take away your miseries and make it mine’’<em>) </em>in order to snuff out a rival. Trips to Vegas in “Can I Live”—even a bit of revelry at one of those tables that “starts a G up”—won’t numb the pain festering in his soul. It is no accident that the album’s final track is titled (and attempts to conquer his own) “Regrets.”</p>
<p id="wOQXQs">A bit unrelated but also a bit identical: When the writer James Baldwin would speak of his first novel, the unparalleled and semi-autobiographical <em>Go Tell It on the Mountain</em>, he would often refer to it as “the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” His reasoning was simple. The contents of his debut were particularly personal; it emanated from his own lived experiences, his family, his history. To write <em>Go Tell It on the Mountain</em>, “I had to deal with what hurt me most,” Baldwin <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/01/10/books/james-baldwin-reflects-on-go-tell-it-pbs-film.html">told <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em></a>. Besides their childhoods in New York, spent among a timeless striving and peddling, there are but a few things that, I believe, link Jay and Jimmy more than this knowledge: that there would be no <em>them</em>, no creation, if they did not first exorcise a part of themselves, the jagged remnants of their history. <em>Reasonable Doubt</em> is, thematically, a rumination on the life of Shawn Carter, albeit furnished with a layer of baroque <em>Scarface</em>-esque fantasies—one that grapples with what hurt him most. It is an album that is, in this way, growth embodied.</p>
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<p id="sVjpu4">This reckoning is not merely limited to the thematic; it bleeds into the very language of the work itself. He’s never, truly, been more deft: how he blends his vowels and consonants into a thick stew of homophones on “Can I Live,” breathlessly stacking “My confederation, dead a nation” with “explode on detonation.” How he occasionally sidesteps the entire convention of rhyming on “Friend or Foe”—because what couplet could outrank “Let me guess, they said it was money ’round here / And the rest is me stoppin’ you from gettin’ it, correct?” How he manages to hit “I cream” and “I diamond gleam” and “high-post like Hakeem” in all the right places in “Bring It On.” It is a type of rapping that unlocked the rest of his oeuvre—a type of rapping that could be mistaken for something holy. The culmination of almost a decade’s worth of growth. </p>
<p id="Di6eeP">Jay’s greatest bit of mythologizing is that he’s made this all seem preordained. That he didn’t spend years grinding before emerging on <em>Reasonable Doubt</em>, and that he didn’t use his performance on the record to become something else entirely, both in a stylistic and ideological sense. The truth is the opposite. He spent years crafting. Nas was 20 when <em>Illmatic </em>dropped; Biggie was 22 for <em>Ready to Die</em>. Jay was older than both and had the benefit of learning from them.</p>
<p id="2YyTp4">He’s never equaled the language on <em>Reasonable Doubt</em> because he’s never needed to. (It’s his most attentive work because he had to be attentive.) The themes on the album have never really been the same since because he’s never needed to revisit them. He has tried, on occasion, to recapture what once was. Where “22 Two’s” first stood was soon <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5lAXPHy7qs">“44 Fours.”</a> In the place of “Dead Presidents II” sat <a href="https://soundcloud.com/young-guru-1/dp3original-version-prod-by">“Dead Presidents III.”</a> They never worked as they had. The climate had changed. And because of all that <em>Reasonable Doubt</em> stands as both disproof of Jay-Z the character—effortlessly cool, mogul, GOAT—and the starting point for it. The project allowed him to become a mythmaker, showed him the path he’d have to follow, while at the same time revealing how disillusioned and painfully human he had been. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="qlKqsu">It was to be his one and only, you see. In all of Shawn Carter’s oracular forethought and salesmanship he’d never conceived of himself as the primary product. So <em>Reasonable Doubt </em>became the takeoff point and also, at least in the rearview, the site that proves he was not always capable of leaving the earth behind. Once bound to the ground, he discovered a new line of business, a fresh hustle: himself.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2021/6/24/22548092/jay-z-reasonable-doubt-anniversary-review-retrospectiveLex Pryor2021-05-07T06:00:00-04:002021-05-07T06:00:00-04:00Dr. Octagon and the Surgical Perverseness of Kool Keith
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://richardachance.com/" target="_blank">Richard A Chance</a></figcaption>
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<p>Twenty-five years ago, the Ultramagnetic MCs rapper teamed up with Dan the Automator for a stone-cold classic and one of the wildest excursions in hip-hop history</p> <p id="MX1QXm"><em>No year in hip-hop history sticks out quite like 1996: It marked the height of the East Coast–West Coast feud, the debut of several artists who would rule the next few decades, and the last moment before battle lines between “mainstream” and “underground” were fully drawn. </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/3/25/22350034/the-1996-rap-yearbook"><em>The 1996 Rap Yearbook</em></a><em>, a recurring series from</em> The Ringer<em>, will explore the landmark releases and moments from a quarter-century ago that redefined how we think of the genre. Today, we’re looking back on Kool Keith’s first post–Ultramagnetic MCs record, his otherworldly team-up with Dan the Automator under the name Dr. Octagon, </em>Dr. Octagonecologyst<em>. </em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="5IGPaa">Though it feels like 8,000 or so, Kool Keith raps the word <em>rectum </em>only eight times over the course of <em>Dr. Octagonecologyst</em>, the mesmerizingly perverse underground hip-hop classic credited to Dr. Octagon (the most famous of the deified New York City rapper’s 50-odd aliases) and first released on May 7, 1996. Yes, on Friday, this eternally astounding record, in all its porno-surrealist glory, will be old enough to rent a car. Do not rent a car to <em>Dr. Octagonecologyst</em>, however, lest the good doctor perform any of his specialties (which per the album include “intestine surgery, rectal rebuilding, relocated saliva glands, and chimpanzee acne—and of course, moosebumps”) in the rental car’s back seat, thereby forfeiting the security deposit. (This is <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7LO7ZcfjPZghM3mTlbqOen?si=24fffcc1bbbd4508">the same skit</a> that lists Dr. Octagon’s office line as “1-800-PP5-1-Doodoo”; I have been old enough to rent a car for nearly 20 years, and each time I hear that phone number it’s still the funniest shit I’ve ever heard in my life.) </p>
<p id="e8HC7j">OK, so that one time, he says <em>rectal</em>, not <em>rectum</em>, and he’s not <em>rapping</em> there, technically; same deal on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1dW067EsbN1Ep1VK6fXGWr?si=9825a83dc56f4423">another skit</a> when he gravely intones, “You have ptomaine poisoning on your tongue. Say <em>Ahh</em>. You have bees flying around your rectum.” Still, though: (only) eight instances of (usually) the word <em>rectum </em>(mostly) rapped across 20 tracks on the album’s canonical 1997 rerelease. “You beat it like Michael Jackson in my atmosphere / Gerbils for rectums, I break you off like Richard Gere,” raps Dr. Octagon. “I do much work on heavy stomachs like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXWYhkAQFC8">Levert</a> / Put up some money, I bet my tools’ll make your rectum hurt,” raps Dr. Octagon. I don’t mean to fixate on this, but we all have our fixations when it comes to <em>Dr. Octagonecologyst</em>, which stands among the most beloved and dissected and perhaps misunderstood rap records of its era, an X-rated sci-fi odyssey of dazzling prurience and lurid imagination, and a solo debut so vivid and monolithic that Keith has spent the past quarter-century firing off 30-odd subsequent albums and concocting 50-odd other aliases lest you pigeonhole him solely as the “Oh, shit, there’s a horse in the hospital” guy. (That’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4bJCtweqhnaxIqr2ltYN4O?si=c925ce61d2514643">my favorite skit</a>.)</p>
<p id="BU2a6T">And so we come here today to praise <em>Dr. Octagonecologyst</em> while also freeing Kool Keith from the monumental burden of being Dr. Octagon all the time. In the mid-’90s, the beyond-eccentric rapper—born Keith Matthew Thornton in the Bronx in 1963—was best known for his stint in the Golden Age crew Ultramagnetic MCs, whose 1988 debut, <em>Critical Beatdown</em>,<em> </em>is an all-timer (<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5I7GbWmphoJfZi6VnzUyGZ?si=d4668d6d2336486c">“Kool Keith Housing Things”</a> is truth in song-titling) and whose full catalog deserves more respect than it gets. (“Light up your inner skull and burn up your rectum,” Keith boasts on a late-period throwaway called <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5Dl0hBbbBhmqY089uieVHt?si=062b3223d2264178">“Talkin’ Out Ya Ass,”</a> which flaunts more raw personality than plenty of his opposition’s failed hit singles. “MCs are doo-doo, I never did respect ‘em.”) But this guy was destined for different planets, different galaxies, different schools of musical and medical and sexual thought. And with some help from San Francisco producer Dan the Automator, whose taste for eerie whimsy would soon light up records by the likes of Gorillaz and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/1/20749404/handsome-boy-modeling-school-20-years-prince-paul-dan-automator">Handsome Boy Modeling School</a>, Keith kicked off one of the wildest solo careers in rap history by reinventing himself as a sex-crazed, homicidal, space-age experimental surgeon named, yes, Dr. Octagon. So many rectums to burn up, so little time. </p>
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<p id="PW5tOj">If <em>Dr. Octagonecologyst</em>—bolstered by extra production from longtime Keith cohort KutMasta Kurt and dizzying scratching from turntablist DJ Qbert—has anything resembling a breakout single, it’s “Blue Flowers,” a hypnotic 23rd-century earworm less memorable for anything Keith says (“Cybernetic microscopes and metal antidotes / Two telescopes that magnify size of a roach”) than for the absurdist swagger with which he says it. Kool Keith, anywhere and under any alias, doesn’t have to stay on beat if he doesn’t want to. His rhymes don’t have to rhyme if he doesn’t want them to. He doesn’t have to make one iota of goddamn sense if he doesn’t want to. He can turn nonsense declarations like “Half-shark-alligator, half-man!” or “Earth people, New York to California! / Earth people, I was born on Jupiter!” into infectious choruses. He can follow up a deviant sex jam called “Girl Let Me Touch You” with an even more aberrant barrage of goofy threats called “I’m Destructive.” (“Bash in your head with 10 full cans of Campbell’s soup / I’m on the roof and I let the pigeons out the chicken coop.”) This is a <em>stupendously </em>baffling record, a Neptunian porno mag that doubles as a Dadaist B-movie script, an outré masterpiece that threatened to turn Keith himself into a mainstream star. </p>
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<p id="WZ3U5U"><br>But outright <em>acceptance</em>, even within ostensibly flamboyant underground-rap circles, was never Keith’s goal; he has never stood still long enough, physically or stylistically, to risk mass culture’s stultifying embrace. <em>Dr. Octagonecologyst </em>landed him a coveted slot on the 1997 Lollapalooza tour, but he never showed, as noted in an admiring if unsettled <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/arts/music-a-master-of-x-rated-hip-hop.html">2001 <em>New York Times </em>piece</a> that hailed him as “part George Clinton, part Marquis de Sade.” By 2001, of course, Keith had already put out approximately <em>nine more albums</em>. Some were likewise beloved: 1999’s self-explanatory <em>Black Elvis / Lost in Space </em>was a riotous barrage of near-pop songs from <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5NMZVAjT1GXXIWY4gXOP9l?si=d53a01043f184057">“Livin’ Astro”</a> to the corporate-America sendup <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4MlBsLONRAlSrG7slJyQ6T?si=b1d6802b001244fe">“The Girls Don’t Like the Job.”</a> (“I want you to fax yourself to China, OK?” he murmurs, almost as an aside. “Do this now.”) But other records were cultier fusillades of shit-talk like 1996’s <em>Big Time </em>(which reunited Keith with his Ultramagnetic MCs pal Tim Dog and called out “all you motherfuckers bitin’ my space shit”) or thornier fan favorites like 2000’s <em>Matthew</em>. (The increasingly loopy <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3y4xrjq6u85dBVQjuYg2VA?si=337acfcfc5b44cd0">“I Don’t Believe You”</a> makes it clear that so far as other rappers go, he doesn’t believe anybody.) </p>
<p id="bVW8yi">Keith is so reliably prolific and eccentric that it’s easy to assume his work is effortless, in the sense that <em>he doesn’t put much effort into it</em>. But he is fearsomely dedicated to his craft, and hellbent on rarely, if ever, repeating himself. Rather than cravenly build off <em>Dr. Octagonecologyst</em>’s success, he instead invented yet another alias, Dr. Dooom, and kicked off that character’s first album, 1999’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/45Ls3xyYRSUIzZms4jH4BI?si=HhTpIWBRTLu0Av_2a9D89g"><em>First Come, First Served</em></a>, with a song called “Who Killed Dr. Octagon?” In 2006, a sequel called <em>The Return of Dr. Octagon </em>emerged with only tentative involvement from Keith himself (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090227142441/http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/PrintFriendly?oid=291467">it’s complicated</a>); Keith and Dan the Automator reunited for real for 2018’s far better <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/0HLxOztiu0HKfyqkT6kMHr?si=PIToK89NT8WyMxrNsloOQA"><em>Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation</em></a>. But with a cult rapper this singular, you are far better off not getting what you want, and far closer to grasping Keith’s whole deal if you consider the possibility that grasping his whole deal has never been the point.</p>
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<p id="omBqyp"><br>“People get locked into Octagon and I’ll go change—they don’t understand that,” Keith observed in a 2020 chat with <a href="https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/rapper-and-producer-kool-keith-on-creating-your-own-worlds/"><em>The Creative Independent</em></a><em> </em>that is legitimately one of the most illuminating rapper interviews I’ve read in ages. “But I’m not here to stay in one thing too long. Some people, they’ll do a gangster album for the rest of their life. Some people will rap fast, like 100 miles an hour, for the rest of they life. I can’t do it all the time. I can’t take <em>antioxidant </em>and just rhyme with that shit every hour. There’s other words to use, you know?” (He’s got a whole riff in that interview about pill-obsessed rappers whose only trick is rhyming <em>antioxidant </em>with <em>apocalypse</em>. Just roll with it.)</p>
<p id="vXKQjY">The other vexing thing about Kool Keith is that he’s so imaginative, so provocative, so magnificently <em>out there</em> that people assume he really is, say, a murderous alien gynecologist. “It’s just escape for me,” he told <em>The Creative Independent</em>. “But in people’s minds, it’s the opposite: They think I’m in outer space or something. I’m the George Jetson of rap. But I’m in the streets, the hoods, when I write. I write sci-fi things that drive me away from normal daily life. My life is real, but my mind is surreal.”</p>
<p id="KUxvqI">All of these presumptions and patronizing misconceptions were in the air <a href="https://www.villagevoice.com/2006/09/12/spankmaster-and-servant/">the one time I saw Kool Keith live</a>, at New York City’s Bowery Ballroom in 2006. I remember three things about this show, in ascending order of importance:</p>
<p id="yyiobM">3. When he played “Halfsharkalligatorhalfman.” </p>
<p id="d0QYqY">2. When I was hanging out at the bar in the Bowery Ballroom basement before Keith hit the stage, and a group of four jovial bearded white dudes standing nearby suddenly started belting out the chorus to the 1972 soft-rock smash “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” a capella, which sure says something about this guy’s core audience, though I’d rather not think about what, exactly. </p>
<p id="TaY6uA">1. When Kool Keith himself, in the midst of one of his many lengthy and delightful bouts of stage banter, described his writing process this way: “I get me a <em>Yoo-Hoo</em>, I get a motherfuckin’ <em>donut</em>, and I <em>get in they asses</em>.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="jI2iH7">What made that image so funny to me at the time was the thought of supernatural oddball Kool Keith doing anything as pedestrian as drinking a Yoo-Hoo and eating a donut, but upon reflection, the real triumph of <em>Dr. Octagonecologyst</em>, as with every Kool Keith album that came after it, is that it’s so bizarre and obscene and sensational that only a real-life human being could’ve thought it all up. What makes this guy truly great is that he thought up the phone number “1-800-PP5-1-Doodoo.” What makes him legendary is that when you call up that number, you never know what, or who, you’re gonna get. </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/2021/5/7/22423121/dr-octagon-octagonecologyst-anniversary-legacyRob Harvilla2021-04-30T06:30:00-04:002021-04-30T06:30:00-04:00The Eternal Hymn of “Tha Crossroads”
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<p>Twenty-five years ago, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony took the real-life tragedy that surrounded them and turned it into something that transcended their genre—and made good on the promise Eazy-E saw in them </p> <p id="aRcCfh"><em>No year in hip-hop history sticks out quite like 1996: It marked the height of the East Coast–West Coast feud, the debut of several artists who would rule the next few decades, and the last moment before battle lines between “mainstream” and “underground” were fully drawn. </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/3/25/22350034/the-1996-rap-yearbook"><em>The 1996 Rap Yearbook</em></a><em>, a recurring series from</em> The Ringer<em>, will explore the landmark releases and moments from a quarter-century ago that redefined how we think of the genre. Today, we’re celebrating this history of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and the biggest rap song of that year or virtually any other: “Tha Crossroads,” released in early 1996.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="keTqcr">By 1993, Eazy-E had achieved things most rappers only dream of. N.W.A, the group he cofounded and masterminded in the late 1980s, had redefined hip-hop and brought gangsta rap mainstream. He’d put out several successful solo projects on Ruthless Records, the label he founded alongside Jerry Heller just a few years earlier. He’d dined with the president—perhaps <a href="https://thesource.com/2020/03/18/today-in-hip-hop-history-eazy-e-visits-president-george-h-w-bush-in-the-white-house-29-years-ago/">as an unwelcome guest</a>—and he’d started a film production company. He appeared happy: He was wealthy, he loved skateboarding, he had girlfriends. But one thing gnawed at Eric Wright: He had yet to find a way to match the heights N.W.A reached, commercially or culturally.</p>
<p id="3SlTh2">Ice Cube and Dr. Dre had no such problems. The former, who had left N.W.A by 1990 after alleging financial impropriety by Heller, had established himself not only as a superstar solo rapper, but as a burgeoning Hollywood talent after his breakout role in <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/7/10/21319691/boyz-n-the-hood-theater-violence-opening-weekend"><em>Boyz n the Hood</em></a> (which coincidentally shared a name with Eazy’s biggest solo hit). Dre, meanwhile, would redefine hip-hop again in 1992 when he released <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2020/4/20/21227555/dr-dre-the-chronic-streaming"><em>The Chronic</em></a>. Eazy’s former partners were lapping him, and laughing in his face while doing it—<em>The Chronic </em>single “Fuck Wit Dre Day” took several thinly veiled shots at Eazy and Heller, while its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqh-w7y928M">music video left no room for confusion</a>. Eazy fired back with a scathing diss song of his own and called Dre a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOnZ3YtA1Q0">“studio gangster”</a> during a visit to <em>The Arsenio Hall Show</em>, but no matter how cool he seemed while wearing his trademark Compton hat and sunglasses, he was clearly rattled by the feud. Eazy, who had famously avoided alcohol and drugs to remain sharp during his early days as a hustler, began getting high and drinking Jack Daniel’s. Some closest to him thought his newfound habits were a direct result of his inability to keep pace with his former cohorts. “I’m thinking he was trying to mask how he was feeling deserted and embarrassed,” his onetime assistant, Charis Henry, told Ben Westhoff in the 2016 book <em>Original Gangstas</em>. </p>
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<p id="T2pcVX">In his memoir, <em>Ruthless</em>, Jerry Heller said Eazy had become consumed with the idea of besting Dre and Cube. In the early days of Heller and Eazy’s partnership, they had instituted a policy of working on only one release at a time. After Dre’s solo career blew up—and after he proved it was no fluke by producing Snoop Dogg’s four-times-platinum <em>Doggystyle</em> in 1993—Eazy abandoned that rule. At one point, Heller recalled, Ruthless worked on 29 different albums at the same time. Some were from Ruthless mainstays Above the Law and MC Ren. Others were from upstarts that Eazy latched on to: two raunchy all-female acts, H.W.A. (short for “Hoez With Attitude”) and Menajahtwa (pronounced <em>ménage à trois</em>, of course); the unapologetically Jewish group Blood of Abraham; another group named Atban Klann, led by rapper-producer Will 1X, who would later rise to fame as will.i.am.</p>
<p id="ZX0Z4i">But Atban Klann never released an album, and none of the other new groups sold more than 40,000 units on their first go-round. Eazy’s plans to build a Ruthless empire to rival Death Row looked like a long shot at best. Then he decided to call back some kids from Cleveland who had been hounding his assistant.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="qL526M">Desperation brought Eazy-E to Bone. It also brought the inseparable Ohioan quintet to California, where they sought out the man who would become their early mentor. The group had been through several names—first the Band Aid Boys, then B.O.N.E. Enterprise, then by 1993, just Bone—and lineups, but by the early ’90s, they had settled on five members: Bizzy Bone, Wish Bone, Krayzie Bone, Layzie Bone, and Layzie’s older brother, Flesh-n-Bone. They essentially lived together and spent most of their time hanging on the corner of <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2016/7/22/16037366/bone-thugs-cleveland-east-99th-d7785572d39f">E. 99th Street and St. Clair Avenue</a> in Cleveland, dreaming of their way out. </p>
<p id="HORHRE">Flesh-n-Bone bankrolled the trip to California. He saved money from his job working at Kentucky Fried Chicken and bought five one-way tickets to the Golden State. They arrived at a friend’s place in Visalia, a small city about 190 miles north of the Ruthless headquarters in the San Fernando Valley. The plan was not exactly foolproof. But Bone had one thing working in their favor: perseverance that bordered on obsession. As the group told <em>The Source</em> two years later, by day they’d call Eazy’s office repeatedly; at night, they’d write rhymes along to their hero’s new song, “Real Muthaphuckkin G’s,” and watch the video-request channel the Box. When funds began to run low, the boys started robbing pizza delivery people. It seemed hopeless—until it didn’t. “One day he called us back,” Krayzie Bone <a href="https://hiphopdx.com/interviews/id.2213/title.bone-thugs-n-harmony-detail-eazy-es-impact-remember-his-death#:~:text=%E2%80%9CSomehow%20we%20got%20the%20number,of%20y'all%20calling%20in.&text='%20So%2C%20one%20day%20he%20called,He%20was%20just%20trippin'.%E2%80%9D">recalled to <em>Hip-Hop DX</em> in 2013</a>. “I rapped for him on the phone, and it was just crazy. He was just trippin’.”</p>
<p id="cw9QcN">Eazy was about to embark on a tour, so he couldn’t invite them to Los Angeles, but he had a date in their hometown coming soon. Bone scrounged up whatever money they could to get back to Cleveland to meet him. There, they auditioned as a group, and as legend has it, Eazy offered them a deal on a spot. “Jerry, you aren’t going to believe these motherfuckers I found out here,” Heller recalled Eazy shouting during an excited call back to Ruthless. “They practically homeless, man, when I met them they were all hanging around a motherfucking barrel with a fire in it, trying to stay warm. You got to hear them, Jerry! Send them bus tickets and get them the fuck out there.”</p>
<p id="hGR2Hf">Even today, it’s plain to hear what captivated Eazy about Bone. Acts like Das EFX and the Fu-Schnickens had popularized tongue-twisting raps in the early ’90s, but Bone doubled down on the style and added melodic elements, decades before Drake and Post Malone made sing-rapping the dominant commercial sound. They also learned how to build off one another, finishing each other’s lines and layering their voices in a way no street rappers ever had. The “Thugs-n-Harmony” part of the name—which they would adopt at Eazy’s urging—could just as easily apply to their vocal style as their connection. As Krayzie told <em>Thrasher</em> magazine in 2017, both evolved naturally from all the time they spent together. “We did it all the time—in my mama’s basement—anytime we’d have smoke or drink sessions, it was a flow session,” he said. “We started to learn each other’s verses and the other four would just ad-lib and it would sound like we were harmonizing.” </p>
<p id="8lUUwB">Eazy was also captivated by Bone’s subject matter, which bordered on “horrorcore,” a hip-hop subgenre that felt more influenced by slasher flicks than N.W.A. Their music dealt with <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7mE0Heyd1SRvhRJPrXI7FI?si=aOFXnb_UQdGVYA-CHiiZJg">ouija boards</a> and spirits best not conjured. Their early independent tape was named <em>Faces of Death </em>and featured a <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/Faces_of_death_alternate.jpg">crudely drawn Grim Reaper</a>. Taken as a whole, Bone sounded like a demonic doo-wop group. That their rapid-fire lyrics were often indecipherable only added to their cryptic appeal. Heller bought into Eazy’s hype. He sent the tickets immediately, and the next day, the group departed for L.A. </p>
<p id="zefzrs">Bone immediately brought a different energy to Ruthless—which Eazy enjoyed, but which stressed his business partner out. Heller had experience managing young, excitable rappers in N.W.A, but the only one of them who could reasonably be considered a <em>street dude</em> was Eazy, and once the group started, he abandoned that life in favor of business. Not so with Bone, as Heller recalled it. He said he once talked Flesh-n-Bone out of plot to rob elderly walkers in the suburban L.A. neighborhood of Chatsworth. “I told him that 80-year-olds in jogging outfits probably weren’t carrying too much money on them,” Heller wrote. “Reluctantly, he gave up his plan.”</p>
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<p id="Yy85Bc">But while Bone gave the Ruthless brass headaches, they also recorded a ton of music, and the early results were undeniable. Their debut EP for the label, 1994’s <em>Creepin on ah Come Up</em>, produced two colossal singles: the Eazy-E-assisted “Foe tha Love of $” and “Thuggish Ruggish Bone.” The latter—produced by the man who would become their most important collaborator, DJ U-Neek—is G-funk at its most sinister. The <a href="https://www.complex.com/pigeons-and-planes/2012/11/who-did-it-best-the-funky-worm-sample">“Funky Worm”–style Moog</a> pioneered by Dre (<a href="https://ambrosiaforheads.com/2017/07/above-the-law-g-funk-dr-dre-chronic/">or Above the Law</a>, depending on whom you ask) typically sounds joyous and infectious; on “Thuggish Ruggish Bone,” it’s partly hypnotizing, partly horrifying. It’s a miracle the song made it to mainstream radio, but once it did, it thrived, hitting no. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 and no. 2 on the rap charts while helping <em>Creepin</em> hit four times platinum. That equaled the certifications for <em>The Chronic</em> and <em>Doggystyle</em>. “In Eazy’s eyes, his success was an enormous ‘fuck you!’ to Dre and Cube,” Heller wrote in his memoir.</p>
<p id="RFvxqq">Ruthless quickly inked Bone to a long-term deal, and they began work on their follow-up: <em>E. 1999 Eternal</em>, a classic that refined the group’s sound, built on their mythos, and made Midwestern rap a viable commercial proposition. Topically, the songs on it don’t stray far from death, weed, and the occult. But working exclusively with U-Neek now, Bone crafted something completely new. The five-song stretch that opens the album is as haunting as anything the Geto Boys or Three 6 Mafia (the latter of whom had a longer-simmering, ultimately futile <a href="https://hiphopdx.com/news/id.33626/title.three-6-mafia-beef-with-bone-thugs-n-harmony-explained-by-dj-paul">feud with Bone</a>) had ever attempted. Backward voices, sinister pianos, harmonies that take on a séance-like quality—<em>E. 1999</em> at times felt like its own self-contained world that began and ended at the cemetery gates. Even the brightest moments on the album (most notably the lead single, “1st of Tha Month,” and the Isley Brothers homage “Buddah Lovaz”) basically amount to smoke breaks. </p>
<p id="mVWsFJ">Death seemed to permeate nearly every song, but especially <em>E. 1999</em>’s centerpiece: “Crossroad,” a song dedicated to a friend of the group named Wally who was gunned down in Cleveland. (“Wally was like the first security guard that I ever had, but he was really my best friend,” Layzie told <a href="https://hiphopdx.com/interviews/id.2392/title.layzie-bone-clarifies-remarks-about-leaving-bone-thugs-n-harmony"><em>Hip-Hop DX</em> in 2014</a>.) “Crossroad” is at once a tribute to a fallen friend and a meditation on mortality, a sober moment on an album full of nightmare sequences. It’s haunting, but also beautiful.</p>
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<p id="zVo7Gj">Heller said he knew what Ruthless had on its hands as <em>E. 1999</em> neared completion—he thought the project could do <em>Thriller</em>-like numbers if the label played its hand right. And while the album would fall short of that megalithic goal, it would spend two weeks at no. 1 and eventually sell more than 4 million copies, becoming the biggest release in Ruthless history after it arrived in July 1995. Eazy had been vindicated in his quest for the next great rap group. And while he wouldn’t be there to celebrate that success with his protégés, his absence would help fuel their biggest moment. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="3NJ3E6">Among the cartoonishly macabre imagery of the <em>E. 1999</em> cover—the computer-generated skull and bones, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmYkSsHTAQY">the hidden pentagram</a>—sits a very earnest depiction of the real-life loss Bone had experienced in 1995: a picture of Eazy-E, who died at age 30 of complications from AIDS four months before the album’s release. The implication was clear: While <em>E. 1999 </em>had largely been completed beforehand, his passing loomed large over the project—and quite possibly, Bone’s future. “When we found him, we found our way out,” <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-15-ca-15136-story.html">Wish Bone told the<em> Los Angeles Times</em> in 1996</a>. “Then he died right before [the success] happened, and it seemed like we were gonna be left in the streets right back where we came from.”</p>
<p id="Bxhnto">Wish’s fears wouldn’t come to pass; Ruthless—which had parted ways with Heller around the time of Eazy’s passing and was now under the stewardship of the rapper’s widow, Tomica Woods-Wright—made Bone the marquee act of its next phase. But Eazy’s death weighed heavily on all five members. So they turned it into a song. In the spring of 1996, they reworked “Crossroad” into a tribute to the man who discovered them. </p>
<p id="OFyQPT">“Tha Crossroads,” released early in 1996, was unlike anything else in the Bone catalog to that point, even the plaintive original. Built around <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHH_EMeRjGA&t=5s">an Isley Brothers interpolation</a>, DJ U-Neek’s slick production, and a massive chorus, it taps into their pain without embracing the darkness that shrouded so many of their tracks. It’s vulnerable and spiritual—a point accentuated by the song’s bridge of <em>pray and we pray every day</em>. Here, they weren’t the kids fixated on graveyard imagery. They were concerned with what lies beyond it. Bone weren’t the first streetwise rappers to pen a dedication to their fallen comrades, but few had done so as tenderly, and with such gravity. (Practically every line is an earworm, including—especially—Wish Bone’s<em> I miss my Uncle Charles, y’all</em>, which has inspired its share of <a href="https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Uncle-Charles-who-is-referenced-repeatedly-in-Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony-song-lyrics">Quora questions</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHIbP1FNNKk">explainer vids</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Miss-Uncle-Charles-Yall-Thugs-N-Harmony/dp/B08L5WDHRL">knockoff merch</a> in the past 25 years.)</p>
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<p id="mJL6Z0">Buoyed by a CGI’d video that looks primitive in 2021 but felt blockbuster at the time—the Grim Reaper figures heavily again, but here he has angel wings—“Tha Crossroads” quickly became a hit. It would spend eight weeks at no. 1, go double platinum, and dominate MTV and radio airwaves. In <em>Billboard</em>’s decade-end list, it ranked as the no. 25 song of the 1990s, making it the third-highest rap entrant behind only Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” and another dedication to a late rapper, Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You.” Eventually, “Tha Crossroads” would win a Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. Bone had taken overwhelming tragedy and turned it into something positive—something that transcended its genre.</p>
<p id="GgYCFT">Twenty-five years later, “Tha Crossroads” towers over Bone’s legacy—how could it not?—but the group had plenty of success in the years following its release. The follow-up to <em>E. 1999</em>, the double-disc <em>The</em> <em>Art of War</em>, would also sell 4 million units, and the five other albums the collective would release on Ruthless, either as a group or individually, all went gold or platinum. They did more than make good on Eazy’s dream of finding an act to match N.W.A’s success—they single-handedly kept the label in business. When Bone left Ruthless after 2002’s <em>Thug World Order</em>, the company sputtered, putting out only a handful more releases before effectively closing its doors in 2010.</p>
<p id="sU7FdN">Bone, meanwhile, have persisted as a group despite members cycling in and out, side projects <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Brothers">that happen in a silo</a>, Flesh-n-Bone’s time in prison, and all the issues that come with being middle-aged legends in a genre that favors youth above all else. Even after nearly three decades together in the music business, the bond that propelled them to move to California in a pack—that had them memorizing each other’s every word and harmonizing at a time when no other rappers dreamed of it—continues on. “It’s a deep bond,” Bizzy told <a href="https://www.xxlmag.com/bone-thugs-n-harmony-eazy-e-interview/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral"><em>XXL</em> in 2014</a>. “We work on other things and we work with each other personally and spiritually, but our legacy to the people is the music and what they remember. But to us, it’s each other.”</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="m38Mf1">And perhaps that’s what really drew Eazy-E to Bone. In a 2015 <a href="https://www.vibe.com/features/editorial/vibe-eazy-e-cover-story-370313/">interview with <em>Vibe</em></a>, Krayzie hypothesized as much. When they first arrived at Ruthless, Eazy would watch how close they were, how if one member got up to go the bathroom, the others would follow. One day, Krayzie recalls Eazy saying how he admired that closeness: “Man,” he told them, “If N.W.A would have been as tight as y’all nobody would have never came between us.” </p>
<p id="pvfozG"><em>The piece has been updated to reflect the release date of “Tha Crossroads.”</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2021/4/30/22410278/bone-thugs-n-harmony-crossroads-eazy-e-anniversaryJustin Sayles2021-04-19T06:30:00-04:002021-04-19T06:30:00-04:00The Improbable Empire: Master P’s ‘Ice Cream Man’ and the Birth of a Southern Rap Dynasty
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://richardachance.com/" target="_blank">Richard A Chance</a></figcaption>
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<p>How Master P laid the groundwork for the No Limit empire with his 1996 album</p> <p id="CuxQmh"><em>No year in hip-hop history sticks out quite like 1996: It marked the height of the East Coast–West Coast feud, the debut of several artists who would rule the next few decades, and the last moment before battle lines between “mainstream” and “underground” were fully drawn. </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/3/25/22350034/the-1996-rap-yearbook"><em>The 1996 Rap Yearbook</em></a><em>, a recurring series from</em> The Ringer<em>, will explore the landmark releases and moments from a quarter-century ago that redefined how we think of the genre.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="F7NJGR">You are asked to believe a parade of tidy metaphors, an unbroken string of meaningful coincidences: The gun that jams at a life-altering juncture. The championship basketball game marred by threats of violence. The chance encounters with Michael Jackson’s lawyer, with Tupac. The grandmother who makes the hero recite King’s “I Have a Dream” speech until it’s memorized and tells him there will be “no limit” to his success, then strikes the fear of God in him when she starts planning outfits for his funeral. Taken individually, these are the sort of moments on which entire lives hinge; as a whole, they become a web of parables that strain credibility. But at a certain point, with the Soundscan numbers and gold-plated tanks as supporting evidence, you’re forced to admit that something truly out of the ordinary has happened. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="DM2fZQ"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: Master P, No Limit, and the Rise of Southern Rap","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2020/12/31/22207668/master-p-make-em-say-uhh-video"},{"title":"The 20 Best Southern Rap Albums Ever","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2017/8/21/16170892/southern-rap-album-ranking-south-week"},{"title":"The 1996 Rap Yearbook","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2021/3/25/22350034/the-1996-rap-yearbook"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="SagwuN">These are the stories Master P tells about himself, on his records and on TV, in the biopics he commissions and in the magazine spreads he poses for gamely. The New Orleans native’s No Limit Records was a family business that was also voracious the way they teach you to be in business school. It was always ready to grow—from music into movies, from phone sex to sports management and, inevitably, to real estate. It was one of the more intriguing ventures of its time, creatively significant to rap music and almost perfectly representative of a media landscape that was reshuffling rapidly as it approached an unforeseen breaking point. </p>
<p id="EzUl72">Master P’s fifth album, the languid, swaggering <em>Ice Cream Man</em>, was released 25 years ago this month. His breakthrough to national audiences, its sound is a close precursor to the one that would soon become No Limit’s signature: big and bombastic but with plenty of negative space, whining synths, and ad-libs as architecture. Yet it retains the silk and funk that marked his earlier music, which is heavily indebted to the West Coast, where he spent the crucial early years of his career. Like nearly every record No Limit issued during its heyday—of which this album marks the beginning—<em>Ice Cream Man </em>scans immediately as the sound of a counterculture that, at the end of the 1990s, was quickly becoming central, in terms of bankability as well as controversy.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="VfaHvr">Percy Miller was born in New Orleans in 1967, the first child of Percy Sr., a security guard in the French Quarter, and Josie, who worked in hotels. He would soon have a younger sister and three brothers; before long, his parents split and his sister, Germaine, went with two brothers, Corey and Vyshonn, to live with their mother in the Magnolia Projects. That left Percy and his brother Kevin with their father in the 3rd Ward’s Calliope Projects. These Miller men lived with Percy’s paternal grandparents, Claude and Maxine, and with a rotating cast of relatives. At its most crowded, their three-bedroom apartment slept 16 people. But Claude spun his social security check into tuition for young Percy at the Catholic school nearby—a formative place for him, although he’d often have to fight his way home, an easy target in preppy uniform.</p>
<p id="FsPq0K">By high school, Percy had developed into such a good basketball player that he was a minor celebrity. People sometimes gambled on these games, which led to that almost-too-cinematic crossroads at the free throw line: Either make the shot and send his team to the playoffs, or brick it, as the spectator who flashed a pistol in the stands clearly hoped he would. “If basketball don’t work, the circle is going to close in on me anyway,” he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tW_JPDfUzA">recalled thinking</a> in a 2020 BET documentary. He made the shot—of course he did—then ran to the waiting team bus.</p>
<p id="sgiU7T">Distinguished college basketball men in linen suits descended on the projects: P says that powerhouse programs like Louisville and Georgetown sent representatives to the Calliope. He accepted a scholarship offer to the University of Houston, which had that decade produced Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon. But shortly after he arrived, he tore his ACL during practice. The NCAA allows schools to revoke scholarships if athletes become injured, and that’s exactly what happened; to hear P tell it, the injury was so demoralizing he might have left school anyway. He took the seven-hour bus trip back to New Orleans with no concrete plans for the future. </p>
<p id="4nLImz">At this point P started hustling. Things went well until they didn’t. (Here he likes to tell the story of blanching when a college dean tries to buy crack from him; he claims the dean asked, “You gonna sell me some crack, or are you a dope dealer with a conscience?”) When P’s cousin was shot during a dice game robbery, Maxine, his grandmother, apparently grabbed a black dress, threw it over her nightstand, and told her grandson that it’s what she planned to wear to his funeral. </p>
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<p id="Ze9dLe">So he went West. This was 1989; P had married his wife, Sonya, who gave birth to their first son, Romeo. The young family moved to Richmond, California, with $10,000 in seed money, which they used to open a music shop called No Limit Records and Tapes. At first things were slow: Mother, father, and infant slept in the back of the store, surrounded by moldy walls and not much else. But P learned the business fast, filling an underserved market for gangsta rap and forging relationships with Bay Area rappers like E-40, Too $hort, and Spice1, all of whom stopped by No Limit to drop off their own LPs. After studying consumer behavior and the successes and failures of those established Bay artists, P sensed that with shrewd marketing and enough legwork, he could make a fortune selling a new batch of rap records—his own. </p>
<p id="mNXcYW">But as he was preparing to shift from proprietor to star, word came from back in New Orleans: His brother Kevin, who was planning a move to Richmond to join the burgeoning music venture, had been killed. An acquaintance of whom he was always leery took Kevin out for a ride with another man and, from the back seat, shot him in the head and torso, then left his body on the side of the I-10, just west of the city. </p>
<p id="M0XG6G">P and his siblings came running back home. He drove the 2,200 miles from Richmond without stopping. Corey, who was serving in the Army, was not granted leave to be with his grieving family—so he went AWOL to meet them. The three surviving brothers each got portraits of Kevin tattooed on their arms and vowed to make something of this new family enterprise. On P’s arm at least, the portrait is underlined with text: “NO LIMIT SOLDIER.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="lKp15N">By the end of 1990, P was back in the Bay, securing studio time through less-than-conventional means. He offered to paint the house that producer K-Lou’s mother lived in, but did such a bad job that he was asked to stop. K-Lou granted him a session anyway. That grew into many more, and those sessions yielded records—demos, really—that were, to be kind, very rough. His first album, 1991’s <em>Get Away Clean</em>, is derivative in predictable ways (there’s the “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/59doiD6SCKnxLaV5i9dkYX?si=e7b533b3d2224df3">Friends</a>” bass line, there’s the same <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0T4M0JakX5C2WZQxQmKAA8?si=d8003782f3f54570">Steve Arrington sample</a> N.W.A used for “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1pOIpxfrQ8AszXZdKR3aH3?si=c3073ab8116f4d1f">Gangsta Gangsta</a>”) but lays the foundation for what would come next. It was truly a family affair: It featured not only his brother, Vyshonn, who had taken the stage name Silkk the Shocker, but also Sonya, rapping alongside her husband. Some songs on <em>Clean </em>presage the occasional moral confrontation of P’s later records: Narrators wave pistols to buy milk for starving babies and dope money is wired back to relatives overworked in retail jobs and call centers. </p>
<p id="or10Fs">There is, however, one curious bit of misdirection. In this early stage of his development, P sounds better the quicker he raps. At this faster clip, he’s able to retain the bend and personality of his speaking voice. But when he slows down, there’s none of the appealing legato he’d access later—he sounds, instead, almost shockingly amateur, as if he’d internalized all of rap’s signifiers and few of its rhythms. </p>
<p id="w5jhce">As P grew into himself as a performer, No Limit grew into something more than a vanity label. The third surviving brother, Corey, also began rapping. Against P’s wishes, he chose the name C-Murder—obvious given his real initial, but with extra gravity when you consider that it was inspired partly by the things he saw as a medic during the Gulf War. (You know: One who <em>sees murder</em>.) With the help of his brothers and other mostly Bay-bred artists, P set about building the No Limit brand through sheer sweat: bouncing around the country, playing tiny shows or paying promoters for the honor of rounding out bills led by more established artists. P struck up a relationship with Tupac, who lived in the Bay from the time P moved there until 1993, and was able to join him on brief tours as an opener. </p>
<p id="AUvBf0">Soon the label’s tank logo, a nod to the Millers’ military ties, was everywhere: on posters the founder pasted up himself, on the tapes he sold out of his trunk, on the T-shirts he handed out to the homeless. It was around this time that the crew supposedly got into a scuffle at a club in Oakland, which culminated in P pulling a TEC-9 from his trunk and pulling the trigger on one of his enemies. The gun jammed once, then again; P and his associates fled the club. Had he killed a man in such a crowded space, one imagines, he would have been tried and convicted. “I realized God had a bigger plan for me,” he said of the incident in the BET documentary. </p>
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<p id="Y02jSb">E-40’s uncle, St. Charles, an independent music industry fixer with decades of experience, was helping to guide P and to make No Limit profitable. This allowed the Miller brothers to turn down major-label deals that offered short-term money in exchange for control over No Limit’s release schedule and master recordings. All this time, P was framing his album covers and hanging them on the walls of his Richmond apartment—as if they were platinum plaques. And he was nudging reality in that direction: His 1994 album, <em>The Ghettos Tryin’ to Kill Me!</em>, was both a creative leap forward and an independent juggernaut, selling over 100,000 copies with no radio play to speak of.</p>
<p id="N6rlyh">In 1995, three things transformed No Limit forever. The first was that the brothers moved the label back to New Orleans. (They would eventually establish a permanent studio in Baton Rouge.) The second is that P landed a sweetheart distribution deal with Priority Records: By fronting marketing, recording, and other costs himself, he was able to retain between 80 and 85 percent of the profits, giving up just that small remainder in exchange for Priority’s help getting No Limit into giant retailers. This gave P a degree of creative control virtually unprecedented for a rap label so profitable, and would soon make him cartoonishly rich. </p>
<p id="2gKeoZ">The third thing that changed No Limit was the addition of Beats by the Pound, the production collective that would soon handle the lion’s share of each album the label put out. These producers—Mo B. Dick, O’Dell, Craig B, KLC, and Carlos Stephens—churned out a dizzying number of beats and quickly forged an unmissable style, characterized by punishing drums and slick melodies, sometimes isolated but often competing with one another. KLC in particular would go on to distinguish himself as one of his era’s most innovative producers. </p>
<p id="utVFAa">Beats by the Pound had a slight flattening effect on some of the No Limit roster: See, for example, the way Mia X’s bounce roots are only intermittently shown in her work for the label, or the way Mac (a former child star who had worked with a young Mannie Fresh) rapped on beats very similar to those they gave to Silkk, a radically different vocalist. The saving grace was simple quality. Combined with reliably vibrant, still-imitated covers by the Houston design firm Pen & Pixel, BBTP confirmed the impression of No Limit as a high-volume factory, but one with increasingly exacting standards. </p>
<p id="dYVn2v"><em>Ice Cream Man </em>was made against a deadline: K-Lou claims that the entire LP was tracked in a single weekend, because P had promised it to Priority before he had a single song mixed and mastered. Whether the timeline was quite this compressed or not, the album seems to have come together quickly; despite the broader No Limit move back to Louisiana, it was tracked mostly in the Bay, at a Berkeley studio called Live Oak and in K-Lou’s own studio. Twenty years after the fact, P would <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/65zvpz/rank-your-records-master-p">contrast</a> the recording experience with some of his earlier setups, which were compromised by “crackheads standing outside … knocking on the window.” The new environment sees P become a more distinct vocalist. He leans into his tics and—perhaps because of the time crunch—leaves compelling imperfections in his final takes. At points, his voice wavers the way it occasionally does in interviews, as if he’s leaving a placeholder that will later be replaced by something more forceful.</p>
<p id="1gKSBk"><em>Ice Cream Man </em>is an amusingly clear example of a record label in transition between regions. There has, of course, long been a good deal of exchange between the West and the South when it comes to hip-hop production and vocal styles. But at times the album seems to dart between the sounds of California and Louisiana rather than blend them. At their best, each is executed superbly: On the one hand, you have shimmering California cuts like “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7nqGegKhN3ISRreeikgxaj?si=f008ff510725401d">Watch Dees Hoes</a>” or “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7w05LTKeE3QH6ik6kSlMMc?si=19bf0848605a4c61">Playa From Around the Way</a>,” in which Mo B. Dick serves as a delightful budget Nate Dogg; on the other you have KLC’s sparse, sneering “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3y2Acf7FS7AfGfJLk9Ukpe?si=d3cdc6f05cbc48ba">Back Up off Me</a>,” where P’s vocal development is more clearly on display, in the form of a serrated growl that makes him a magnetic presence—including and especially at the slower paces he couldn’t handle earlier in his career.</p>
<p id="dPwdjx">There are rappers whose writing styles you might describe as “deceptively straightforward”—Too $hort’s hyper-slow verses, or even the early, epigrammatic Jeezy stuff—but Master P’s is, simply, straightforward. He’ll taunt, for example, someone who is “all screwed up, like DJ Screw.” But this is in part what makes the elegiac “No More Tears” touch a nerve, or the social commentary in “The Ghetto Won’t Change” so defiant: There is no sleight of hand, no artifice, because there is no space for either. </p>
<p id="UEDUOo">The record’s best song is the “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2ohf5urBpT8bieYr8kq3kt?si=717f587cd3764280">Bout It, Bout It</a>” remix—this is where P’s new growl is most impressively deployed, and then punctuated by a verse from Mia X that would be show-stopping even if left naked, but is so expertly produced, through its doubling and ad-libbing, as to be percussive itself. “Bout It, Bout It II” is also <em>Ice Cream Man</em>’s one phenomenal act of synthesis: Here KLC meshes the post–“<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6j6zSLwHRvHpfGCnZ0z55v">Funky Worm</a>” West with P’s 3rd Ward bounce to come up with a new, alchemic blend so potent that when the <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6kiPr9joxTFka4DKy7Z40X">next remix</a> was gifted to Cam’ron, P was convincingly cast as an exporter of sound, rather than a map-hopping omnivore. </p>
<p id="cWwGaG">Though a dogged self-promoter, P seemed to understand that his records were best served by sharing the spotlight. He smartly cedes much of “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/675fKouTdyDexqNS4X6wQ4?si=a2dade9cd84146c4">Bout That Drama</a>” to Silkk, whose entrancingly chaotic flow knocks around the beat in a way P never would, or could. And “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4h2ivHk1DOadWS1rBpeQAy?si=574d156713b3411a">Break ’Em off Somethin</a>’” benefits greatly from Pimp C’s beat—if not his verse, which is just a little dulled compared to the usually animated MC’s best work. (Bun B, the consummate professional, compensates for his partner; he brags that your local police department must be “getting somewhere” if they’re targeting him.) Pimp C would more than make up for this a couple years later by giving No Limit one of his signature verses: the opening 16 on C-Murder’s “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6MGZkm9RcfxTONlFow4Lb6">Akickdoe</a>!,” the one that opens “The game fucked up, I ain’t got no friends / And I done spent my last $70,000 on a drop-top Benz.” </p>
<p id="JMTCNV">And then there’s <em>Ice Cream Man</em>’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6utJPGnUAGkW7qRaYpoasi?si=207d1473c8974c46">title track</a> and lead single, which betrays both P’s marketing philosophy and something more elemental about the way he saw the world. To him, the drug dealer could be a <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4PV9DcxLQDoB05BWdCpAP6?si=058b8fbecfbb47fc">destructive force</a>, or at least a cog in a destructive machine, but was always defensible as someone looking after his own, and often after his neighbors, too. That left him with the metaphor. The hustler was also a businessman—or more specifically, businessmen were also hustlers, and he was simply beating the suits at their own game. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="yUwwm7">Given what came later, <em>Ice Cream Man </em>can seem like a mere prologue. No Limit’s unquestionable peak was 1998—that was the year the label signed Snoop Dogg away from Death Row and put out 23 albums, including a handful of classics; it was also the year P played the lead in two movies. “<a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/699xAzNxlXxgmkycTEqktC?highlight=spotify:track:0l3wp8iEtN8rgag9eTeorW">Make Em Say Uhh!</a>,” technically released the year prior, became ubiquitous, the rare kind of crossover hit that actually doubles down on its regional idiosyncrasies. He was even able to live out his adolescent dreams, suiting up for the Charlotte Hornets during the 1998-99 NBA preseason. </p>
<p id="SGWLMC">That supernova success overwhelmed the record industry and likely netted P more than $100 million. It also burned out relatively quickly: By 2001, the Beats by the Pound producers were long gone, and much of the marquee vocal talent had left the label. That year the label jumped from Priority to Universal, where Cash Money had found success, and rechristened itself The New No Limit; by the end of 2003, it had filed for bankruptcy. </p>
<p id="TbFpF3">On a personal level, No Limit’s roster was scarred by tragedy. In 2001, Mac was convicted of manslaughter despite another man confessing to have killed the victim; he has been imprisoned ever since, though there is now hope for release after he was <a href="https://www.wdsu.com/article/gov-edwards-grants-rapper-mac-phipps-clemency-after-serving-20-years-in-prison/36076649">granted</a> clemency. Two years later, on the day before Thanksgiving, Soulja Slim was murdered in the front yard of a house he had purchased for his mother. (A legendary figure in New Orleans, Slim was one of the few meaningful bridges between the city’s two titanic rap labels; while his best LPs came out on No Limit, it was “Slow Motion,” a duet with Juvenile, that scored Cash Money its first no. 1 single.) Also in 2003, C-Murder was convicted in the shooting death of a 16-year-old named Steve Thomas. The machinations around this case have been grinding steadily away for years, fueled by <a href="https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_9f86af27-b74a-50c1-ad38-8f0b8191c679.html">allegations of jury tampering</a>, but for now P’s brother remains locked up. </p>
<p id="YC13YG">Much is made about whether art from past decades seems “dated” in the present, as if predicting or influencing future trends is the only bar with which to measure aesthetic success. <em>Ice Cream Man</em>’s DNA—maximalist gloss knowingly fucked up around its edges—is, in the broadest possible sense, traceable back to hip-hop’s roots in disco and forward through artists like Future, whose best work is often a pained mutation of what would be conventional radio pop. But like most of what No Limit produced, the album sounds unmistakably like the late-’90s window it took by force. In an era when works from across decades, even centuries, are stripped of context and presented beside one another or in algorithmic succession, this specificity is made refreshing.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="UZFZbO">As for Master P’s story itself: It is the type that could only be told in America, because of both the moral rot that created his circumstances and the strange, spastic infusions of capital that allowed him to escape them. Even before he learned to play on the country’s appetites and anxieties, he had extracted life-changing money from the bleakest possible events. When he was barely out of his teens and a new father with a bad knee and no prospect for making legal money, he was able to make that New Orleans–to Richmond-move—and set up the original No Limit store—because of the aforementioned $10,000 he had on hand. That was not the detritus of a volatile drug trade. It was his share of a hospital malpractice settlement check: P’s grandfather, Claude, was killed after receiving another patient’s medicine. The morbidity baked into that transaction—a dollar figure for a patriarch—is obvious, as is the futile nature of trying to fill that specific vacuum with any amount of eventual financial success. But what P did with No Limit—what he began, in many ways, with <em>Ice Cream Man</em>—was to inflate the dynamics of our world to their most extreme, stylized proportions, to accentuate what was always there. </p>
<p id="gnT0Pl"><a href="https://twitter.com/paulxt"><em>Paul Thompson</em></a><em> is a writer based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in </em>Rolling Stone<em>, </em>New York <em>magazine</em>, <em>and </em>GQ. </p>
https://www.theringer.com/2021/4/19/22391296/master-p-ice-cream-man-anniversaryPaul Thompson2021-03-25T06:30:00-04:002021-03-25T06:30:00-04:00How Busta Rhymes Harnessed the Dungeon Dragon on His Classic Debut
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://richardachance.com/" target="_blank">Richard A. Chance</a></figcaption>
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<p>A quarter-century ago, Busta parlayed two modestly successful group projects and a string of bar-raising guest appearances into ‘The Coming,’ his solo introduction to the music industry. Today, he reflects on what made the album so special—and why he still has many years left.</p> <p id="rdhwI0"><em>No year in hip-hop history sticks out quite like 1996: It marked the height of the East Coast–West Coast feud, the debut of several artists who would rule the next few decades, and the last moment before battle lines between “mainstream” and “underground” were fully drawn. The 1996 Rap Yearbook, a recurring series from </em>The Ringer<em>, will explore the landmark releases and moments from a quarter-century ago that redefined how we think of the genre. Today, we’re going deep on Busta Rhymes’ legendary debut, </em>The Coming<em>, which incinerated the rap game when it arrived in March 1996.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Ho2ntR">The writing was always on the wall, but in 1993 it was on camera for <em>Yo! MTV Raps</em>. Leaders of the New School were disintegrating in real time. You can read the tension on the face of a then 21-year-old Busta Rhymes, who was appearing on the show with the group that provided his entry to the music industry. And you hear the defeat in his voice as he stands opposite his group and says to the cameraman, “Please don’t film this, B.” </p>
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<p id="rEOwnm">The group’s post-show split confirmed what everyone on staff at <em>The Source </em>magazine already knew: 16 bars could no longer cage the roaring dungeon dragon from East Flatbush. Leaders of the New School, or L.O.N.S., didn’t have to go up in flames, but Busta needed room to spread his wings and scorch the earth before the end of the millennium.</p>
<p id="7ogHIA">“I hate to be the one to put it on paper and shit, but Busta needs to do a solo album,” dream hampton wrote in her 1993 <em>Source</em> review of L.O.N.S.’s sophomore album, <em>T.I.M.E.</em> “[The] problem with an L.O.N.S. jam is you can’t help waiting for Busta to get on the mic. … You want more of him than the group can provide.” She then suggests Busta record an EP but remain in the group, comparing his “polyrhythmic flow” to John Coltrane and Charlie Parker solos. Discussing the album, though, almost seems like an afterthought. Hampton’s praise was likely personal opinion, but it also cohered with the company line at the publication then considered hip-hop’s bible.</p>
<p id="RikgFl">Dante Ross—the renowned A&R who worked with De La Soul at Tommy Boy before decamping to Elektra to sign Brand Nubian, KMD, Leaders of the New School, and, eventually, Busta Rhymes—remembers talking to <em>Source </em>cofounder Jonathan Shecter around the time the review ran. “He’s like, ‘When is he gonna go solo?’” Ross recalls Shecter saying. “We were watching [a L.O.N.S.] show at this club called <a href="https://www.standardhotels.com/culture/Building-Hip-Hop-NYC-De-La-Soul-Tribe-Called-Quest">Building</a>, and he was like, ‘When is that going to happen?’ Straight up. It wasn’t a surprise.”</p>
<p id="xTGVP5">Whispers about a Busta solo album turned to deafening exclamations after L.O.N.S. appeared on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario” in 1991. The third single from ATCQ’s all-time classic <em>The</em> <em>Low End Theory</em>, “Scenario” peaked at no. 57 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1992. The world heard Busta become the “dungeon dragon” and never looked back. The future was his alone, with or without a past.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="mQyO2K">According to Busta Rhymes, the Recording Industry Association of America is wrong. They maintain his 1996 solo debut, <em>The Coming</em>, was certified platinum on January 13, 1999. “I don’t know where you got that information from, my brother. <em>The Coming</em> went platinum within the same year of its release,” Busta says, speaking via phone from his Brooklyn condo. “I got my plaques before I put out <em>When Disaster Strikes ..</em>.” The bass in his voice never disappears. Though he speaks calmly, every word is in bold typeface, any change in octave—however slight—the equivalent of adjusting the font size. Thoughtful and sometimes intense, Busta chooses his words carefully, processing every question before responding and occasionally pausing between sentences. Over the course of an hour, his focus doesn’t waver. </p>
<p id="Ywsx30"><em>The Coming</em>, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this weekend, was a culmination and a confirmation. After two L.O.N.S. albums, all the public and journalistic conjecture, and years of song-stealing features, Busta proved he could wreck the discotheque solo, remain raw, and bring the ruckus for an entire album. When the L.O.N.S. smoke cleared, he had more fire. The dragon had evolved, becoming “the Dread” (“Do My Thing”). A nod to his character in John Singleton’s <em>Higher Learning</em> (simply named “Dreads”) and his towering locks, the moniker also has an allegorical ominousness. Busta personified the fears of his competitors.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="YEUmDh"><q>“Anything where you invest your time and your passion, and you put your soul into it, I don’t think it’s ever easy to walk away from.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="thUdvc">If you reined in Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s besotted and eccentric mania and ratcheted up Redman’s blunted menace, you might get close to the Busta who appears throughout <em>The Coming</em>. But you wouldn’t get the man who made “Woo Hah!! Got You All in Check,” the album’s platinum single bolstered by an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQzvQO2LcA4">indelible Hype Williams–directed video</a>. Busta was pulling panache from George Clinton and aesthetic influences from dancehall, reimagining the booming cadences of toasters he heard growing up in a Jamaican household and a community of Caribbean immigrants. His voice cracks your skull and slinks down your spine. You’re dazed but moving, vibrating. Like a mushroom cloud after a nuclear detonation, the damage from every syllable envelopes you. Busta matched all fervid theatrics and force with battle-ready metaphors and similes on songs like “Do My Thing” and “Everything Remains Raw.” He gave you the energy of the most intense cypher, the feeling of nearly wrecking the whip as you and your squad break your neck to the beat. Seemingly bringing his vocal cords to the brink on virtually every song, he wanted you to feel his energy on a molecular level (“I make you feel my proton, neutron, and electron,” he spits on “Everything Remains Raw”). And, somehow, he sounds suave in the company of R&B duo Zhané on “It’s a Party.”</p>
<p id="WN2zn2">There are moments when Busta plays doomsday oracle, yelling about the end of the world like a street-corner zealot. He prophesizes the next four years of his career and the end of the world. Peers were falling off (or were about to) and pre-millennium tension was on the rise, but Busta was prepared to execute his plans until the digits in every computer system hit double zero and all the elevators stalled, planes fell from the sky, and credit cards failed. The closer you listen, though, the more you realize <em>The Coming</em> was less concerned with global collapse than where Busta was headed. It was raw, supremely confident rap made to carve his name into the pantheon.</p>
<p id="rr8dC7">“I just appreciate the culture, the art, and the architects,” Busta says. “We have some level of responsibility to make sure we all represent the culture right, represent ourselves right, and represent the architects of the culture right. Even in the evolution of [the culture], we still have a duty to represent it the right way.” </p>
<p id="B4v1em">In the years leading up to <em>The Coming</em>, however, Busta was worried about his responsibility to and the future of his family, unsure whether he was capable of making a debut that would serve as the foundation of his solo career. So let’s bring it back. Come. Rewind. </p>
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<p id="uNBK6F">Ross saw the end of L.O.N.S. at the beginning. When group member Charlie Brown entered Elektra HQ in 1989 to discuss a deal, Busta had already been kicked out of the group. But Ross was adamant about signing the lineup he’d seen at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/14/nyregion/outlaw-clubs-move-to-an-elusive-beat.html">Payday</a>, a roving and short-lived hip-hop party in New York’s late-’80s club scene. “They were performing with one mic, and it was three MCs, not four. Busta also did the beatbox. It was just ill. He was controlling the mic and certainly the star of the show. He was completely amazing.” Brown and Busta, who was still in high school at the time, patched things up to sign the deal, but the former’s bruised ego wasn’t ready for the beating it would take in the years ahead.</p>
<p id="baS0Pv">“I think [the friction came from] the competitive nature in Brown feeling like he was the leader of the group, and having to compete with the attention that I started to get was challenging. It started to create other petty shit to justify removing me,” Busta explains. “But it was nothing serious enough that should’ve led to breakups.”</p>
<p id="vqIgw7">Discerning rap fans heard what Ross witnessed at Payday on L.O.N.S.’s 1991 debut, <em>A Future Without a Past ...</em>, a title that now seems like an ironic inversion of their trajectory. Busta was already roaring and commanding attention on the lead single, “Case of the P.T.A.” “Wicked and wild,” he launches spitballs at classmates and spits game to a girl named Cheryl. Still, this might’ve been a time of relative peace for L.O.N.S., one when Busta’s undeniable talent and presence didn’t dominate the conversation. But only a few months elapsed before the world heard “Scenario.” </p>
<p id="6h6bXK">The last song on A Tribe Called Quest’s sophomore album, <em>The Low End Theory</em>, “Scenario,” actually wasn’t released as a single until March 1992, almost six months after the album dropped. In hindsight, it’s amazing they waited so long. Busta’s verse comes last. Who could’ve rapped after inhaling the smoke and ash he leaves in his wake? He saunters over the breakbeat at first, tempering his rasp and matching Q-Tip’s mellower voice as they trade lines. Then Tip unleashes the dungeon dragon for a three-alarm blaze of punch lines, varied cadences, and James Brown–esque grunts. Once the “RAWR! RAWR!” was out of Busta’s esophagus, it may as well have been the death knell for L.O.N.S. In <em>The Source</em>’s five-mic review of <em>Low End Theory</em>, Busta was the only member of L.O.N.S. singled out for his “incredible lyrics.” The group worked through their infighting to record <em>T.I.M.E. </em>(1993), but the clock ran out when they went to promote it on <em>Yo! MTV Raps</em>.</p>
<p id="jADt9e">“I didn’t want to leave the group, and I didn’t want the group to end. I wasn’t really happy about the situation,” Busta says. “I had invested a lot in the group at that point, and we started building something. Anything where you invest your time and your passion, and you put your soul into it, I don’t think it’s ever easy to walk away from.”</p>
<p id="5MTTE7">The loss of his temporal and emotional investments cut deeply, but Busta had little time to dwell. He was the father of a newborn son, one whose central source of income vanished that afternoon when the MTV cameras rolled on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Though he needed the money, Busta was hesitant about accepting the Elektra solo deal brokered by Ross and Chris Lighty, the famed record executive who died in 2012. Busta didn’t know whether he could captivate listeners for the length of an entire song, much less an album.</p>
<p id="3Yu5fi">“He was scared. Straight up,” Ross says. “He was really young, and he was scared to do it. He wasn’t necessarily ready for it.”</p>
<p id="Y0unXh">Guest features existed before Busta Rhymes, but he set a new precedent between the end of L.O.N.S. in ’93 and the release of <em>The Coming</em>. He turned the final minutes of Craig Mack’s “Flava in Ya Ear” remix to cinders and appeared on over half a dozen songs for artists like the Artifacts, TLC, and Brand Nubian. But Busta’s motivation was monetary as much as it was creative. There were no mixtapes in the ’90s. Features afforded a chance to experiment and find himself on someone else’s dime.</p>
<p id="qOxwNP">“I was like the first artist to really start rhyming on everyone else’s record. And I was doing that because it was a quick way to feed my kid,” Busta says. “That’s what was going on until, you know, I got to a place where I felt comfortable enough with doing a solo album.”</p>
<p id="iFum2G">To get comfortable, Busta also flew two hours to Atlanta. Dallas Austin, the writer and producer behind hits for Brandy and Monica (“The Boy Is Mine”), TLC (“Creep”), and Boyz II Men (“Please Don’t Go”), had a plush new studio: D.A.R.P. (Dallas Austin Recording Projects). Busta absorbed game from Austin, who helped him land a production deal and create the logo for his nascent label, Flipmode Entertainment. D.A.R.P. was also a creative hub for musicians from and passing through Atlanta. When he wasn’t with Austin, Busta kicked it with Goodie Mob, read <em>Behold a Pale Horse</em>—Bill Cooper’s scripture for conspiracy theorists and <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/how-behold-a-pale-horse-influenced-hip-hop.html">a foundational text for a certain era of hip-hop</a>— and attended informal lectures with Dr. Funkenstein. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="ivMYKU"><q>“I was like the first artist to really start rhyming on everyone else’s record. And I was doing that because it was a quick way to feed my kid.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="g32kxt">“George Clinton was always a creative inspiration to me for just being over the top and outlandish and brave as far as his showmanship,” Busta says. “[He] used to make the time to talk to us and school us, put us on to shit that was going on in the music industry back in the heyday of Parliament and Funkadelic. ... It was a surreal thing for me. He gave me a lot of jewels that I walk with to this day.”</p>
<p id="Mpbz0H">When Busta was back in New York, though, he still felt trepidation about his new beginnings. For a final boost of confidence, he turned to Q-Tip, the architect of three lauded Tribe Called Quest’s albums, the man who’d catapulted him to greater heights with “Scenario,” and, most importantly, a friend. </p>
<p id="BKi2LD">“Q-Tip was just always there as a supportive big brother. … I came to him for some guidance and support when it was time to go into this solo album,” Busta says. The pair collaborated on only “Ill Vibe,” but Tip offered reassurance before and throughout the recording process, offering Busta a “thumbs-up” whenever he played Tip a new song.</p>
<p id="UYr92a">The initial recording sessions began in late 1994 in Los Angeles, where Busta was wrapping his scenes for <em>Higher Learning</em>. When shooting ended, he flew back to New York, bouncing between three studios: Chung King, Music Palace, and Soundtrack. After he sourced beats, he wrote solely in the studio, afraid to lose lines or ideas for flows. Everything was on paper. Arrangements, concepts, choruses, and verses. There were no half-mumbled takes. Cadences, intonations, ad-libs, cartoonish vocal quirks—he had them in his head before entering the booth. </p>
<p id="pu2Hi5">“I just let the music inspire the way that I would flow and how I would attack the record,” Busta explains. “I try to do what the music isn’t doing and what will sonically complement what the music is doing. The music dictates it.” </p>
<p id="Hxunlz">Somehow, he summoned all the energy while recording most of his verses alone. More often than not, there was no one to hype him up before or after he incinerated the booth.</p>
<p id="ERcb5B">“Beyond his talent, he’s the most driven I’ve ever seen,” Ross says. “Nobody works harder than that dude at his craft. Nobody.”</p>
<p id="Q8POft"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="nnD6Fw">Two syllables. Two exclamation marks. “<em>Woo-hah!!</em>” On his first single off <em>The Coming</em>, Busta called back to Big Bank Hank’s line on Sugarhill Gang’s “8th Wonder” and encapsulated the joyful aggression that defined his music. He’s elated to check the competition. You can hear it in the way he relishes dragging out the vowels at the end lines while affecting a Jamaican accent: “Body blows busting your shit, making you bleeeed-ah / Just feed off dynamic flows and take heeeed-ah.” </p>
<p id="2QusUc">On certain sound systems, the slowly meandering Galt MacDermot sample that creates the melody for “Woo Hah!!” is almost inaudible. The original, which eventually moves into a quasi jazz-funk fusion, sounds like something that might play in a hip French bistro more than it does something that would provide a bed for one of the most dynamic voices in rap history. But the juxtaposition of the almost dainty melody was perhaps necessary. The instrumental had to be something so innocuous that it didn’t distract from Busta’s many cadences and irrepressible personality competing with the drums.</p>
<p id="BKUI3u">If GIFs and Twitter existed in ’96, clips from the music video would’ve flooded the timeline. Compared to the later Busta and Williams collaborations (e.g., <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSoQDaXh144">“Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See”</a>), however, it’s relatively minimalist. Per Busta’s vision, he and Williams adapted the photoshoot for <em>The Coming</em> album packaging, creating sets to match every vibrant outfit. But you feel the energy through the screen every time Busta swings his arms and stomps his feet, turning otherwise static scenes into controlled chaos. Every aspect was an homage to dancehall.</p>
<p id="slbK8v">“I think a lot of what made it intriguing is what I got from dancehall culture. I gave that to the performance and the colorfulness of the video. That’s how the dancehall artists were dressing. Really colorful and over-the-top shit,” Busta says. “The animation of the performance—that all comes from dancehall culture.”</p>
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<p id="vhdMkT">For the second single, Busta went left. “It’s a Party” is a down-tempo slice of R&B-leaning boom-bap crafted by Easy Mo Bee. There are moments when Busta sounds relaxed—or at least as relaxed as Busta can—smoking with the Flipmode Squad and seducing a woman back to his “dungeon shack” as R&B duo Zhané enhance the mood with a smooth, soulful hook. In retrospect, the song presaged his collaborations with Janet Jackson (“What’s It Gonna Be?!”) and Mariah Carey (“I Know What You Want”). In ’96, however, he risked alienating fans who wanted everything to remain raw.</p>
<p id="alJdTr">“At the time, those kinds of records were risqué. … It was looked at like a sellout move, like you were trying to do things in that way to sell more records or garnish more success because you didn’t feel confident in just keeping it raw rap shit,” he says. “For me, the goal is always to make great music. I kind of didn’t give a fuck about those opinions at the time, fortunately. When the record actually did come out, those kinds of opinions was out the window. ... I think people also respected Zhané in the culture for what they represented as women and what they represented through the music. ... Ultimately, it allowed girls to appreciate Busta Rhymes outside of ‘RAWR, RAWR! Like a dungeon dragon’ shit all the time. It worked out well.”</p>
<p id="NqnXp8">Outside of making an R&B-friendly record, Busta took another risk. In 1995, J Dilla was Jay Dee, a relatively unknown Detroit producer whose biggest credits were on the Pharcyde’s underperforming <em>Labcabincalifornia</em> (including the singles “Drop” and “Runnin’”). Compared to Easy Mo Bee (“Everything Remains Raw,” “It’s a Party”) fresh from the platinum “Flava in Ya Ear” and six songs on Notorious B.I.G.’s <em>Ready to Die</em>, Dilla’s name didn’t carry the same weight on a tracklist. Once Q-Tip introduced Busta to Dilla’s beats, though, his résumé was irrelevant.</p>
<p id="Yxpbkn">“He was creating a sound that nobody else was doing. I loved it, and it reminded me of that hard-slapping, creative way of sampling records that Q-Tip was already doing, and Large Professor, Pete Rock, and Preemo. But he sounded closer to Q-Tip more than anybody else. Tip was one of my favorite producers at the time, and Dilla sounded like a young, iller version of Q-Tip. That was it. I just fell in love with his work.”</p>
<p id="BfAccQ">His faith in Dilla, which forecasted Busta’s unfailing ear for budding talent—he worked with Swizz Beatz, Nottz, Just Blaze, and The Neptunes early in their respective careers—led to “Still Shining” and “Keep It Movin’.” The former is slightly more rigid than later Dilla beats, but his forever-imitated swing is still there. Dilla’s crushing kicks and snares pair well with the bass of Busta’s voice as he disses the counterfeit and “Ice Capades all over” the beat.</p>
<p id="ouqInA">But despite those songs, the interesting Dilla-Busta collaboration never made it to the record. In a parallel universe, you can hear Busta, Method Man, Nas, and the Notorious B.I.G. rap over a Dilla beat. But “The Ugliest” never materialized as envisioned. On this cursed timeline, Biggie’s Lexus truck doesn’t start. Fast forward and Lil’ Cease <a href="https://youtu.be/_hafRCn7a44">loses control of dealer-loaned Chevy Lumina </a>with faulty brakes, the crash shattering Biggie’s leg and plaguing him with the cane-assisted limp of his last days. When Meth and Nas show to record, B.I.G. can’t walk up the stairs to the studio.</p>
<p id="jg1R2x">“Me, Method Man, and Nas was in the session, and nobody wanted to lay their verses until Biggie came in the session,” Busta says. “When Biggie did eventually come—because Nas and Meth showed up for two sessions and Biggie didn’t—Nas and Meth didn’t come back.”</p>
<p id="FxBVfr">If someone had thought to send the freight elevator when B.I.G. arrived, we might’ve heard “The Ugliest” as intended. Then again, maybe not. When Busta heard Biggie fire shots at 2Pac (“And the winner is, not that thinner kid / Bandanas, tattoos…”), he pulled the song from the album. “I didn’t feel like that was smart at the time. They were having such a serious back-and-forth. As a friend, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing nothing to add to that. I was friends with both of them, but I was closer to B.I.G.”</p>
<p id="QEGPvW">(Listen to “The Ugliest” <a href="https://youtu.be/DrS3JJ6yfe4">on YouTube</a> and you might recognize Biggie’s verse from “Dangerous MC’s,” a posse track on 1999’s posthumously released <em>Born Again</em>, featuring Snoop Dogg, Mark Curry, and Busta, and produced by Nottz. There’s also a <a href="https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/6VF5AgjPDu6RwYKW6">version of “The Ugliest” with a young Flipmode affiliate named Roc Marciano.</a><strong>)</strong></p>
<p id="T9U8dp"><em>The Coming</em> was as short on controversy as it was autobiography. Many rap debuts are the sum total of all lived experience combined with any drama, angst, or struggle that exists during composition. On <em>Ready to Die</em>, Biggie narrated everything from his birth to his death, rapped about providing for his child, the drug game, and suicidal thoughts. Busta wouldn’t tell you the year he was born. (“It was a dark night, pitch black, May 20, 19…” and then it cuts out on the intro.) And he seemingly attempted to dead the L.O.N.S. breakup rumors, featuring the group on “Keep It Movin’.” The sole reference to his son comes in one line on “Woo Hah!!” (“Yes, I catch wreck and that’s word on my seed”). The lack of personal revelation wasn’t an oversight on Busta’s part. It was intentional.</p>
<p id="il96gD">“I don’t think [<em>The Coming</em>] was too autobiographical because I wasn’t really comfortable sharing a bunch of my personal shit at that time in my life. During that time, it was very important to keep your personal life separate from your industry life. I might’ve talked about things from the perspective of things I grew up around or saw, but not from the perspective of personal shit that I was going through. I was just trying to make sure that people got the energy that they knew and loved from me with Leaders and through my features … As time passed and I got older, I got more comfortable sharing the personal shit,” he says. “It’s a little easier to talk about shit when you’ve gotten past it, or when you’ve come to terms with it.” </p>
<p id="8Qf48P">A quarter-century later, <em>The Coming </em>remains timeless partly because it isn’t narratively tied to the past, because the world is always ending, because you can revisit it whenever you need a jolt of skull-cracking energy. Busta preserved the integrity of the art form while creating a new voice. Similarities with his peers and influences exist, but no one sounded identical.</p>
<p id="8bu6Tv">“Back then, shining remotely like each other was almost like a blasphemous act. Biting was a serious crime in hip-hop. I made a conscious effort to make sure that when I did what I did, I didn’t sound like nobody. Ever.”</p>
<p id="1bpjPS">As we end our interview, Busta isn’t sentimental. He got his plaques for <em>The Coming</em> in ’96 (or ’99), and he continued to rack up more. His remarkable run between 1996 and 2002 warrants another piece. But he doesn’t reflect on that, either. He recently released the deluxe edition of his 2020 album, <em>Extinction Level Event 2: The Wrath of God</em>.</p>
<p id="VsWEWU">“I feel great about [<em>The Coming</em>] for the time that it came out,” Busta says. “It did what it was supposed to do. That’s it. I don’t really put no other thought into it.”</p>
<p id="4KWWki">I ask whether there’s anything we didn’t discuss, anything he’d like to add. </p>
<p id="9aPCGl">“Happy 25th anniversary to this motherfucker,” he says, chuckling and audibly smiling. After expressing my admiration for his catalog, he assures me there’s more music, more time left.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="mfT1zr">“We got a lot of work left to do. I ain’t going nowhere no time soon.”</p>
<p id="kWQj8I"><a href="https://twitter.com/TheeMaxB"><em>Max Bell</em></a><em> is a writer from Santa Monica, California. His work has appeared in NPR, the Los Angeles Times, SPIN, and more.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2021/3/25/22349157/busta-rhymes-the-coming-history-retrospectiveMax Bell