Originally published 11/3/24 on Medium.

In nuclear fission, energy is generated when an atom splits. From the new energy, electricity emerges. That electricity powers homes, businesses, hospitals, and schools. The greatest technological and cultural breakthroughs of the 20th century were products of breaking atoms.

Few albums are more appropriately titled than Main Source’s 1991 debut. Just as the discovery of nuclear fission signaled a new era for the world, Breaking Atoms is, perhaps, the album that most clearly announced the arrival of the ’90s in hip-hop.

The first year and a half of the 20th Century’s final decade was, in many ways, the culmination of hip-hop’s late ’80s coming of age. Samples were stacked in unrelenting walls of sound. Rappers were larger-than-life avatars. Whether gangstas of nihilism or prophets of rage, they commanded microphones with bristling bombast.

The intensity was explosive but, in hindsight, unsustainable. What made the late ’80s conflagration so powerful was the fullness of the vibrant culture captured at block parties and on wax in the decade and a half preceding it. Shorn of that context, the volume of fire and brimstone threatened to drown out the next generation of hip-hop fans seeking a hospitable entry point and artists simply looking to put their lives on record, not start a revolution.

Rapper/producer Large Professor’s first foray into the lab, flanked by DJs K-Cut and Sir Scratch, may not have nuclearized the new generation that would ultimately shape the mid-90s Renaissance. But he split the atom that set the energy force in motion.

If the throbbing keys from Ike Turner’s “Getting Nasty” providing the intro to “Snake Eyes” are the careening neutron, the radiant emissions begin the moment the keys collide with Large Professor’s SP-1200. Like a nuclear bomb, from the time the beat drops, the sonic mushroom cloud that is Breakin’ Atoms doesn’t let up, its blast radius expanding with each track.

“Snake Eyes” sets the tone with deceptive ease. The crisp 98 BPM pacing and robust power of the sampled horns and rhythm guitar embrace the Golden Era intensity that runs rich in the track’s DNA. Yet, the drums land with a warmth befitting the burgeoning Native Tongue-driven avant-garde movement.

On the mic, Large Professor lives up to his name, methodically building out a thesis through an organic blend of extended metaphor and conversationally rendered narrative. Using the machinations of corner dice games, he delivers a cautionary tale with the ease of a master teacher.

Rollin’ dice can help you or hurt you, your virtue
Is knowin’ when to quit, ’cause you’ve hit your cash curfew
Even if you have to get swift and swindle
It’s as long as you win, so close you’re simple
I see people rollin’ dice with lives
Tellin’ lies and cuttin’ throats like knives
For a sandwich and shelter, they’ll probably sell the
Clothes on they man’s back for fame and wealth

It’s a street narrative shorn of gangsta bombast; a conscious missive sans sanctimony. It’s a conceptual gambit minus the self-conscious idiosyncrasy of the era’s rising alternative stars. In stark contrast to the outsized personas dominating all sides of the early ’90s paradigm, Large Professor’s power came in being, on the surface, unremarkable. He spoke as a peer, articulating and commenting on the experiences that defined the lives of he and his listeners.

That everyman approach is epitomized on “Just Hangin’ Out,” The album’s slow-rolling second track celebrates friendship, youth, and the dynamic energy hip-hop injected into the urban experience. Throughout two unhurried verses, we not only meet Large Pro’s extended crew but feel like honorary members as they watch blaxploitation flicks, make beats, chill in the park, and ultimately hit the club. The familiarity is a product both of his evocative writing and the inherent similarities his circle bore to those of his listeners. Despite a decidedly East Coast aesthetic, “Just Hanging Out” rides a slinky, synth-flavored musicality. It’s suggestive of the West’s still coalescing G-Funk sound that wouldn’t fully infiltrate New York for another three years.

Rounding out one of hip-hop’s greatest opening trifectas, lead single “Looking at the Front Door” finds all of the album’s hallmark congealing with disarming ease. Samples thrust and parry in delicate interaction, suggesting intricate tapestry more than a wall of sound. Ample open space is filled with a pensive Fender Rhodes riff from Donald Byrd’s “Think Twice,” providing a moody backdrop for Large Pro’s reflection on a romantic coupling coming undone.

By ’91, “girl songs” quickly became a staple on all but the most gangsta hip-hop albums. “Looking at the Front Door,” however, may be the first relationship song to break through. It’s not an exercise in seduction, flirtation, or romantic frustration. True to form, Large Professor matches the production’s sophistication with a nuanced portrayal of emotional limbo. Only 18 at the time of the single’s late 1990 release, he displays a self-awareness far beyond his years and those of his core audience. The song’s resonance grew as listeners his age and younger eventually lived through the purgatory it portrays.

Large Professor deploys the same measured analysis to a more urgent topic on “A Friendly Game of Baseball,” delivering the most ingenious of hip-hop’s many police misconduct callouts. The production pairs a brooding bassline with deceptively airy drums to create a mood of ruminative tension rather than boiling rage. A faintly echoing horn sample from Lou Donaldson’s “Pot Belly” swells intermittently, mirroring the menace of cruiser sirens. The cacophony of cuts and samples comprising the hook evokes the havoc so often wrought by the appearance of the very institution assigned to “protect and serve.”

The linchpin, however, is the writing. Mere months after the Rodney King video shocked the world, Large Pro deftly uses the language of America’s pastime to call foul on a most treacherous component of urban life.

I guess when they shoot up a crew, it’s a grand slam
And when it’s one, it’s a home run
But I’ma be ready with a wild pitch
My finger got a bad twitch, plus I wanna switch
Sides and step up to the batter’s box
F*** red and white, I got on black socks
But let him shoot a person from the White Sox
What’s the call? Foul ball

“Peace is Not the Word to Play” turns the same critical gaze inward, calling out the hypocrisy of “peace” as a common greeting on streets, where even seemingly mundane interactions can quickly erupt into violence. Large Professor’s linguistic acumen compels fans to listen as closely to his rhymes as the frenetically jazzy production, delivering a salient message with disarming nonchalance.

Piece of what?
You can’t mean P-E-A-C-E
’Cause I’ve seen people on the streets
Shoot the next man and turn around and say, “Peace!”
But that’s leavin’ people in pieces
It’s not what the meaning of peace is

Though thematically driven tracks provide most of Breakin’ Atoms’ iconic moments, it remains nearly as potent when Large Professor shelves his thinking cap in favor of free-wheeling braggadocio. “Large Professor” and “He Got So Much Soul (He Don’t Need No Music)” highlight the lineage from which Main Source was forged. Frantic BPMs and textured sonic density serve as a tip of the cap to the production work (credited and uncredited) on Eric B. & Rakim’s Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em and Kool G. Rap & DJ Polo’s Wanted Dead or Alive through which Large Pro cut his teeth. His flows mirror the signatures of the two icons but are modulated with a casual delivery indicative of the emerging generation’s penchant for conversationality over intensity.

If such deep cuts are Large Professor’s nod to the icons that christened him, “Live at the Barbecue” signals an official changing of the guard. With the bass-heavy rumbling of a bare-bones loop and chanted call-and-response chorus, the “Just Hangin’ Out” B-side embraces the aesthetic of vintage posse cuts and the schoolyard ciphers that birthed them. However, the MCs passing the mic are hungry new voices unleashing flows, inflections, and sensibilities distinctly of their generation.

Joe Fatal’s gravelly intensity and Akinyele’s vocal contortions cut through the soundscape. The palpable hunger of his guests propels Large Pro to his most muscular performance. But, it’s the first chef at the grill, a ravenous 17-year-old Nasty Nas, who turned hip-hop’s collective head and has never fallen too far from the fix of its gaze ever since. The dexterous flow and syllabic precision may feel instantly familiar to fans introduced to Nas later in his 30 year career. The ribald punchlines now stand in jarring contrast to the reflective persona he began cultivating with the 1994 release of his game-changing debut, Illmatic.

Main Source circa 1992. Image from Wild Pitch Records.

Conventional wisdom might have Main Source close their album with the roof-raising posse cut. When an atom splits, however, new configurations are birthed. Large Pro opts instead to close with “Watch Roger Do His Thing,” an understated celebration of the remarkable nature of what, in a perfect world, would be utterly unremarkable.

Over the album’s simplest production, consisting mainly of a James Brown-esque loop from Funkadelic and a gospel-tinged keyboard riff, “Roger” tells the story of a young man overcoming the obstacles of urban life to prosper legally. There’s no pathology and no melodrama, simply ingenuity and perseverance.

Though presented as a slice of life rather than a watershed moment, the song subtly paints a young man of the hip-hop generation into the tapestry of the traditional American dream. It may have felt aspirational at the time. With hip-hoppers thriving in all arenas today, Roger’s story feels prescient. It’s hardly a stretch to suspect that Large Professor saw a generation as inspired by hip-hop as he was, poised to carry the culture’s ethos of hustle and self-possession into every walk of life.

The nuclear eruption sparked by the atom Large Professor split (make no mistake, Breaking Atoms is a quasi-solo project) was not instantaneous. Main Source’s label, Wild Pitch Records, never developed a marketing savvy to match its canniness for signing dynamic artists. (The Wild Pitch catalog of the late ’80s and early ’90s is a veritable treasure trove of under-exposed gems.) But the energy Breaking Atoms set in motion impacted just the right elements to continue and accelerate the splitting.

Taste-making DJs throughout the Northeast Corridor embraced the production’s inviting warmth. Its sonic sophistication and conceptual ingenuity made it a favorite among the burgeoning world of hip-hop journalists, highlighted by a coveted 4.5 mic rating in The Source. Most importantly, it captured the ear of Large Professor’s musical peers, many of whom absorbed its energy and paid the fission forward on subsequent releases.

Breaking Atom’s use of samples to create arrangements would become a hallmark of the East Coast’s Renaissance-era music. The meticulously woven sonic textures of Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s Mecca and the Soul Brother and Diamond D’s Stunts, Blunts, and Hip-Hop are products of its energy chain. A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, who has consistently sung Large Pro’s praises, almost certainly had Breaking Atoms in his deck while polishing The Low-End Theory, released two months later. It’s evident in the “hard but gentle” soundscapes and muting of the flower power indulgences of the group’s debut in favor of a street-savvy thinking man’s persona.

When Large Professor split the atom in 1991, he couldn’t have known that he was setting in motion a nuclear age of explosive creativity that would reverberate for decades. While he’s several degrees removed from the sonic boom, his group’s name ultimately proved as prescient as its album title.

They truly were the main source.

By the Numbers

Production — 9.5
Lyrics (how the words are put together) — 8
Delivery & Flow — 8.5
Content (Substance) — 10
Cohesiveness — 9
Consistency — 9
Originality — 10
Listenability — 9.5
Impact/Influence — 9
Longevity — 7.5

Total — 90

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 10/13/24 on Medium.

It’s nearly cliche for rappers to celebrate “gettin’ it out the mud.”

The phrase is essentially a hip-hop remix of the “up by your bootstraps” mythology. In true hip-hop form, it chops and filters the mantra long used to justify the continued deprivation of poor urban communities into an empowerment ethos for America’s beasts of burden to get their piece of the pie—or better yet, bake their own pie—by any means necessary.

Vallejo, California’s E-40 is far from the first or last MC to build a musical movement from the ground up, nor to boast flamboyantly of his relentless hustle and hard-won triumphs. No rapper, however, represents the essence of “out the mud” more thoroughly.

Unlike pulling oneself up by the bootstraps — which if taken literally, defies the laws of physics — gettin’ it out the mud is possible. However, there’s no clear path forward or upward. The mud, by nature, is constantly reconfiguring, filling paths as quickly as they’re cleared. To emerge from the mud requires ample fluidity to morph with the muck while maintaining the necessary disciplined certitude to resist its oppressive weight. E-40 doesn’t just evangelize the ethos in what he says, his entire make up — flow, vocabulary, even production — embodies the shape shifting elusiveness of the mud and the successful navigation of it.

Beginning in 1986, E-40’s early career trajectory was as slow and nonlinear as the mud’s motion. As a member of The Most Valuable Players — a group including his brother D Shot, sister Suga T, and cousin B-Legit — which later became The Click, 40 scored an array of local hits on Sick Wid It Records, the indie label he founded.

After securing regional distribution through Solar Records, 40’s solo debut, 1993’s Federal, expanded his reach throughout the West Coast. The Click quickly rode the momentum to their first national hit, “Captain Save a Hoe,” thanks to a colorful video and zany call-and-response chorus.

After nearly a decade of grinding, E-40 was finally poised for his tipping point. His sophomore solo offering, In a Major Way, lived up to its title. It propelled 40, his crew, and his hometown into hip-hop’s big leagues without sacrificing the signature style that carried them to the precipice.

The mackalisciously spoken “intro” establishes the milieu, the mission, and the singularity of the style; it positions E-40 and The Click as “young street soldiers from the lower development housing, tryin’ to get n**** rich by takin’ full advantage of this new scrilla-makin’ D game called rap.”

“Da Bumble” offers a masterclass in 40’s methodology, throwing the uninitiated into the deep end of his three-dimensional hustle and asymmetrical linguistic warfare. A methodically plodding bassline tethers jittery drums and synths as 40 wrestles the unwieldy track into submission. Instead of searching for a pocket, he seemingly forces the pocket to coalesce around him as he sprays rapid-fire syllables. Unexpected pauses give his dense word puzzles room to breath.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find the same cadence or inflection repeated in consecutive couplets. Yet, as the track coalesces over its single extended verse, we find ourselves catching onto 40’s verbal rhythms and the fundamentals of his color-coded hustler slanguage.

Keep it goin’ though — don’t stop
Shakin’ baking soda forms a rock
36 zips on a triple beam scale
Burn the duct tape, but keep all the yayo
Whip appeal, overkill, extras
Really real, apron specialist
Drisidrisomina is the illest zaggin
59 clip kizzartridge, you know I’m pizzackin’
In the mornin’, cookin’ bacon
In the ghetto in the bullet-proof apron

The table set, “Sideways,” invites the crew to dine. B-Legit devours the slippery electro-funk production with a propulsively rhythmic delivery, deftly trading bars with his cousin. Labelmate Mac Shawn of Funk Mob flosses out the simplistic chorus with cocksure Bay swagger. The straightforward styles of the two guests provide a steadying counterpoint to E-40’s verbal gymnastics, setting him up to shine in explosive bursts of flamboyance.

After four tracks and an interlude of uncut 40-ology, “Sprinkle Me” feels like a strategically placed breather for new listeners mentally sprinting to keep up with E-40’s frenetic subversiveness. It still bears all the 40 hallmarks, but the flow is a little steadier, the rhymes more linear. The signature synths shimmy with controlled elegance, leaving ample open space for 40 to flex his lyrical and stylistic bonafides.

I be more hipper than a hippopotamus
Get off in your head like a neurologist
Pushin’ more weight than Atlas
Got a partner by the name of 2Pacalypse
The 7–0–7, my roots go hella far back to Floyd Terrace
I pull a forty out of my ballcap
And then I flush it down my esopha-garus

For fans hearing E-40 for the first time, the smash radio single sounded completely original without feeling disorientingly foreign. For those who copped In a Major Way on the strength of lead single, “1 Luv,” and heard “Sprinkle Me” for the first time in the context of the album, it offered a fortifying bit of positive reinforcement. As they sang along with the earworm chorus after having comprehended the entirety of the previous verse (or at least 80%), it was confirmation that they “got it” and were now witting accomplices for the remainder of the caper.

For its part in introducing E-40 to a broader audience, “1 Luv” takes a more pragmatic approach, gradually escalating the deployment of his stylistic affectations. The taught synth funk exercise rounds into a picaresque portrait of the lethally unbalanced world that necessitated its hero’s off-kilter approach. 40 begins his verses with precisely modulated couplets that gradually intensify in density and histrionics as stakes rise and circumstances come progressively unmoored.

Just received word from my folks upstate
They said uh, “they tryin’ to, they tryin’ to take away our weights
And uh, no more beef and pork, just Muslim books and fish
Walkin’ laps around the yard with my Walkman bumpin’ this
Now I’m bouts to get married, is it clever?
Thought it was ’til I got the Dear John letter
Been down for ten months and got a eight-year stay
And I just found out she had her baby yesterday
Ain’t nobody been to see me yet, but I ain’t gonna worry
Mayne, ya out there ballin’, mayne, can you drop a twamp up in my commissary?”

“Fed Ex” extends the origin story beyond E-40’s personal experience to illuminate the genesis of the hustler’s mentality through which he ascended. 40 begins by digging to the roots of the ethos before breaking down the machinations of its execution en route to the ultimate end goal: a way out. Suga-T’s sassily sung chorus and producer Funk Daddy’s dissonantly guttural keyboard tapestry make “Fed Ex” arguably the album’s funkiest offering. The deep grooving soundscape goes beyond mere speaker rattling to provide a sonic embodiment of the gumbo of grit, boldness, and ingenuity required to effectively maneuver amorphously treacherous terrain.

If “1 Luv” and “Fed Ex” ground the stylistic derring-do with palpable reminders of the inherent confines defining existence outside the margins, “Spittin’” and “Smoke ‘n’ Dank” come completely untethered in the most exhilarating way. Both tracks find a “toasted out of my cranium” E-40 bouncing free association syllables off of every contour and crevice of delirious keyboard cacophonies. The former offers an exercise in pure linguistic exhibitionism. The latter champions the power of intoxicates to offer a euphoric, if fleeting, escape from even the bleakest circumstances.

E-40 and Suga T. sprinkling verbs in “Sprinkle Me” official music video. Image from Jive Records.

The synths turn menacing on “Dusted ‘n’ Disgusted,” making the Bay all-star affair a sobering contrast to the album’s intoxicating detours. Spice 1, Mac Mall, and 2Pac conspire with E-40 to plot revenge for a murdered homie. While 40 dials back the slanguistics in service of narrative clarity, his flow — as well as Spice-1’s in a standout second verse — remains unrelenting in its speed and dexterity.

Perhaps most illustrative of the prowess required to harness In a Major Way’s expressionistic acid funk is 2Pac’s uncharacteristic struggle to find a clean pocket to anchor his flow. Not only does rap’s soon-to-be top dog feel pedestrian next to 40 and Spice’s theatrics, but he was ultimately replaced by Vallejo stalwart Celly Cell in the song’s video version.

The album’s second posse cut, “H.I. Double L,” strikes a decidedly more reverent chord. E-40, Celly Cel, and B-Legit deliver an oil-slick funk anthem for their hometown, positioning the unsung Vallejo as a loyal-to-the-soul gangsta’s paradise. Indeed, In a Major Way’s moments of madcap triumph outnumber the more somber moments. However, the general vibrance of the color makes the starker tones linger long past their runtime when they do emerge.

Closing the album with the meditative “It’s All Bad,” E-40 seems determined to leave us with the gravity of the circumstances that forged his unorthodox approach as a system of survival. Delivered as a heart-to-heart to his 6-year-old son, Lil E, the closer takes shape as a frank summation of the world the next generation is entering and the fortitude they’ll need to conquer it. When E-40 passes the mic to Lil E to bring the track home, it’s confirmation of game passed down and received — by his son, and us.

At the album’s end, we’re officially baptized in E-40’s singular sound, style, and approach to hip-hop’s hardwired hustle. In a Major Way stands as a masterfully constructed conduit, ushering a mass audience into a very specific milieu without losing what makes that world so vibrant in the first place. The album’s platinum sales confirm its accessibility. The reverence held for E-40 in the Bay, even today, speaks to his ability to retain authenticity while expanding the market.

As much as any rap star, E-40 truly got it out the mud. But rather than getting out of the mud, he built an empire from the Bay area’s incomparable brand of cosmic slop.

By the Numbers

Production: 8.5
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 9
Delivery & Flow: 9
Content (Substance): 9
Cohesiveness: 9
Consistency: 9
Originality: 10
Listenability: 8
Impact/Influence: 7
Longevity: 6.5

Total — 85

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

The Riff’s Album of the Month is a monthly virtual discussion forum. It is open to all!

Originally published 7/9/26 on Medium.

Heat is nature’s greatest amplifier. It’s what makes summer revelry a little more fun, summer love more romantic, and summer flu feel unspeakably oppressive.

In Jamaica, the heat is part of the landscape. While temperatures rarely reach the triple-digit highs that routinely scorch the American Southwest, they seldom drop below 80 degrees. The humidity is as consistent as the one drop beat in a classic roots riddim.

In resort-dense coastal regions, trade winds provide a cooling effect, muting the searing intensity of the heat to a pleasant hum that slows the pace just enough to make every ocean wave, every mixed drink, and every bite of grouper feel a little more immediate.

In inland cities, concrete and steel absorb heat, refracting it upward and outward, creating a cauldron effect that heightens everything paved on those streets — literally and figuratively. That means both the rich cultural roots that sustained the island through centuries of slavery and colonialism. It also means the ghosts of those very same systems of oppression that still haunt the highest reaches of the country’s institutions.

That duality gives reggae its timeless power — a mix of the disarming warmth of the coasts and the vibrant inferno of the cities, pride of perseverance and rage from ongoing exploitation, elevation born of spiritual certitude and urgency rooted in daily survival.

August’s Riff Album of the Month positions the duality in terms of blood and fire. The album doesn’t shy away from the framing. Early tracks celebrate lineage and trace history’s imprint. Later tracks portray the present-day struggles of life in a 21st-century Babylon, plagued by continued poverty, pandemics, and digital dystopia, before the album ultimately resolves in a place of transcendence.

Yet, it’s a consistently inviting listen — by turns infectious, celebratory, and affirmational. Whether you want to dance, vibe, or chill, it offers a hospitable soundscape. But in contrast to some of his contemporaries, the artist’s gravelly delivery and unflinching cadence carry a mix of gravitas and urgency, making it impossible to simply tune out the words in service of the grooves, rich as they often are.

Though it is too early to place it historically, it feels like a culmination of the roots revival movement that has quietly come to define reggae music over the last ten years, after a quarter century of dancehall’s high-octane riddims steering the ship. If Chronixx is the movement’s ambassador, Protoje its curator, and Stephen and Damian Marley its lineage, this month’s album feels like a galvanizing spirit establishing itself as the cultural anchor.

In a largely singles-driven genre, the artist has created an album in its truest sense — a journey in which every song is an intentionally rendered chapter. Each chapter can be enjoyed on its own, but the collective story doesn’t truly come into focus until the chapters are assembled together. When you pair the first words he delivers on the opener and the final words of the closer, it also offers a poignant circularity.

If your frame of reference for roots reggae is fixed in 1973, you may be struck by the sonic eclecticism. However, the diversity reflects the artist’s upbringing. Professional obligations of his parents (reggae stars themselves) led to stints in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Florida. As a young adult, he moved to California to play collegiate soccer. Yet the overt nods to traditional African and American sounds are, in themselves, a callback to reggae’s genealogy.

Born out of the cross-pollination of traditional Jamaican folk music, African rhythms, and the American soul music, roots reggae — while uniquely Jamaican — is also music’s greatest diasporic melting pot. By cranking the tempo and streamlining the sonic signature, dancehall proved to be one of the late 20th Century’s most explosive forms of music. But it also lost some of the texture.

This month’s album feels like the culmination of a quiet reclamation of roots and culture that has taken shape in Jamaican music over the last decade, while afrobeats commandeered the “international” sets at US clubs. Like so much of the most powerful music, it feels at once fresh and familiar, old and new, timely and timeless.

It’s also a fitting reminder that resistance music can be warm, hopeful, and even fun.

August’s Album of the Month is Keznamdi’s BLXXD & FYAH.

The discussion is going down August 2nd, at 5 PM EST/3 PM PST. Log-in instructions below.

In true reggae fashion, all are welcome.

Your camera can be on or off. You can comment, ask questions, or just listen. It’s truly a no-judgment zone. We’re a community of music fans who love to share our musical passion with others, and increasingly, use music to process life and the world.

Looking forward to seeing regulars, and meeting some new music lovers, including you!

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Keznamdi Lyrics

View the 17 full and accurate lyrics we have for “Keznamdi” on LyricsBox.com. Find them now!

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Reggae Glossary for Beginners:

Rastafari: Spiritual and cultural movement rooted in Pan-Africanism and African repatriation in resistance global colonialism.

Jah: The living God, embodied by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I (whose pre-regnal title was Ras Tafari Makonnen).

Babylon: The Western capitalist system rooted in the transatlantic slave trade and colonial exile. Refers specifically to the Roman and British Empires, and to modern oppressive power structures more broadly.

Zion: The spiritual home and sanctuary to which Rastafarians aspire figuratively (through spiritual enlightenment) and literally (through a return to Africa). Ethiopia is seen as the earthly manifestation of Zion, because of its historic success in fighting off colonialism and thriving as an autonomous African nation.

I & I: Linguistic expression of “oneness” among humans and between humanity and Jah.

Dreadlocks/Natty dreads: Braided or matted hair symbolizing spirituality, resistance, and cultural identity.

Ganja: Sacred herbal gateway to elevated consciousness, inner peace, and spiritual ascension. (Marijuana)

Originally published 9/22/24 on Medium.

To begin grasping the multitudes of Ghostface Killah, the Wu-Tang Clan’s enigmatic once-masked avenger, one must be familiar with the mythology of Iron Man.

In the iconic Marvel comic series, scientist and weapons manufacturer Tony Starks is captured in a war zone. His heart is irreparably damaged by shrapnel. To sustain his heart and break free from captivity, Starks builds a high-tech suit of armor. Once free, he continues to enhance the suit, which eventually provides him powers of superhuman strength, flight, and energy projection. Stark’s Iron Man is the ultimate self-made superhero.

With his solo debut, Ghostface channels Starks — both in name and ethos. Ironman finds Ghost careening through a madcap collection of pulse-pounding episodes. In totality, they capture the duality that makes superhero mythology so endlessly fascinating. He’s at once bombastic and reflective, steely and shattered. He’s equal parts impenetrable armor and cripplingly scarred heart.

The Wu-Tang lyrical marvel opens his first feature with a flurry of action. “Iron Maiden” raises the curtain on Ghost and his fellow Avengers, Raekwon, and Cappadonna, suited, zooted, and ready to risk it all as they race through a high-stakes caper. The parallel motifs of extralegal scores and musical ones invite easy comparisons to Raekwon’s 1995 opus Only Built for Cuban Linx, on which Ghost rode shotgun.

But where the earlier album’s do-or-die hustles were born of desperation, “Iron Maiden”’s lyrics are laced with nods to a life of luxury, suggesting Cuban Linx’s big score succeeded. The duo are still at it out of greed, habit, or an insatiable adrenaline jones. With its pulsing drums, thick bass, ’70s soul horns, and spaghetti western guitar, RZA’s production resurrects Cuban Linx’s immediacy after a detour into abstraction on GZA’s Liquid Swords. Yet, it shimmers with a pristine richness, suggesting the Wu-Gambinos have, indeed, come up in the world.

The album’s first half careens frenetically to and fro as Ghost and his co-Ds put their respective super-powered exoskeletons through their paces. “260” lands in the war room and the battlefield while Ghost and Rae plan and execute the robbery of a notorious drug spot. The track spotlights the dynamic duo at the height of their powers as characters and narrators. Trading verses over RZA’s regal horns, the pair creates a world of colorful characters while methodically mounting the tension with every detail. The set-up’s meticulousness makes the climax’s brutality all the more bracing.

“Winter Warz” spotlights Ghost, Cappa, U-God, and Masta Killa waging lyrical warfare with bars constructed every bit as exactingly as “260”’s heist. Boasts pair the cerebral with the savage as the four MCs dismantle opponents’ body, mind, and spirit. While Ghost’s vocal ferocity ups the ante, it’s Cappadonna who rolls out with the chips, tearing through 54 bars of lethally controlled bravado.

“Wild Flower” transfers the same brutality to affairs of the heart. The result is a break-up song that obliterates the lines between catharsis and toxicity. A tsunami of rage, lust, and psycho-sexual pathos, “Wild Flower” deftly uses a soured relationship to provide our first glimpse at the scar tissue calcifying a heart hardened by the horrors of warfare. To a warrior, the song underscores that even love is a war. Yet, the intensity of the song’s hurt hints that beneath the scars, there’s still a purity to Ghost’s iron heart.

It’s that purity, paired with his unbridled passion, that, over time, has made Ghostface perhaps hip-hop’s most unlikely balladeer. He’s a reliable practitioner of oddball love songs as heartfelt as they are cognitively dissonant. “Camay” marks the first entry into Ghost’s quiet storm chamber. Landing just past Ironman’s midpoint, the idiosyncratically soulful seduction suite finds the album’s core three in a disarmingly earnest quest for connection. Toning down his signature bombast, Ghost pitches woo like an old-school gentleman:

Your complexion gives a reflection of
Sometime a Black woman just need to be loved
Quiet and shy; baby girl, my gift got you high?
Made you wanna hit me with the keys to that 5?
Just jokin’, baby; I have a sharp sense of humor
Wish I would’ve bumped into your frame a lot sooner

His understated delivery carries sufficient sincerity that the song’s ultimate reveal — that he’s creeping on wifey — delivers a moment of whiplash. Fittingly, the song backslides into lusty come ons as it rounds into its final bars. It’s as if Ghost has recognized his own vulnerability and hastily stepped back into his armored suit.

If Ironman’s front half is an audio action flick, the back half subtly shifts to the gritty origin story. RZA’s epic theatricality gives way to a pensively soulful brand of vérité. The rhythmic bassline and cascading drums of the classic single “Daytona 500” lend a bellicose bite to Ghost, Rae, and Cappa’s now familiar brand of braggadocio. Yet, the B-Side’s more straightforward production truly shines when Ghost takes down the armor to offer vividly drawn vignettes of the battlefields that forged him.

Ghostface and Raekwon, “Motherless Child” music video (1996). Image from Razor Sharp/Epic Records

“Motherless Child” pairs a sorrowful vocal sample from O.V. Wright’s ’60s classic of the same name with an ominous bassline and punishing drums. The result is a dystopian backdrop for Ghostface’s masterfully crafted tale of trauma, greed, and revenge. The theme—money and pride turning childhood friends into mortal adversaries—is well-trodden ground. Ghost, however, displays a novelist’s eye for detail and character, bringing fresh immediacy into the tragedy.

The story’s central character is sketched with such specificity that we empathize even as he sells drugs and draws down in a petty movie theater beef. It makes the plot twist, in which Ghost steps from his role as passive narrator and into the story as the young man’s robber, hit us almost as hard as it does the bystanders witnessing the scene unfold as he shoots his way out of Brooklyn’s famed Albee Square Mall.

On the tear-jerking hit “All That I Got Is You,” Ghost turns the tables. Stepping fully out of his armor, he details the childhood struggles that shaped him and the maternal love that saved him. RZA deploys a minimalist arrangement, allowing the plaintive strings and keys to cradle Ghost like a cocoon as he spills every ounce of his soul into a delivery that spans the full emotional spectrum, sometimes simultaneously.

And there was days I had to go to Tech’s house with a note
Stating, “Gloria, can I borrow some food? I’m dead broke”
So embarrasin’, I couldn’t stand to knock on they door
My friends might be laughin’, I spent stamps in stores
Mommy, where’s the toilet paper? “Use the newspaper”
“Look, Ms. Rose gave us a couch.” She’s the neighbor
Things was deep, my whole youth was sharper than cleats
Two brothers with muscular dystrophy, it killed me
But I remember this, moms would lick her finger tips
To wipe the cold out my eye before school with her spit

In the space of three movements—Ghost’s stream-of-consciousness reminiscence, Mary J. Blige’s soulful lament from his mother’s perspective, and Papa Wu’s philosophical resolution—we understand both the scars that hardened Ghost’s heart and the irrepressible humanity that has sustained it against the longest of odds.

As Ironman rounds into its final lap, listeners could be forgiven for feeling disoriented if thoroughly exhilarated. It’s as if we’re watching a movie overstuffed with compelling scenes but short on thematic throughlines to tie it all together. Remarkably, “The Soul Controller” succeeds not only as an epic capstone but in providing that very connective tissue.

RZA delivers a tour de force, interweaving the cinematic exoticism of the A-Side tracks with the hard-driving soul dirges of Side 2. The chorus features an extended recreation of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” sung with hauntingly atonal anguish by the Force M.D’s. The vocals languish at the cross-section of the album’s recurring emotions—pain, desperation, defiance, resilience.

Ghost uses the first verse to deliver the preamble conspicuously absent at the album’s start. His matter-of-fact depiction of his imprisonment at the intersection of desperation and aspiration provides a methodical explanation of what inspired the high-stakes heists through which we first met the inner-city Avengers.

Yo, yo these streets got me backed down, how can I escape?
How can I survive without bubblin’ weight?
It’s prepared for the stand off, once you hand off
That white rock, and then give birth to a knot
Your biggest dream was to rock your 850 and beam
You and the Gods buy a crib in the white part of Queens
But at the same time, n****s on the block is ill
Some’ll rock you to sleep, hap, for selling crushed pills
Being watched all day like enemies’ prey
Faces you never seen before is in your hallway
Brothers you knew for years is mad p**** and scared
Back in the days, U.F.O.’s couldn’t walk up in here
It’s time to motor, travel like a foul order
Clear my head, stay sober, the soul controller

The second verse contrasts the visions of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment that motivate Ghost’s maneuvers with the brutality of the world he must navigate to get there. Ghost concludes the song and the album with a concise third verse in which imagery of street savagery morphs into defiant MC boasts. It plays as a definitive reminder that having weathered the war, armor intact, the only product he’s now pushing is his lethal pen.

Carbon copy, I love my Akai snare choppy
Melachi off the funky pen with the wax poppy on instrumentals

Like his comic book doppelganger, Ghostface Killah has made the transition from mercenary to prisoner of circumstance to righteous warrior; he and his Clan “play[ing] the wall like nine superheroes.”

In a 2021 appearance on Noreaga’s Drink Champs podcast, Ghostface confessed to not liking Ironman. He admitted to suffering from depression during its recording, which made writing and creating a struggle. Understandably, Ghost wouldn’t care to revisit those dark feelings. Yet, it’s hard not to suspect that, like Tony Stark’s trauma, that darkness gives Ironman much of its power.

Unlike previous Wu-Tang solo albums, Ironman moves beyond the Wu-Tang philosophy. It presents Ghostface as achingly human rather than simply expounding on his persona within the group mythology. That humanity is at the heart of Ghost’s sustained success as a solo artist long after many of his fellow Clansmen faded.

Ironman mesmerizes with its armored adventures. Its true triumph, however, lies in its fearless willingness to take us beneath the armor, where we meet a man of true steel.

By the Numbers

Production: 10
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 9
Delivery & Flow: 9.5
Content (Substance): 9
Cohesiveness: 8
Consistency: 9
Originality: 9.5
Listenability: 9
Impact/Influence: 8
Longevity: 9

Total — 90

Score reflects the tracklist for original LP and cassette pressings. CD and digital versions contain a bonus track, “Marvel”. Later editions omit “The Soul Controller” due to sample clearance problems. It has thankfully been restored on the 25th anniversary special edition.

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 9/8/24 on Medium.

Seven simple words opened a floodgate:

“Cruisin’ down the street in my six-fo’”

It wasn’t that “Boyz-N-The-Hood” unleashed gangsta rap on the world. With its whimsical delivery of vivid street vignettes, Eazy-E’s landmark 1987 single followed closely in the mold of proto-gangsta predecessors, like Schoolly D’s “Saturday Night” and Ice-T’s “6 in the Mornin’”. “Boyz-N-The-Hood” swung the gate in the opposite direction, inviting the world into gangsta rap.

“Boyz-N-The-Hood” is a shining example of the whole amounting to exponentially more than the sum of its parts. The raw simplicity of the minimalistic 808 beat paired with Eazy-E’s Mother Goose cadence ultimately proved the record’s greatest asset. Not only did it place the focus squarely on the world that Eazy was building, the repetitive rhythm and elementary rhyme schemes invited listeners from all walks of life to rap along.

The participatory element quickly transitioned the uninitiated from rubbernecking interlopers to enthusiastic co-conspirators in the gangsta underworld that would soon commandeer hip-hop and popular culture. As listeners rapped along, they absorbed the lingo, cultural signifiers, and attitude integral to understanding and exalting the more sophisticated gangsta rap soon to come.

Cruisin’ down the street in my six-fo’
Jockin’ the b****es, slappin’ the hoes
Went to the park to get the scoop
Knuckleheads out there, cold shootin’ some hoops
A car pulls up, who can it be?
A fresh El Camino rollin’ — Kilo G
He rolled down his window and he started to say
“It’s all about makin’ that GTA”
’Cause the boys in the hood are always hard
You come talkin’ that trash, we’ll pull your card
Knowin’ nothin’ in life but to be legit
Don’t quote me, boy, ’cause I ain’t said s***

The triple-platinum success of Eazy’s group, N.W.A, and their explosive debut, Straight Outta Compton, surpassed “Boyz-N-The-Hood” stylistically and commercially the following year. Yet, the importance of Eazy-E’s single in priming audiences for N.W.A and the avalanche of disciples that followed can’t be underestimated.

It’s only fitting that mere months after Straight Outta Compton shook up the culture, Eazy brought the journey full circle. Eazy-Duz-It refines the formula established by “Boyz-N-The-Hood” to flesh out not only Eazy’s world, but his persona as its most colorful character.

It was Eazy-E’s persona, heightened by a helium-textured cartoon voice, that lent Straight Outta Compton much of the tongue-in-cheek levity that cut N.W.A’s snarling aggression just enough to broaden the group’s accessibility. Eazy-Duz-It wastes no time in leaning into the madcap mischief that made Eazy Straight Outta Compton’s initial breakout star despite far less mic time and technical acumen than N.W.A’s lead rappers, Ice Cube and MC Ren.

Funk-fried opener “Still Talkin’” finds Eazy flexing his bona fides as the ultimate street signifier. Over a muscular bass and guitar loop from Rudy Ray Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas and Others,” Eazy regales with tall tales of sexcapades that would make Moore himself blush. Like Moore’s iconic 1970’s comedy, Eazy’s freaky tales are so over-the-top that the sheer absurdity dilutes the misogyny.

As a table setter, “Still Talkin” establishes that, unlike N.W.A’s bracing street narratives and revolutionary defiance, Eazy-E isn’t meant to be taken literally or particularly seriously. Between verses, Dr. Dre deploys explosive horns from Rufus Thomas’s “Do the Funky Chicken.” Atop the sample, a riotous peanut gallery eggs Eazy on as his tales grow taller. If there was any doubt, the jarring interludes yank back the curtain on the fact that this is not Ice-T’s “reality rap.” It’s a show — a heightened spectacle of funhouse gangsterism.

As Carnival commences, we’re primed to receive the album’s most macabre moment, “Nobody Move,” as shenanigan rather than sadism. Even as Eazy details a robbery rife with superfluous brutality, his childlike voice and impish whimsy evoke an angel-dusted Dennis the Menace more so than a gang-affiliated Charles Manson.

Though the ribald second verse would elicit immediate calls for cancellation today, the Shyamalan-worthy plot twist proves a narrative masterstroke, undercutting Eazy’s depravity by making him the story’s ultimate dupe. That he’s willing to deliver one of the album’s biggest laughs at his own expense further peels back the mask of bravado that kept some at arm’s length from gangsta rap’s more self-serious iterations.

The inclusion of the year-and-a-half old “Boyz-N-The-Hood” in an extended remix form introduces newcomers to the origin of Eazy, N.W.A, and by extension their distinctly southern California brand of gangsta rap. A verse is added as prologue, setting up Eazy’s re-rapping of the song, peppered with additional splashes of profanity to solidify the sea change signaled by Straight Outta Compton.

Following an intro in which his groupmates egg him on to bust that “crazy s***” that “motherf***ers said wasn’t gonna work,” Eazy tears into the new verse, soundtracking a day in his gangsta life with the song we’re about to hear.

Jumped in the ‘4, hit the juice on my ride
I got front and back, and side to side
Then I let the Alpine play
Bumpin’ new s*** by N.W.A
It was “Gangsta Gangsta” at the top of the list
Then I played my old s***, it went somethin’ like this

It’s a deft approach to including the familiar favorite in a way that feels fresh while positioning it as a classic of the still nascent subgenre. By doing so, Eazy acknowledges and embraces the single’s sonic crudeness in comparison to the album’s newer compositions, which begin to introduce the rich musicality that would become a hallmark of later gangsta rap.

Dr. Dre’s production steals the show on the title track, expertly corralling a bacchanal of sound. A whirling dervish of explosive samples, robust live instrumentation, and DJ Yella’s crisp turntablism, “Eazy-Duz-It” is the most pronounced example of Dre’s approach to much of the album: leveraging sonic dynamism to provide the momentum that Eazy’s static and often stilted delivery can’t.

It’s quite possible that constructing Eazy-Duz-It around Eazy’s limitations — multiple N.W.A members have spoken of Dre having to record each of Eazy’s lines individually and manually assemble his verses due to Eazy’s inability to stay on beat — was integral to Dr. Dre’s evolution from elite beat maker to master producer. Though heavily sample-driven, many of Eazy-Duz-It’s standout tracks are meticulously arranged rather than simply leaning on looped breakbeats.

“We Want Eazy” finds Dre taking his first deep dive into the P-Funk waters that would eventually become his lifeblood. Using live musicians, including frequent collaborator Stan “The Guitar Man” Jones on guitar and bass, Dre and Yella recreate Bootsy’s Rubber Band’s “Ahh… The Name is Bootsy, Baby” as the backbone of a party anthem equally suited to rock a backyard barbecue or an unsanctioned back ally night spot.

Taking its cue from Bootsy’s original, the track leans heavily into Eazy’s roguish persona, leaving the gangsta bravado largely in the subtextual shadows. As a result, “We Want Eazy” became one of the first gangsta rap hits to achieve daytime radio play, beginning the erosion of barriers between gangsta rap and mainstream media. It also provided a template for the “gangsta party” records that would become a hip-hop staple for decades to come, catapulting subsequent artists like Snoop Dogg and 2Pac into superstardom.

“We Want Eazy” music video, 1989. Image from Ruthless/Priority Records.

In many ways, Eazy-Duz-It plays as an N.W.A offshoot as much as a solo introduction. In addition to Dr. Dre’s role as the album’s sonic architect and Yella’s turntable and percussion work, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and frequent N.W.A collaborator The D.O.C. tag team to pen Eazy’s verses. (Eazy-E was not a rapper before joining N.W.A; he was a financier with a voice that sounded irresistibly demented when spitting gangsta rhymes.)

All three MCs prove equally stellar in crafting rhymes to match and build upon Eazy’s persona. Ren, however, emerges as the perfect partner in rhyme and crime. Taking on a role somewhere between hype man and co-defendant, Ren’s muscular baritone and dexterous flow prove the ideal counterpoint to Eazy’s voice and delivery. His presence grounds “Ruthless Villain” and “2 Hard Mutha’s,” and he ably plays Bobby Byrd to Eazy’s James Brown during intros and between verses on several other standouts.

Had the malfeasance of Eazy and manager Jerry Heller not splintered the crew, it’s easy to imagine N.W.A having evolved into an entity similar to mid-90s Wu-Tang Clan: each member releasing a quasi-solo project built around his specific persona, but bolstered by the entire collective.

Ren was seemingly up next, and probably the biggest loser in the split. As arguably the best pure rapper but the least distinctive personality among N.W.A’s MCs, his eventual solo career failed to gain the traction of his cohorts. A Dre-produced solo under the N.W.A umbrella, with Eazy riding shotgun, might have been just the formula Ren needed to achieve individual stardom.

Eazy-E’s star power, however, never dims throughout Eazy-Duz-It’s brisk 50 minutes. Whether brashly retrofitting his bravado for the airwaves and daring programmers to ignore gangsta rap’s rising tide (“Radio”) or offering a Q&A on the machinations of the culture behind the milieu (“No More ?’s”) the unerring brashness of Eazy’s swagger makes him an irresistible anti-hero.

He’s the perfect conduit into the world of gangsta rap, preternaturally suited to filter its brutality through a kaleidoscope that renders it thrilling rather than threatening. At the heart of Eazy-Duz-It lies the blueprint for hip-hop characters of subsequent generations, from Snoop to Lil’ Wayne to Young Thug, who built empires atop the marriage of inner-city angst and cartoon color.

Was Eazy-E a great MC? Of course not. It’s entirely possible he never wrote a word that passed his lips in the entirety of a career cut tragically short by his 1994 death from AIDS.

But he’s the epitome of a rap star. With a little help from Eazy’s friends, Eazy-Duz-It proved to an industry still skittish about hip-hop in general, and its hardcore varieties in particular, that gangsta and stardom could not only co-exist, but resonate with audiences far beyond the boys in the hood.

By the Numbers

Production: 9.5
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 6
Delivery & Flow: 6.5
Content (Substance): 8
Cohesiveness: 9
Consistency: 9
Originality: 9
Listenability: 9
Impact/Influence: 10
Longevity: 10

Total — 86

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 6/10/23 on Medium.

Will artificial intelligence (A.I.) replace human beings?

With the recent emergence of ChatGPT, Google Bard, and other Natural Language Processing and Understanding (NLP and NLU) platforms, the conversation has exploded from Silicon Valley rec rooms and university cocktail parties and into local coffee shops and morning newscasts from Puckerbrush to Hackensack.

The consensus is that, sooner than later, workers in repetitive, quantitive fields like accounting and auditing will be screwed. If job functions can be reduced to formulas, algorithms will quickly be better equipped to perform them than humans.

The wicket gets stickier in the so-called “creative” fields. Or so we “creatives” would like to think. There are certainly replicable structures inherent in literature, film, and music. But it’s often intangible components that make the great works resonate. Emotion. Aura, An overall feel that touches its audience on an innate, almost primal level.

Why is the human species incapable of sitting still when “Shout!” bursts through a speaker? You could write a 5000-word think-piece (The Atlantic probably has) and still not capture the elusive essence of the 60-year sway The Isley Brothers’ burner continues to hold on our collective backsides.

One thing’s for sure. It ain’t the chord progression.

A day in the A.I. life

My day job includes content strategy for a chatbot cluster. The past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT for “research and development.” I work from home most days, which gives me the luxury of listening to music.

During a recent exploratory session, The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life” popped up on my “Work Day” playlist. Structurally and lyrically, it’s anything but a formulaic composition. There’s no traditional chorus. The extended bridge feels like an interlude from an entirely different song.

Though the lyrics are descriptive, their power comes from the existential feelings they evoke; the questions of life, humanity, and our place in its puzzle that we’re led to ponder. It’s the product of a unique partnership between two of the 20th Century’s great songwriters.

Can A.I. replicate that, I wondered?

Since ChatGPT was open in front of me, I went straight to the source.

“Could you have written ‘A Day In The Life’ by The Beatles?” I asked.

ChatGPT nimbly ducked my question, insisting that it didn’t contribute to the writing of “A Day In The Life,” not that it couldn’t have.

However, the response seems to affirm the inherently human function of creativity. It notes the “songwriting prowess” of John Lennon and Paul McCartney and positions the song as a direct result of their “collaboration and creativity.”

ChatGPT then goes on to describe the parameters of its current functionality as generating “new text based on prompts and existing knowledge.” In other words, ChatGPT’s output is inherently limited by what we put into it. That suggests it’s not yet equipped for true innovation.

I kicked the hornet’s nest a little harder, this time not giving it room to equivocate.

“How would ‘A Day In The Life’ by The Beatles be different if you had written it?”

Here’s where things get interesting:

ChatGPT acknowledges it would not have crafted the same lyrics Lennon and McCartney did. Hardly a revelation. Neither would any human songwriter.

More telling is ChatGPT’s suggestion that it would likely alter the tone of the song. A truly sentient language processing module should be able to intuit the tone of The Beatles’ song. Its algorithm can surely pull from countless analyses of the song that speak to its tone.

So is ChatGPT’s insistence that the tone would be different had it written “A Day In The Life” an acknowledgment that it’s not yet equipped to process the nuances of feeling?

Possibly in part. But I suspect it speaks more to algorithms’ inherent tendency to regress to the mean.

A.I. is based on the identification and replication of patterns. Every pop song of significance is embedded in its “brain.” When tasked with writing a song, A.I. seems to aggregate its songwriting data and work from the center out.

It’s telling that in its example of how an A.I. generated “A Day In The Life” (re-titled “Moments Unveiled”) might look, ChatGPT turns The Beatles’ exercise in formal dissonance into a traditionally structured pop song, complete with verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge structure.

The tonal shift is equally telling. The Beatles’ pensive melancholia is replaced with affirmational wonder. Compare Lennon’s opening verse to the first verse-chorus sequence from ChatGPT:

[John Lennon]
I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords

[ChatGPT]

Screenshot by author. Image from ChatGPT

In an algorithmic blender, pop music’s tendency towards the saccharine and superficially inspirational ultimately overpowers The Beatles’ mastery of atmosphere and subtext. Add in the human thumb almost certainly leaning on ChatGPT’s scale, assuring it doesn’t provide responses that could inadvertently inspire dangerous behavior (i.e., legal liability), and there’s little chance it would ever generate the equivalent of “he blew his mind out in a car.”

Similarly, the countless conventionally structured songs, including dozens from The Beatles, ChatGPT undoubtedly referenced weighted far more heavily in the algorithm than structural outliers like “A Day In The Life.”

Algorithmically speaking, ChatGPT made “A Day In The Life” a “better” song. The construction is tighter, the rhyme scheme cleaner, and the meaning less opaque. Its narrative is linear, where the Beatles’ meanders. If recorded, it would probably run two minutes shorter.

To the human eye, “Moments Unveiled (A Day in the A.I. Life)” is a model of mediocrity; a generic, if competently written pop song that might play in Whole Foods.

Had ChatGPT’s version been released in 1967, it probably would not have become the cultural touchstone that Lennon and McCartney’s did. Still, paired with the right instrumentation and vocal arrangement, it could have at least held its own as a solid album cut. All in all, not a complete failure for A.I.

I decided to up the ante.

Power source above

For all its reflection on the human condition, “A Day In The Life” stands at a remove, narrating external tumult rather than internal. It ultimately speaks to the universal.

What would A.I. do with a viscerally personal song; an offering speaking directly to the unique experiences of an individual artist?

“Could you have written ‘Dear Mama’ by 2Pac,” I asked.

“Dear Mama” is about as human as it gets. 2Pac nakedly unpacks his complex relationship with his mother and turbulent youth:

[2Pac]
When I was young, me and my mama had beef
Seventeen years old, kicked out on the streets
Though back at the time, I never thought I’d see her face
Ain’t a woman alive that could take my mama’s place
Suspended from school, and scared to go home
I was a fool, with the big boys breakin’ all the rules
I shed tears with my baby sister, over the years
We was poorer than the other little kids
And even though we had different daddies, the same drama
When things went wrong, we’d blame mama
I reminisce on the stress I caused, it was hell
Huggin’ on my mama from a jail cell

ChatGPT immediately recognized the deeply personal and innately human nature of 2Pac’s song and conceded A.I.’s limitations in replicating it via algorithm.

In contrast to its response to “A Day In the Life,” ChatGPT doesn’t obfuscate or attempt to reframe the question. It issues a flat “no” and a clear acknowledgment of its own lack of the humanity so instrumental in Pac’s writing.

I doubled back to my previous follow-up question.

“How would ‘Dear Mama’ by 2Pac be different if you had written it?”

It’s a testament to ChatGPT’s intelligence — artificial or otherwise — that it recognizes “Dear Mama” as a heartfelt recounting of 2Pac’s personal story. Rather than trying to approximate his lived experience, it takes Pac’s premise — a nostalgia-heavy show of appreciation for his mother — and attempts to adapt it to its own experience as an A.I. tool “birthed” by programmers.

The result is laugh-out-loud hilarious:

[ChatGPT]

As it did with “A Day In The Life,” ChatGPT flattens “Dear Mama” into the structure of a traditional pop song. Seemingly unable to differentiate the genre conventions of hip-hop, it shortens the verses and adds a bridge.

It seemingly fails to recognize that “Dear Mama” adapts its chorus from The Spinners’ classic mama tribute “Sadie,” in line with hip-hop’s tradition of operating in dialog with older music. Not only does ChatGPT’s chorus abandon the “Sadie” structure, but it also doesn’t appear to interpolate any previous hits. Perhaps a human-programmed guardrail against copyright troubles?

Lyrically, ChatGPT’s “Dear Mama” approximates the original’s tone far better than its “A Day In The Life.” It mirrors Pac’s gratitude, empathy, and desire to offer reciprocity. However, by adapting those achingly human feelings to its digital “life,” ChatGPT’s “Dear Mama” lands as absurd rather than heart-rending.

The news today (oh boy!)

Songwriters, don’t blow your laptops out in a ride share just yet. A.I. isn’t quite ready to replace you.

While examples are floating around the web of A.I. songwriting working more successfully than my brief collaboration with ChapGPT, none of them have offered much in the way of innovation or individuality.

It’s telling that most A.I. music circulating the web right now leans more on voice-replication gimmickry (i.e., a virtual Rihanna singing Beyonce’s “Cuff It”) than original song generation. Even the vocal simulations generally fail to capture the essence of the replicated artists.

For example, in the viral instance of an A.I. generated Notorious B.I.G. rapping Nas’ “NY State of Mind,” A.I. Biggie’s voice is a passable facsimile of the real thing. However, it performs the verses in the style of Nas, failing to adapt its delivery to reflect Biggie’s looser, more inflected vocal technique.

As it stands today, if Harry Styles enlisted an A.I. tool to write his next album, he’d probably get a collection of technically sound pop songs, but nothing with the spark from which hits are born. It would likely fail to reflect the “voice” that Styles’ fans have come to expect from his songwriting.

Even if the A.I.’s input was restricted to Styles’ earlier work, at best we’d get a mash-up of Styles’ previous iterations, not the next chapter in a journey of artistic growth that artists’ longtime fans expect and cherish.

The bad news? Five years ago, A.I.’s attempts at creative writing produced glorified gibberish. ChatGPT’s technically proficient, if substantively askew, takes on The Beatles and 2Pac represent an exponential improvement in a short time.

Could there be a day when A.I. can approximate human experiences and innovatively present them through art?

As conversational A.I. modules are prone to do, ChatGPT gives away the game in its take on “Dear Mama.” It will “learn through the years” to “simulate warmth, care, and affection too.”

The single differentiator of human creators may soon be the intangible “feel” that occasionally emerges through human experiences and interactions.

The initial iteration of the aforementioned “Shout!” was conceived extemporaneously from Ronald Isley’s ad-libbed gambits to extend the crescendo of hysteria into which The Isley Brothers had whipped a concert crowd. It was an immaculate conception of pure humanity; an exchange of energy between human performers and audience.

The ability to evoke “feel,” even in a studio setting, is what separates the Beatles and 2Pac from their human peers. It’s perhaps the biggest reason they’re among the most impactful artists of the past 60 years. It may similarly continue to separate current and future generational greats from their encroaching digital competitors.

What of the other 99%? The talented but non-visionary grinders who follow trends and adopt the innovations of the greats. Aren’t they essentially the accountants and auditors of the “creative” space, plugging words and melodies into proven formulas and structures?

A day in the life of the average creative is about to get a lot more complicated. Our ability to capture that unquantifiable complexity, “the magic of existence,” through our art may well be our key to survival in the world of “circuits and codes.”

Originally published 7/13/25 on Medium.

There is no culturally richer time of year in Haiti than Carnival (Kanaval) season. Though brought to the Caribbean by European colonizers, the annual Spring festival was swiftly remixed by formerly enslaved Africans brought to Haiti as plantation labor. The free Africans infused Carnival with their music, spirituality, and cultural hallmarks. Today, Carnival remains an annual celebration of Haiti’s liberation and deep cultural lineage.

It’s fitting that Wyclef Jean would use The Carnival not just as the title of his sprawling solo debut, but as its sonic and thematic springboard. As the production guru and conceptual mastermind behind the multi-platinum Fugees, Jean touted his Haitian heritage as a super power from the moment the group introduced their Creole inflected “Vocab” to the world.

If Haiti anchored Wyclef’s spirit, the streets of crack era Newark, NJ, where he spent his formative years, shaped his sensibility. Just as the Fugees’ 17 million selling sophomore breakout, The Score, ruminated at the intersection of the two worlds, The Carnival, owes as much to the macabre showmanship of American small c “carnivals” as to Haiti’s deeply rooted tradition. The result is a long-player as fantastically entertaining as it is culturally dense.

The Carnival commences with a multi-tiered intro framing the album as a “trial,” The U.S. government setting out to prove that Wyclef is nebulously “not innocent.” We’re introduced to the cast who will be performing the forthcoming songs and skits, highlighting the inherent facade of the proceedings. Finally, Clef himself grabs the bullhorn, announcing that “we are not stopping for no red lights tonight.” His theatrical barking is cut short by the hauntingly operating voice of a sampled Danielle Licari ushering us into the dystopic fun house of “Apocalypse”.

When the drums stampede into the mix, the rapturous opener juxtaposes fantastical highs and crushing reality checks. Clef goes from basking in the majesty of his newfound celebrity to being hunted by law enforcement in the space of a few bars.

I was on the highway pushing a black Viper
A car pulls up, is he a jacker or a sniper?
A blue Range Rover, he says, “Pull over!”
I didn’t know he was a DT undercover
I screamed out my lungs, “This is discrimination!
What’s the charge?” He said, “You just robbed a gas station”
Who me? Not me, It couldn’t be
I was at the Grammys with Brandy, didn’t you see me on TV?

Ending with Clef operatically envisioning his terminal blaze of glory, “Apocalypse” establishes the album’s tone of revelry in the existential terror of encroaching end times. In revisiting the album, it’s hard not to be struck by just how much darkness lurks beneath the vibrant soundscapes, and how much joy Clef finds in embracing that darkness.Even the most celebratory tracks crackle with an acknowledgement of the depravity inherent their world and the masks its inhabitants must wear to maneuver it.

On a sensual reimagining of the Cuban patriotic standard “Guantanamera,” Wyclef and Fugee-mate Lauryn Hill paint contrasting portraits of a young woman deftly wielding the many masks of her sexuality. Clef opens the track with a surreal romanticization of that rapturous moment when the right woman, the right music, and the magic of the night conjure spirits of nostalgia and possibility. Upon his conquest, he projects his warmest memories (“Remind me of an old Latin song that my uncle used to play on his old 45, when he used be alive”) and idealized fantasies (“A penny for your thought, a nickel for your kiss, a dime if you tell me you love me”).

After a passionately delivered verse from the original, courtesy of its most famous crooner, Celia Cruz, Lauryn brings Clef’s romanticism crashing back to earth. Her grim depiction of a second generation immigrant making her way through an unforgiving world with the only currency she possesses accentuates the ominousness of Clef’s brooding guitar chords.

The carnival of love turns unsparingly personal on “To All the Girls”. The song’s uneasy reconciliation of a love triangle adds another layer to the album’s themes of masks and dualities. However, subsequent revelations of Clef and Lauryn’s secret affair shortly after the start of his marriage retroactively rip off the masks to reveal one of The Carnival’s most nakedly unaffected moments. One of the album’s few sonically subdued offerings, “To All the Girls” resists melodrama in favor of stark resignation. The heart wants what it wants, and its affairs will end how they end.

The album’s overarching ethos is perhaps best captured in the roisterous second single, “Anything Can Happen.” Atop a dizzying calypso seasoned groove, Clef vacillates from playful to philosophical in unpacking the razor’s edge upon which existence hangs. The song colorfully evokes the sudden twists of fate that can take a reckless playboy from a married lover’s bed to the trunk of a car in the space of minutes, or a musician from afterthought to headliner with one hit. Clef ultimately chooses to embrace the excitement and danger that represent two sides of an ever spinning coin.

Don’t get souped cause you pushin’ a coupe
Next year you on foot, runnin’ from a lawsuit
For example, I know I’m nice, I don’t flaunt it
Least anticipated, to the most wanted

Soaring strings from the New York Philharmonic lend “Gone ’Til November” an angelic veneer, martyring road warrioring hustlers traversing highways and borders in chase of elusive fruits of forbidden labor. The ethereal beauty infused by the global hit is short lived. The Carnival’s back half grows increasingly foreboding in its portrayal of life’s shadows and all that lurks within them.

“Year of the Dragon” and “Sang Fezi” offer back to back meditations on the suddenness with which brutality can upend life’s seemingly easy rhythms. The former finds Clef and Lauryn trading vividly rendered verses over a slyly deployed guitar loop from The Police’s “Voices Inside My Head” and a funhouse recreation of George Kranz’s “Din Daa Daa.” The sonic dissonance evokes social decay of a global order.

On the latter, Clef flexes a stoically somber delivery. His Kreyòl lyrics of Haitian pride are juxtaposed against imagery of a nihilistic dystopia justifying the song’s chorus, loosely translated to “Which Haitan says I walk around New York without my gun?/I tell you man, ya’ll lyin’/When the bum catches you they eat you up/It’s when you die the police come”. Lauryn’s soulfully sung coda closes the track on an inspirational note. Yet, set against the production’s dark chords and ominously repetitive bassline, it feels more like a prayer before the war than a hymn of salvation.

The creative alchemy between Wyclef and Lauryn offers a tantalizing hint at what could have been had the messy demise of their romantic relationship not rendered the Fugees a casualty of love’s carnival. It’s also a peek behind the curtain as to why the affair was likely inevitable.

“Guantanamera” music video. Screen capture by authout. Video from Wyclef Jean on YouTube.

“Street Jeopardy” opens with a short, but telling, skit in which Clef adopts the persona of a music executive urging an unsuspecting artist to deliver “more gangster, more blood, more gun talk, more people dying.” It’s a poignant reminder that, in a hip-hop world still reeling from the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Christopher “The Notorious BIG” Wallace, the industry was cynically scrambling to reap whatever dollars remained from the romanticized version of the violence that claimed them.

The song responds with a darkly cinematic illustration of the real world ripple effects of urban warfare packaged as entertainment. Clef and R.O.C. both compliment eery guitar chords with stellar verses, but its John Forté who delivers the true standout performance. His excoriation of a prison industrial complex in which “..every cell in the bing had a tenet/With each of them regrettin’ they was in it” lands even more hauntingly in light of his own 2000 arrest and 8 year incarceration for drug trafficking.

By the time the propulsive guitar and airy falsetto of the Bee Gee’s disco classic “Stayin’ Alive” christens The Carnival’s lead single and surprise summer hit, “We Trying to Stay Alive,” the deep grooving dance floor filler feels like a well deserved respite. In Clef’s hands (with spirited assists from Forté and Fugees’ Pras), the ode to nightlife opulence transforms into an exultation of doing whatever it takes to not only live another 24, but actually stay alive, be it through music, revelry, or community.

The flight of fancy crashes back to the runway just as quickly as it launches. Slow beating Nyabingi drums and mournful acoustic guitar chords set the stage for a haunting close to the album’s main program. “Gunpowder” is a plaintively minimalistic island folk ballad in which Clef finally allows himself the space to mourn those lost amid the dizzying nihilism behind the carnival’s spectacle and illusion. His depiction of a brother killed during the Haitian Intervention of the mid-90s conveys a sense of purpose lacking from the urban warfare depicted throughout the album. However, both feel a part of a larger carnival careening out of control, its masks representing grotesque manifestation of what lies underneath.

That the scope and proficiency of The Carnival landed as a surprise in 1997 reflects more on our perceptions of Wyclef than it does on him. Even after the outsized success of The Score, there was still prevailing sentiment that Hill was the bell cow and, in Clef’s words, “the guys should stop rapping, vanish like Menudo.” In reality, Clef’s boundary-busting production and conceptual vision were the engine that powered the trio, even if Hill’s high wattage charisma and lyrical gravitas provided the power steering.

Hill’s 1998 The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill proved one of music’s greatest albums. However, The Carnival, featuring ample contributions from Hill, Pras, and other extended Refugee crew members like Forté, is effectively the follow-up to The Score that fans have long lamented never receiving. Where its predecessor delivered a soundtrack to revolution behind the mask of radio friendly crossover hits, The Carnival is a spectacular masquerade. The masks offer outsized embodiments of the humanity beneath, even as they conceal motive and intention.

As with Haiti’s annual celebration, the album revels in the multitudes that define a culture, and ultimately humanity itself. It’s at once boisterous celebration and bitter lament; rebel yell and second line dirge. Eclectic soundscapes and unbridled third world pride enabled The Carnival to connect on a global level. Charting in 9 countries, not only did its success welcome future international artists into the hip-hop ecosystem, it pushed world music sounds into the lexicon of American hip-hop. Both seeds would bear increasingly rich fruit as the 21st Century progressed.

If The Score is under appreciated in the digital age, The Carnival has all but fallen out of the conversation entirely. Perhaps it’s a casualty of Hill’s skyscraper sized shadow crowding out all else Fugees. Maybe it got caught in the backlash that began when Hill cast Clef as Miseducation’s antagonist and metastasized as he became a ubiquitous hired gun producer in the 2000s (just ask Shakira’s hips).

Regardless, The Carnival now stands as a discarded gem, waiting to be marveled upon by future generations of miners rather than the singular opus that injected a much needed vibrancy into hip-hop at its most turbulent moment. That its erasure is as surprising as its initial success goes to prove its thesis.

When you’re rolling through the carnival, anything can happen.

By the Numbers

Production: 9
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 7.5
Delivery & Flow: 8
Content (Substance): 10
Cohesiveness: 9.5
Consistency: 9
Originality: 10
Listenability: 9.5
Impact/Influence: 8
Longevity: 6

Total — 86.5

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 6/15/24 on Medium.

It’s fitting that a duo named Underground Kingz would achieve their definitive classic with a release initially dismissed by their record label as a throw away.

Tension between Jive Records and UGK’s Bun B and Pimp C (okay, it was mostly the late Pimpin’ Chad) had grown so thick that despite the national buzz generated by the Port Arthur, Texas pair’s Menace II Society soundtrack hit “Pocket Full Of Stones” and the near-gold sales of 1994’s Super Tight, Jive Records dumped Ridin’ Dirty onto a crowded summer release slate without so much as a promotional single or music video.True to their name, UGK still connected with its core fan base by meeting them where they lived.

In the hustler’s parlance, “ridin’ dirty” refers to driving with illicit contraband stowed just out of view. The cleaner the car, the higher the likelihood of something dirty under the seat, in the glove compartment, or packing the stash box. That contraband represents the confounding duality of life in the shadows, equally capable of bringing fortune or disaster.

Ridin’ Dirty maneuvers the double-edged switchblade of that ambiguity, unspooling as a slow riding odyssey of the American underground in every sense of the term. It’s a palpable product of and homage to the underclass, the underworld, and the underbelly; a psalm for the under valued and overlooked.

In stark contrast to the characteristically aggressive openers that were a staple of ’90s hip-hop albums, “One Day” launches Ridin’ Dirty with a pensive meditation on the transience of lives lived out of view. Bun, Pimp, and Mr. 2–3 deliver vignettes of existence spent in eternal grind mode only to be ground to an abrupt halt by death and prison. In a bitingly bittersweet tone reminiscent of vintage southern blues, the MCs balance bleak fatalism with appreciation for moments shared with fellow soldiers taken too soon.

[Bun B]
I remember bein’ eight deep off in Chucky crib
Lettin’ us act bad, not givin’ a f*** what we did
When we lost him, I knew the world was comin’ to the end
And I had to quit lettin’ that devil push me to a sin
My brother been in the pen for damn near ten
But now it look like when he come out, man, I’m goin’ in

The pugilistic aggression of “Murder” reflects the raw intensity of a high stakes hustle in which time is the ultimate opponent. The track encapsulates Pimp and Bun’s impeccable chemistry. Pimp rhymes like a modern day blues man, his every extended inflection and vocal flourish embodying the underworld ethos he represents. Bun, by contrast, is a pure spitter. In a verse as torrid as the Texas air in August, he stacks syllables with surgical precision, riding the punishing MPC beat like a rodeo cowboy. If the former is making a killing in the streets, the latter is committing larceny on the mic.

“Pinky Ring” transports the microphone yin and yang onto a trunk rattling beat. It firmly orients the album on the hot concrete of the dirty south’s winding roads. You can feel the condensation settling into the vinyl seats of a classic Cutlass as the bluesy guitar licks nestle into the sinewy bassline.

“Diamond Wood”’s slow winding gangsta dirge deepens the sense of place. Its bluesploitation groove seemingly extends the ride of “Pinky Ring” into the after hours. The wheels of the whip and of the mind slow to a meditative roll, allowing Pimp and Bun to paint palpable pictures of their world, shaded with deadly characters and ethical cul-de-sacs.

[Pimp C]
Pooh say he goin’ through a thang, when y’all ain’t never lied?
I got a baby, but his mama act like he ain’t mine
Wicked women using children to live on
Wanna hurt and try to hate, ’cause she know the thrill is gone
Say, man, I stopped smokin’ with haters back in ‘94
But n****s thinkin’ that a Sweet gonna get ’em through my door
And n****s talk a lot of s*** in a safe place
I know ’cause he can’t look me eye-to-eye when he in my face
Now, n****, listen to my beats and see just what I mean
N****, I ride dirty every day, but still I shine so clean
Glitter and gleam ain’t all what it look like
So I keep swangin’ out here, clangin’, tryna live my life

If the codeine drenched chords of “Diamond Wood” invite thoughts to roam, the next two tracks re-establish the immediacy of late night journeys where danger lurks around each corner. “3 In The Mornin’” evokes an open air fun house haunted by predatory feds, envious local law, Columbian assassins, and two-timing corner boys all angling for a larger piece of an ill-gotten pie. “Touched” pulls back the veil of stoicism providing a veneer of unhurried cool to a dirty ride through a nihilistic ecosystem. In this world, getting “touched” with unchecked emotionality generally leads to getting “touched” with hands or worse.

The B Side kicks off with a pair of tracks speaking to integral components of the underground, that are equally prevalent throughout American culture. Too $hort homage “F*** My Car” rides an ascending guitar riff that revs like a muscle car engine. Pimp and Bun lay bare the gratification, pitfalls, and ultimate contradictions of a car culture that stands in for consumerism. Beneath a candy coating of ribald humor, the rhymes presents a corrosive circularity in which men use cars to entice women, only to resent women for being lured by cars.

“That’s Why I Carry” extends the car motif. The narratives springboards from Bun’s opening vignette of a high roller getting jacked into a full-throated embrace the Second Amendment remedies that are as intrinsic to the American mythology today as when the song (and the Amendment) was written. Though Pimp’s verse warns of the perils of gunplay (“when you bust on your boy, neither one of ya’ll n****s win/You end up killin’ somebody you really ain’t wanna kill”), he makes the song’s ultimate thesis clear: “When I pull, I always pop, that’s why I’m livin’ today.”

Musically and lyrically, the album’s themes culminate in the show stopping “Hi-Life.” Cool grooves and a soulfully funkafied chorus are offset by pensive strings and a somber church organ embodying both the thrill and threat omnipresent in a life chosen by and for so many. Lyrically, the MCs lean on the dry irony native to the region’s vintage blues to highlight the punishing lows endured to sustain the “hi-life.” Despite a 5:25 runtime, the track contains only two verses, giving the MCs a broad canvas on which to sketch a hauntingly nuanced portrait of futile brutality.

[Bun B]
Streets’ll eat your ass alive
Take your possessions with pistols, bare hands, and knives
And nobody’s surprised, if somebody don’t survive the dusk to see dawn
It’s treacherous how we was left here to just die on these streets that we be on
Motherf***ers sleeping on them corners that you pee on
Probably ’cause society felt they didn’t belong
Now who in the f*** made it this way for us?
Got all these little n****s sellin’ that yay
Because it ain’t like they make higher levels gainable
And that quote “piece of American pie” just ain’t attainable
So how can I sustain a full life before death?
Man, I’m left out here to make it by my goddamn self

The guitar drenched title track rounds out the journey like a slow sun rise. We’ve made it through another night in the unseen underbelly. The facade of civilization is returning, and with it the easy bop of a hustler with a full knot and at least another 24 in which to enjoy it. After a 50 minute guided tour through the grime behind the glamour in which underground kings bask and their subjects revel, it feels like a hard earned, if ultimately hollow, victory lap.

In the context of UGK’s career, Ridin’ Dirty proved an equally slow roll, if ultimately more resounding victory. Despite moving just 67,000 copies in its first week, mostly in the South, the album now sits at just under 900,000 in sales. It’s routinely cited as an influence by hip-hop legends from all regions. The album reportedly became a favorite of Tupac Shakur near the end of his life after UGK’s fellow Texan, Scarface, slid him a cassette. Jay-Z was clearly listening — he incorporates Bun B’s “Touched” bars into his now-legendary “99 Problems.”

The wide embrace of Ridin’ Dirty speaks to the power of its authenticity at a moment when hip-hop was becoming the domain of increasingly grandiose production and outsized characters. Pimp C and a largely uncredited N.O. Joe incorporate the sophistication of West Coast G-Funk, but the mixes are left raw and intimate. The pair’s interspersion of live instrumentation channels the world weary grit and dogged determination of the blues and soul running deep in their region’s bloodlines.

On the mic, Bun B and Pimp C both establish distinct characters while resisting the lure of caricature. It’s their humanity — the moments of contradiction, vulnerability, and uncertainty — that cut through the bravado to truly resonate.

Without the fanfare of the seismic releases that defined 1996, Ridin’ Dirty, it’s stash box brimming over with uncut dope, ultimately emerged clean. With the slow, steady roll of a classic Cutlass, it maneuvered into a spot near the top of the CD stack from arguably hip-hop’s deepest year.

It’s the only route befitting Underground Kingz.

By the Numbers

Production: 8.5
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 9
Delivery & Flow: 9.5
Content (Substance): 9
Cohesiveness: 9.5
Consistency: 9
Originality: 8.5
Listenability: 9
Impact/Influence: 9
Longevity: 10

Total — 91

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 5/25 on Medium.

If you’re intimately familiar with the piercing chill of “the hawk,” Black Moon makes music for you.

The hawk is a particular brand of cold that arrives off a near-frozen Atlantic Ocean via whipping winds. It settles deep into the concrete and steel of North Eastern seaboard cities. When the hawk is out, you’ll see city dwellers buried beneath layers of fabric, chins tucked low, coats pulled tight. They hustle to train stations and bus stops en route to whatever adventures the night has to offer that are worth braving the hawk’s needle-like talons.

1993 saw hip-hop spiced with greater stylistic variety than ever before. Yet, neither the slinky synths of Southern Cali’s G-funk explosion nor the deep fried soul of the emerging southern movement provided sufficient score to a hawk infested train ride, bodega run, or front stoop blunt session. In October of ’93, just as the hawk was spreading his wings, Black Moon entered the stage right on time.

Lead single “Who Got Da Props?” landed like the first 40 degree day of autumn to acclimate the system for the coming chill. Built atop a sinister rhythm guitar and keys culled from Ronnie Laws’ “Tidal Wave,” the jazzy jaunt felt right at home among the Native Tongue and Hieroglyphics platters with which it shared mix show space. Yet, “Who Got Da Props?” pulsated with a bare knuckled rawness that set it apart its more ethereal peers in the jazz rap space.

The airiness of the drums belies a propulsive crispness as they pull the track forward like the lead car on weathered train tracks. Lead MC Buckshot Shorty attacks the beat with the rhythmic precision and economy of motion of Golden Gloves champ. Though he sticks and moves with a dancer’s dexterity, his verbal punches land with ample power to drop unsuspecting challengers to the canvas. The chanted simplicity of the anthemic hook (“Who got da props? Who got da props?”) didn’t just invite listeners to rap along, it demanded it. In so doing, it planted the names of Black Moon’s members (“5 F-T, Evil Dee, and Buckshot”) prominently in the mind’s of hip-hoppers and made Enta Da Stage one of the most anticipated releases of a jam packed season.

Lest “Who Got Da Props”’s crisp autumn bounce muddy the waters, “Poweful Impak!” wastes no time unleashing a bass heavy barrage. The unrelenting opener is excessively sufficient to stomp out any lingering doubts that this is hoody and Timbs music. The track spirals into the lower frequencies and revels in a distorting rumble built to put even the most carefully calibrated headphones through their paces. The repetitive minimalism is as hypnotic as it is punishing, engulfing the listener like the dark cold of night itself. Buckshot’s fluid fluctuations in cadence and delivery provide just enough dynamism to stave off sonic redundancy. Busta Rhymes’ scratched hook hints at an explosive release of tension that never quite erupts, instead circling us back into the rhythmic churn of the verses.

The release is soon granted in the form of “N***z Talk S***” and “Act Like You Wanted” (with “Who Got Da Props” in between). The raucous calls-to-action begin to open the album’s dense sonics just wide enough for traces of light to seep through in the form of jazz inflected horns. Establishing one of the album’s motifs, war chant choruses shift the tone from ominous to riotous at verses’ culmination. But it’s “Buck Em Down” where Enta Da Stage truly emerges from its chrysalis, revealing a burgeoning movement rather than simply a moment.

Boasting the album’s richest production, “Buck Em Down” plays a rubbery bassline against celestial horns from Donald Byrd’s “Wind Parade” to mesmerizing effect. The track’s sonics rise and fall like the winter wind itself. The melodic and rhythmic sophistication allow Buckshot to lean into the musicality of his flow. He mellifluously maneuvers the production’s sonic contours without sacrificing his ruggedly rhythmic dance with the drums as he lays out the aesthetic that would soon accompany New York’s mid-90s backpack renaissance.

When I was in school, I was the mack
Shorty was strapped with a ill lyrical contact
Knapsack filled with the s*** that I G’d
And a nickel bag of weed, yes indeed
A mad little n**** runnin’ up on ’em all
Fly as hell, hit the park, play the wall
And all the older people sayin’ “Shorty’s a badass
But you’s a smart little n****, so you gonna last”

It’s truly a double edged sword that “Buck Em Down (Da Beatminerz Remix)”, released as a stand alone 12” in ’94, proved a watershed moment that cast a heavy shadow over the album version. With its enchanting re-imagining of the original’s sonic signatures and Buckshot’s consummation of the melodic flirtation he teased on the album, the remix arguably stands not only as Black Moon’s best song, but the genesis of the Beatminerz sound that would define subsequent Boot Camp Clik classics. Yet, in the context of the album, the original is its own brand of perfection. It stands out as a singular moment while transitioning the claustrophobic density of the early tracks to the ruminative spaciousness of the latter half.

Evil D, 5 F-T, and Buckshot Shorty circa 1993. (Image from Chi Modu.)

“Make Munnie” and “Slave” open the B-side with measured mid-tempo menace, grounding the album’s brutal intensity with narratives of struggle and resilience. The former upends one of hip-hop’s most canonical call-and-response chants (“Make money money, make money money money”). The delivery replaces the chant’s standard reckless abandoned with stoic determination underscoring Buckshot’s gritty recounting of struggles endured and hustles executed. The latter leans on a coiling bassline and washed out horns to brew a quite storm of intensity. Buck delivers a gravelly testament to a near masochistic focus born of unforgiving streets and applied to navigate the equally cold world of music.

I feel like I’m trapped in the motherf***in’ cave
To the rhythm I’m a slave, lookin’ in my grave
Jugular vein bustin’ out my neck, you see the rage
I move when I groove, ’cause I’m into the stage
I’m the Buckshot, Black, I’m bringin’ it back
To the roots, like Timberland boots, home on my rack
And I don’t give a f*** what you say
Commercial rap get the gun clap, day after day

Propulsively staccato drums place “S*** Iz Real” palpably in this world, even as soaring horns float above it. It practically begs blunt rolling of listeners eager to elevate with the track and observe the frenetic grind depicted in the rhymes from a safe remove. The unsung standout is as visceral as it it cerebral, embodying much of what made Black Moon and the entire Boot Camp Clik such a singular brand in hip-hop.

The title track’s bludgeoning beat and “Who Got Da Props?” sampling chorus yank the album out of the hemisphere and back to the concrete. It hits like the starter’s pistol coronating a fierce final lap highlighted by the eternal head nodder “How Many MC’s…”. The album’s second single and penultimate selection epitomizes the revivalist “boom bap” sound that would come to define the era’s underground aesthetic, even as Bad Boy bling dominated daytime airwaves. From the uncharacteristic (by Enta Da Stage standards) crispness of its drums to the spiraling circularity of the looped tenor sax, and punctuated by the hook’s razor sharp cuts behind the unmistakable voice of a sampled KRS-One, it felt like a defiant retrenchment in ’93. Today, it offers an instant time machine ride to the year’s watershed fall season.

In delicious contrast to “How Many MC’s…” measured calibration, “U Da Man” brings Enta Da Stage to a roaring close. In “Scenario” fashion, the rollicking posse cut takes full advantage of its clean up spot to establish the Boot Camp Clik and Duck Down Entertainment as a collective force to be reckoned with in the emerging era. Buckshot and 5 F-Ft are joined by Smif-N-Wessun’s Tek and Steele, Duck Down founder Big Dru Ha, and Mobb Deep’s Havoc for a furified cypher. The 6 MC present a united front in their commitment to the camp’s raw hip-hop fundamentals in their most unvarnished form. Yet, there’s also a distinct sense that, when the mic is passed, each MC is going for his predecessor’s jugular. To stray from the competitive spirit that perennially propelled hip-hop forward would run counter to the Clik’s raison d’être.

At times, Renaissance era hip-hop’s greatest gift was also its most burdensome curse - specificity. If you’ve only lived in regions where the hawk is no more than a rare bird in the World Book, you may struggle to truly connect with the brand of hip-hop that Black Moon helped elevate to high art. Yet, for those from hawk infested cities, that brand of hip-hop speaks to a feeling, an experience, a mentality that likely shaped who they are and how they move, literally and figuratively.

At one of hip-hop’s most pivotal juncture, Enta Da Stage not only epitomized that particular flavor of boom bap, it (along with Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)) revitalized it, injecting immediacy for a new audience while drawing back Golden Era heads growing disoriented amidst the fast emerging G-funk wave. Subsequent Boot Camp Clik releases — specifically Smif-N-Wessun’s Dah Shinin’ and Heltah Skeltah’s Nocturnal — bolster the sound with greater lyrical sophistication and sonic refinement. Yet, Enta Da Stage remains the blueprint for boom bap revivalism precisely because of rough edges just jagged enough to keep the hawk at bay.

By the Numbers

Production — 9
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 8.5
Delivery & Flow: 9.5
Content (Substance): 7
Cohesiveness: 9.5
Consistency: 9
Originality: 8
Listenability: 8.5
Impact/Influence: 9
Longevity: 8

Total — 86

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 10/26/25 on Medium.

2004 was the year hip-hop’s underground infrastructure moved from concrete sidewalks to fiber optic pathways. In Part One we explored the new generation of voices that emerged from digital message boards and the veterans who found new life on those same forums.

However, 2004 also saw the culmination of long and winding journeys for a singular artist who embodied the internet, and another who remixed the message board zeitgeist to the top of the charts.

The mask and the mythos: the digital reinvention of MF DOOM

It’s fitting, even poetic, that after 15 years and two identities, 2004 was the year Daniel Dumile finally tipped. Dumile’s MF DOOM incarnation was, in many ways, the internet personified. His lyrics were densely packed with pop culture obscurities. They were delivered with a flat detachment belying their intricacy. His production was proudly lo-fi. It was stitched almost entirely from digitized tapestries of moments long forgotten by most but passionately treasured by select aficionados.

He literally performed behind a mask.

Introduced to the world as Zev Love X on 3rd Bass’s 1989 hit “Gas Face”, Dumile spent the remainder of the 20th Century as a man in search of a country. His group, KMD, released its first album, Mr. Hood, in 1991. Despite light rotation on Yo! MTV Raps, but the project was largely lost in a jam packed, if schizophrenic year. The group’s jazz-tinged production and Dumile’s off kilter-flow didn’t groove quite fluidly enough to match the infectious dynamism of the Native Tongues. The lyrics, while conscious, lacked the fervor to cut through the fire and brimstone of hip-hop’s revolutionary guard.

In an alternate timeline, KMD’s 1994 follow-up, Black Basterds, may well have been its breakout moment. With a rumored rave review in The Source ready for the presses, the project was shelved by Elektra Records at the 11th hour. The label stated concerns about the album’s provocative cover art — a cartoon “Sambo” figure being lynched. However, persistent rumors suggested the image simply provided convenient cover for Eletktra to wash its hands of a group it didn’t know quite what to do with.

Even more painfully, Dumile’s brother and group-mate, Dingilizwe (DJ Subroc), was struck by a car and killed around the same time.

Broke, depressed, and nearly homeless, Dumile re-emerged at New York area open mics in 1997. Rather than trading on what remained of his KMD fame, he performed in a mask under the Metal Face DOOM moniker. The MF DOOM character was styled as a comic book villain vowing revenge on “the industry that so badly deformed” him. DOOM released three albums between 1999 and 2003, gradually building a cult following through college radio and the embryonic internet. In 2004 the stars aligned. Dumile fully found his MF DOOM voice just as the infrastructure to amplify it reached critical mass.

Madvillainy, DOOM’s collaborative concept album with producer Madlib, is in many ways, the Illmatic of the internet era. Released a decade after Nas’s 1994 debut, Madvillainy signaled a similar paradigm shift. Where Illmatic marked a pivot from the Golden Era’s external focus on rocking parties and fighting the power to intimate personal introspection, Madvillainy shape-shifted introspection into internal world building. Hyper realism gave way to symbolic abstraction. Illmatic was grounded in humanity; Madvillainy elevated through mythology. Illmatic felt communal, ushering in an era of all-star production-by-committee. Madvillainy shined in the hypnotic intimacy of a single-producer showcase.

The end result was, perhaps, the first hip-hop album that could only thrive on the internet. It’s layered, fragmented, and aggressively idiosyncratic. It’s not built to rock the party, rumble in the trunk, or groove on the stoop. It’s a headphone masterpiece meant to be rewound, dissected, and decoded. Unraveling Madvillainy’s linguistic and sonic intricacies became both a right of passage and a community building exercise for message board mavens the web over.

With fans still deciphering Madvillainy, DOOM closed out the year with a second opus, MM..Food. True to its name, the largely self-produced project uses food as both metaphor and conduit to exploration of, well, everything. It’s delivered with a mix of whimsy and reflection belied by DOOM’s unhurried monotone.

MF DOOM’s 2004 marked a blueprint for navigating the digital streets. Raw, but intricate sample-forward production mixed for headphone excursions rather than car speakers. Dense lyricism lending itself to solitary listening and communal mythologizing. And, perhaps most importantly, a rapid fire release schedule that keeps fans (and threads) fed.

The digital streets go West (Kanye, that is)

Kanye West’s myth-making was every bit as intricate as MF DOOM’s. But where DOOM thrust his character construction front and center, Kanye hid his in plain sight.

In the early 2000s, Kanye West had far more in common with Little Brother’s Phonte than he did with Jay-Z. Both men were former college kids who had left school early to pursue a passion for hip-hop. They displayed immense talent, but didn’t fit the mold for rap stardom.

Beneath the scrappy everyman exterior, however, Kanye was playing a different game. Having grown up in a major city with a robust but not over crowed hip-hop scene (Chicago), his early mixtapes achieved a physical footprint beyond the scope of what Little Brother could achieve in Durham. His status as a double threat (rapper and producer) enabled him to secure a foothold in the industry as a beatmaker, and eventual in-house producer for Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records.

By 2004 Kanye was an A-list producer, and almost certainly a multi-millionaire. Industry power brokers still showed little interest in placing him in front of a microphone. But he wasn’t a pugnacious underdog clawing at the closed doors of an impenetrable industry. He was already firmly ensconced in it — just not quite in the way he wanted to be.

Kanye’s 2004 debut album, The College Dropout, did tell his story. At times quite passionately. That gave it enough authenticity to resonate with the message board crowd, who had been circulating leaks of unfinished tracks for months. But it was told with the benefit of hindsight. Kanye already knew how the story played out, affording him the granular view to craft his struggle rhymes as a hero’s journey rather than diary entries from the frontlines.

And everybody, from message board power users to casual of Top 40 listeners, loves a good hero’s journey.

A near-fatal 2002 car accident gifted Kanye precisely the narrative to elevate his story to super-hero level origin myth. In perhaps the first definitive “Kanye moment,” West immediately saw through the trauma to the marketing opportunity. Jaw still wired shut, he raced from the hospital to the studio to record “Through the Wire”.

To today’s ear, the song itself is unremarkable — a sped up Chaka Khan sample over an otherwise stock beat and rhymes that sound very much like they were delivered through a wired jaw. But as mythology, it resonated as a near DOOM-like solidification of character. It positioned Kanye, already gathering moment on digital forums, as “the chosen one,” overcoming not only industry barriers, but mortality itself to bring the world his story. It differentiated Kanye from his message board peers, while aligning him firmly in their tradition. If Little Brother, Murs, and Jean Grae reflected their listeners’ present struggles, Kanye embodied the prospect of triumph on the other side.

After months of digital ubiquity, radio picked up the frequency and “Through the Wire” landed Kanye into mainstream rotations. The song’s success essentially forced Roc-A-Fella’s hand, fast tracking The College Dropout onto 2004’s first quarter release schedule.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that what separated Kanye from his message board peers was a calculating cultural fluency mixed with a near-pathological thirst for superstardom. He was never fully of the message board world. But, he was adjacent enough to be fluent in its language. If Phonte embodied the digital room and DOOM galvanized it, Kanye read it like an instruction manual. He did the same with the mainstream world to which Roc-A-Fella granted access. Whether through calculated strategy or savant-like instinct, he identified the former as an emerging path to the latter.

As a result, the true genius of The College Dropout was not the music. It was that it made sense of the contradictions that defined early 2000s hip-hop. Kanye brought the cinematic scale of his Roc-A-Fella work to the dusty soul sample aesthetic of the digital streets. The themes — insecurity, existential uncertainty, crises of faith — were straight off the message boards. But the presentation — ostentatious, self-aggrandizing, larger than life — was mainstream rap star branding at its brashest.

The 21st Century conduit

The College Dropout sold nearly four million copies and garnered 10 Grammy nominations. That the biggest mainstream album of 2004 was a product of message board culture is the perfect encapsulation of the year the streets went digital. It also foreshadowed what would become the 21st Century’s de facto path to mainstream stardom. As message boards gave way to blogs, and eventually social media, today’s biggest names — Kendrick Lamar, Drake, J. Cole, Tyler the Creator, Cardi B — all built their initial buzz largely online.

Even Westside Gunn’s Griselda collective, through which Benny the Butcher reached stardom, while undecidedly “street” in substance, is a largely digital phenomenon. The streets might stream the odd song. But it’s the digital natives — Benny’s “weird Twitter nerds” — who drop $50 for limited edition vinyl and $100 for hoodies at shows. Does Benny really think hustlers and corner boys are running home to argue on Twitter about the best mixtape in his Plugs I Met series?

So when Benny says “the streets don’t hold the culture no more,” he’s right in the literal sense. But, the streets’ status as the driver of hip-hop music arguably ended in the early 80s. Once record labels began signing rappers at scale, the hottest MC was no longer determined by who rocked the hardest block parties or reigned supreme in corner cyphers. It was determined by who made the right record, with the right push, at the right time.

Once stardom became the barometer of success, MCs had little choice but to work inside the machine to varying degrees. Sign with the wrong label, piss off the wrong media programmer, or wear the wrong sweatsuit in a video, and MCs risked being relegated to “cult favorite” while better positioned peers reaped the benefits of stardom. Artists like Too $hort, E-40, and Ludacris became regional legends selling their music hand-to-hand on the streets. But they were virtually unknown nationally until they signed or partnered with major labels.

The internet effectively made the streets global. They enabled MF DOOM to amass an international following legion enough to sustain him through ticket and merch sales until his death in 2020 despite his records never receiving a single corporate radio spin. The digital streets turned small pockets of fans scattered throughout the world into cohesive communities fervently devoted to celebrating and amplifying their artists.

So it’s not that hip-hop left the streets. The streets simply migrated. In doing so, they got bigger, stronger, and better organized. That’s a win by any measure. And it’s the central truth behind 2004’s legacy as one of hip-hop’s most transformative years.

Originally published 10/20/25 on Medium.

Benny The Butcher made headlines recently, excoriating modern hip-hop’s shift away from the urban street culture of its origins.

“Ya’ll see the state the game is in when the streets don’t hold the culture or the game,” Benny railed in a recent Instagram Live session (ignore that irony for now). “Now you got weird Twitter nerds… and all these weird [people] got they hands on the culture.”

When Benny’s comments crossed my feed, I was revisiting The Foreign Exchange’s 2004 message board classic, Connected, in preparation to lead November’s Riff Album of the Month discussion. It made for a jarring moment, driving home a fundamental truth. Value judgments aside, Benny’s assessment isn’t wrong. He’s simply two decades late to the party.

I Googled “Hip-Hop albums of 2004.” The search results were a revelation. 2004 produced landmark albums on both sides of the mainstream/underground divide. But for perhaps the first time — at least since the 1980s era when all rap was by definition underground — it was the underground records that truly defined the year. Perhaps most tellingly, those albums didn’t generate their buzz through street corners, car trunks, barbershops, or even late-night mix shows. The buzz grew through the internet.

Connected is the most literal representation of 2004’s message board culture culmination. The cross-continental collaboration originated from a relationship forged on the forums of OkayPlayer. The project’s origin story, from IM’d digital files to physical release, embodied a shift that subtly began in the late 90s. However, it’s simply one album of many that fundamentally realigned the underground’s center of gravity in 2004.

New voices find their tribe

The magic of the message board era was that it empowered “new artists,” many of whom had been toiling on the industry’s outskirts for years, to find their audience and speak directly to them. There was no filter of major label marketing bibles or corporate media politics (and payments).

The act most emblematic of the digital path around the machine is Little Brother. The Durham, NC trio chose its name to highlight their place as the musical and cultural heirs to the Native Tongue (Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, et. al) legacy of left-of-center hip-hop in the late ’80s and ‘90s.

However, by the time MCs Phonte and Big Pooh linked with producer 9th Wonder as students at North Carolina Central University in the early 2000s, the industry had moved on from the Native Tongue era. Tribe had called it quits. De La Soul was without a label. Queen Latifah was winning Oscars. With artists like Eminem and 50 Cent selling more albums in a single week than Tribe’s biggest records moved in a decade, labels were no longer interested in line-drive doubles. They only wanted grand slam home runs.

Yet, with the consumer-level proliferation of high-speed internet, digital communities were quietly coalescing. Frustrated hip-hop fans feeling neglected by corporate radio and video outlets congregated on sites like OkayPlayer, Spitkicker, and SOHH to wax nostalgic about the Golden Age, lament the industry’s current state, and share new music that moved them.

Phonte was a regular participant on OkayPlayer’s message boards. So when he began sharing Little Brother tracks, fans felt seen by the warm production, playful everyman lyrics, and unabashed ’90s nostalgia. The Little Brother buzz quickly spread to other forums, and was ultimately instrumental in the group landing a deal with independent ABB Records.

When their debut album, The Listening, hit shelves in 2003, its buzz outpaced sales. The discrepancy was largely due to ABB’s inability to land the record on chain store shelves. On the hip-hop web, it might as well have been platinum. It was embraced not just as a return to the brand of hip-hop digital denizens had been craving, but a proof-of-concept that a product of the digital world could crack the industry, however peripherally.

2004 was, in many ways, defined by The Listening’s descendants. The Foreign Exchange is literally the OkayPlayer-generated pairing of Phonte and Dutch producer, Nicolay. Los Angeles underground stalwart Murs reached digital mass by pairing with 9th Wonder on Murs 3:16: The 9th Edition.

Jean Grae, after slogging through the New York underground scene for the previous seven years, found rabid support online. Where Grae’s multi-facets confounded major labels, digital fans embraced her three-dimensional representation of modern womanhood. Her 2004 album, This Week, got the boards buzzing. But it was the leaks that same year of her 9th Wonder collaboration, Jeanius, that truly elevated her to rarified air in the digital space.

Jeanius leaks were so widely pirated that the album was ultimately shelved, the label fearing Grae’s core audience already had the music. As a result, Jean Grae has the unfortunate distinction of being the first casualty of the internet’s persistent tendency to devour its own, however unintentionally.

Phonte, Murs, and Jean Grae all had distinctive creative voices and MCing styles. Yet there was a throughline connecting the three and the lion’s share of the budding digital stars emerging behind them. All were in their mid-20s and using music to navigate the everyday struggles of early adulthood in an increasingly inscrutable world. They were, in turns, smart and vulnerable and unafraid to embrace the duality. They were street savvy, but weren’t gangsters or hustlers and made no pretense of being such. They didn’t boast of victory’s spoils; they documented the real-time struggle of life’s grind.

In short, they connected with their audience because they were their audience.

Old heads, new life

If emerging technology giving rise to new voices is a story as old as time, the underground’s digital migration also enabled a more surprising development. Internet forums offered a second life to legacy artists of the ’80s and ’90s, discarded as relics or problem children by the industry machine.

Juice Crew alum, Masta Ace, known as much for his conceptual ingeniousness as his off-kilter mic dexterity, was one of the first veterans to gain traction in the digital space with his 2001 indie release, Disposable Arts. The album was a narrative-driven satire of the corporate overlords who had commandeered hip-hop in the ’90s and summarily moved on from him after 1995’s Sittin’ On Chrome failed to meet the decade’s rapidly rising sales bar.

Disposable Arts carried all the emerging hallmarks of a message board classic. Lyrical intricacy, conceptual cohesion, a modernized twist on vintage boom bap production, and a full-throated rebuke of mainstream excesses coalesced into a 73-minute opus of independent spirit. It immediately found traction in then-nascent online communities, where many users were unfamiliar with Ace’s early work.

However, the digital streets were still largely confined to college campuses, where ethernet was abundant and musical exploration was social currency — and illegally pirated. The infrastructure was not yet robust enough to be an artist’s primary ecosystem. Disposable Arts success as an unlikely comeback vehicle was ultimately still dependent on 20th Century outlets — underground radio, video rotation, legacy press coverage — to which Ace’s name still opened just enough side doors to let his original fanbase know he was still in the game.

When Ace dropped the follow-up, A Long Hot Summer in 2004, the equation reversed. It wasn’t just that the number of hip-hop forums had expanded exponentially in the three-year interim, or that the number of fans finding them had grown correspondingly (though both were true). Perhaps the most overlooked variable was that, by 2004, a significant portion of Ace’s original fanbase was now online.

Contrary to Benny’s framing, the internet didn’t simply subsume the physical streets; it absorbed them. A kid who was 16 in 1995, cruising the block to Sittin’ On Chrome, was now 25. They weren’t coming home from work and hanging on stoops or basketball courts. They was logging onto OkayPlayer or SOHH, and scanning SoulSeek for the latest gems.

If they saw themselves in the new jacks, in the vets, they saw seasoned OGs dropping knowledge hard-earned by navigating the industry and the world for decades. Spun back-to-back Connected and a A Long Hot Summer feel like two sides of a coin. Phonte and Nicolay are just beginning the climb, their struggle fueled by the optimism of eventually reaching the promised land. Ace was already on the other side, realizing there was no promised land, only more pavement to pound. Yet, both albums are propelled by the same heartbeat: an unbreakable faith in craft.

De La Soul’s digital resurrection was, perhaps, even more telling. Where Masta Ace had always been fundamentally an underground figure, De La Soul emerged in 1989 with a watershed album, 3 Feet High and Rising. It garnered heavy MTV and Top 40 radio rotation en route to a platinum plaque. Never quite comfortable with the industry’s machinations, the Long Island trio spent most of the ’90s actively tearing down the flower-power brand Tommy Boy Records built for them. With the emergence of the internet, they finally found the home they had seemingly been searching for.

De La Soul was the most visible of a collective of artists who founded Spitkicker.com in 2000. At its peak, Spitkicker functioned as a forum and distribution hub via its online radio station and mixtape releases that included music from community members and established artists. When Tommy Boy folded in 2002, the newfound freedom was a gift to De La Soul. Spitkicker was clocking 250,000 monthly visits. By funneling their promotional strategy entirely through the site, De La could speak to their audience with greater intimacy and immediacy.

As a result, 2004’s The Grind Date, released through the group’s own A.O.I. label, entered the market as De La Soul’s most anticipated release since at least 1996’s Stakes is High. With De La finally shedding the last vestiges of their “hip-hop hippies” residue in favor of a blue-collar craftsman ethos, The Grind Date stood beside A Long Hot Summer as the twin template of elder statesmanship in hip-hop’s digital underground.

If 2004 amplified a new generation of artists forged in the message board culture, it also represented the tipping point for an artist who personified the internet itself, and another who took the digital zeitgeist to the top of the charts.

In Part 2, we’ll explore MF DOOM, Kanye West, and the culmination of the underground’s digital migration.

Originally published 5/11/24 on Medium.

Ginger Roger famously boasted of the impeccable skillset she deployed staring in Hollywood musicals with Fred Astaire, saying“I did everything Fred did, only backwards and in high heels.”

So was the delicate dance performed by MC Lyte on her groundbreaking debut album, Lyte as a Rock. Hip-hop’s first full length solo album released by a woman, Lyte as a Rock hoofs the thinest of tightropes. In crafting the album, the 17 year old Brooklyn MC faced the monumental task of credibly her positioning herself as an MC without sacrificing her still coalescing identity as a woman. In doing so, she was, by default thrust into the center of the foundation upon which female MCs would build going forward.

There were female rappers before MC Lyte. A handful even notched notable hits. Yet, none truly challenged the perception that rap was the football of the music world: a testosterone-fueled bloodsport created, performed, and consumed by men. The women who had broken through generally did so with novelty trifles, often written by men.

Even Salt-N-Pepa, who scored a platinum plaque in 1987 with Hot, Cool & Vicious, while respected as performers, were not truly MCs. It was widely known the duo had never rapped before producer Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor plucked them from the Sears call center to perform raps he had written, because he liked their look. To be taken seriously as a female MC, Lyte wasn’t simply starting from zero, she was digging out of a hole. The shovel couldn’t have landed in more able hands.

From the moment her debut single, “I Cram to Understand U (Sam)” hit the streets in 1987, it was clear that Lyte was more than worthy of her “MC” moniker. She immediately seized command of Audio Two’s beat heavy track with a huskily authoritative vocal tone and casually confident delivery. Her voice is powerful enough to go toe to toe with the men with whom she jostled for mix show slots, but retains just enough lilt to beguile rather than intimidate. However, it’s her evocative storytelling that truly shines.

With the narrative richness of Slick Rick, Lyte deftly unspools a narrative of a dodgy boyfriend who is up to more than mere philandering. Just as we think “I Cram to Understand U” is a strident and clever callout of the player game in which male rappers often reveled, Lyte begins to drop breadcrumbs to the song’s true reveal: “the girl you was addicted to, her name was crack.” “I Cram to Understand U” remains one of the ’80s most impactful anti-drug songs, because it focuses on story and character rather than sloganeering.

While the track’s cautionary component lies as much in the collateral damage wreaked on those close Sam as Sam himself, Lyte resists the trap (trope?) of presenting herself as a helpless victim. “I Cram to Understand U” is presented as a hard learned lesson learned rather than a tragedy, as Lyte’s tone is equal parts sinewy, sarcastic, and knowing throughout.

The remainder of Lyte as a Rock builds on that persona, as well as MC Lyte’s formidable mic skills. After a brief spoken intro spells out the meaning of her album title and stage name (i.e., not “light” at all), the title track thrusts her directly into the arena of 1988’s rap gladiatorial games. Over a staccato rhythm from Audio Two, Lyte delivers a manifesto clearly defining who she is and the position she is claiming.

The opening verse deftly tackles the gendered stereotypes and questions of sexuality that predictably dogged female rappers. Lyte acknowledges the presumptions head on and shoots them down with playful aplomb. The elephant cleared from the room (or at least integrated into the party), Lyte is free to highlight her MC bonafides before ultimately positioning herself as a “leader” and a “scholar”.

By the tone of my voice, you can tell I am a scholar
I’m also the leader of the hip-hop followers
Now get this, I’m at a jam and I’m rockin’ it
Suckers like a checkerboard where black is clockin’ it
The grace as I ease across the stage
Bars around the audience, sort of like a cage
They laugh, ’cause they assume I’m in prison
But in reality, they’re locked in

If “Lyte as a Rock” dismantles the preconceptions that too often dogged female MCs, “I am Woman” finds MC Lyte channeling Helen Reddy to reposition her gender as a source of power. Despite an inert drum machine beat that feels primitive by ’88 standards, the track resonates as a statement of affirmation thanks to Lyte’s confident blend of certitude and playfulness as she deconstructs the delicate balance a female MC must strike.

The queen? Nah, that’s too corny
The sexy? Nah, that gets the guys too horny
The best? Now that sounds conceited
But what is true is true, so it has to be repeated

Well aware of the cultural tendency to tag all women in a given field with the shortcomings of their weakest representatives, Lyte doesn’t suffer laziness in female MCs easily. “10% Dis” takes Hurby Luv Bug protege Antoinette to the woodshed for what Lyte views as a lack of originality. While the track was inspired by Antoinette’s recycling of the “Impeach the President” drum break upon which Audio Two’s 1987 smash “Top Billin’” was built, her contempt reaches its zenith when calling out Antoinette’s flow and delivery for mirroring Rakim a little too uncannily. The track instantly put to rest any lingering notions that women weren’t built for battle, and remains one of the most savage dis tracks of the ‘80s.

MC Lyte, “Paper Thin” official music video (1988). Images from First Priority Music and Atlantic Records.

On an album sprinkled with multiple classic singles, the most iconic moment, and arguably the signature record of MC Lyte’s career, remains “Paper Thin”. One of hip-hop’s first true “relationship” songs, the albums’ buoyant third single finds Lyte spinning her gender to her advantage in affairs of the heart. She infuses the rapid fire lyrics with a vulnerability most of her male peers shied away from. Yet, she never lets vulnerability spiral into weakness. Instead, she surgically dices a smooth talking suitor’s empty promises. She’s more bemused by his antics than hurt, and doesn’t hesitate to reset the state of play on her terms.

So now I take precaution when choosing my mate (Uh-huh)
I do not touch until the third or fourth date (Word)
Then maybe we’ll kiss on the fifth or sixth (Yeah)
Time that we meet, (Muah — like that)
’Cause a date without a kiss is so incomplete
And then, maybe, I’ll let you play with my feet

Not content to simply play the background to the male stars staking claims as the faces of their respective neighborhoods, Lyte delivers “Kickin’ 4 Brooklyn,” a celebratory anthem positioning her as a preeminent spokesperson for her East Flatbush neighborhood (the ‘90s). Once again, Lyte overcomes plodding percussion by using her dexterous vocal inflections to provide sonic variation. A triumphant chorus invites listeners to rap along, whether at a packed house party or alone in their bedroom.

“Big Girls Don’t Cry” closes Lyte as a Rock with the closest thing it offers to an explicit female anthem. Deftly sampling Frankie Valli’s standard, Lyte uses the track to reinforce her own mental and lyrical fortitude with a woman’s touch more than sufficient to take on a man’s world. In doing so, she also lays down the gauntlet, challenging her female peers in rap and life to put on their big girl pants and take center stage.

That’s ultimately Lyte as a Rock’s greatest contribution to hip-hop’s evolution. By owning her space with the same ferocity as her male peers without sacrificing her femininity and the stories and perspectives it conveys, MC Lyte provided the blueprint for female rappers to not only make hits, but build identities, makes statements, and sustain lasting careers. It feels only fitting that, five years later, she would make history again, becoming the first female solo rapper to go gold with the crossover hit “Ruffneck”.

MC Lyte’s persona and vision are as apparent in the work of subsequent female MCs like Yo-Yo, Monie Love, and Lauryn Hill as her flows, cadences, and vocal nuances. In 2023, Queen Latifah, arguably the most successful female entertainer to emerge from hip-hop, introduced Lyte as “my hero” on LL Cool J’s F.O.R.C.E Tour.

The trajectory of women in hip-hop would likely have looked very different had Lyte as a Rock not elbowed its way to the front of 1988’s overcrowded honors class. That’s more than enough to qualify it as a bonafide classic. That its highlights can still rock a crowd with the weight of a bolder only bolsters its renown. The number of successors who built equally powerful legacies upon her foundation cements MC Lyte as a hip-hop legend.

By the Numbers

Production: 7
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 8.5
Delivery & Flow: 9
Content (Substance): 9
Cohesiveness: 8.5
Consistency: 7.5
Originality: 8.5
Listenability: 8
Impact/Influence: 10
Longevity: 9

Total — 85

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 3/30/24 on Medium.

Triumph defines identity, but adversity forges character.

By 1998, hip-hop’s identity as the mouthpiece of a generation and the embodiment of a modern American dream was well established. In the preceding quarter century, the culture and its art forms had gone from powered by bootleg electricity from New York City street lights to powering the billion dollar industry at the epicenter of global pop culture.

As often comes with outsized success, hip-hop’s character was strenuously tested during its meteoric ascension in the mid and late ’90s. Feuds erupted between regions, record labels, and stylistic niches. Increasingly formulaic corporate machinations had many original devotees questioning hip-hop’s future, even as new found fans propelled the latest releases to unprecedented commercial success.

It was an inflection point of reckoning that just so happened to coincide with a pivotal period of reflection for Gang Starr’s Guru and DJ Premier. Nine years after their debut, both veterans found themselves in the eye of a storm, feeling betrayed by the culture they helped define.

Guru had recently pled guilty to a 1996 charge for carrying a handgun onto a flight to Los Angeles, no doubt a precautionary measure, given the escalating coastal tensions that would claim Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls soon after Guru’s arrest. Premo found his vintage sample-based production style under increasing attack due to “sample snitches”. He was even facing a lawsuit from within the culture levied by no less than revered elder statesman Chuck D. The resulting opus is an intensely personal treatise that ultimately shone through the malaise as a beacon, guiding a culture adrift back to its essence and forward to a brighter tomorrow.

Any fears of Gang Starr chasing the shiny suited gravy train with their first release since 1994’s superlative Hard to Earn are immediately put to rest with Guru’s spoken salvo at the open of “You Know My Steez”. “The rhyme style is elevated, the style of beats is elevated. But it’s still Guru/Premier,” he assures us. “And there’s always a message involved.”

The moment the beat kicks in, the tragedy, discord, uncertainty, and crass commercialism of the past 18 months recede. The stuttered drum loop, cribbed from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “Flash to the Beat”, not only roots the record in hip-hop tradition, it quells any fears that mounting legal obstacles may have scared Premo away from his vaunted wax stacks. An accompanying guitar riff from Joe Simon’s psychedelic blues burner, “Drowning in the Sea of Love” warms the track like the first ray of sunshine peeking through a parting cloud.

The boom-bap production feels at once comfortingly familiar and exhilaratingly fresh. It imbues Guru’s trademark even-toned rhymes with an assured urgency. He asserts his status as an elder statesman, calling out corporate chicanery and putting hip-hop’s journey from society’s margins to pop culture’s pinnacle in poignant perspective.

The rejected stone is now the cornerstone
Sorta like the master builder when I make my way home

The table set, Gang Starr use the remainder of the album to serve us course upon course of veteran craft mastery and grown man wisdom. As an MC, Guru has always favored clarity over complexity. Like Ice-T out West, he draws his power from the precision of his ideas and the words with which he expresses them. Never has he been more powerful than on Moment of Truth.

“Robbin Hood Theory” lays out the album’s mission, while compelling disgruntled OGs to guide, not shun the next generation. Premier’s deceptively simply track puts the focus squarely on Guru. The lack of a break between the refrain and subsequent verses subtly builds intensity to match the escalating density of Guru’s philosophy.

Now that we’re getting somewhere, you know we got to give back
For the youth is the future, no doubt that’s right and exact
Squeeze the juice out of all the suckers with power
And pour some back out, so as to water the flowers

“Above the Clouds” further expounds upon the mindful sensibilities that make Moment of Truth Gang Starr’s most overtly conscious album. Guru and Wu-Tang lyrical swordsman Inspectah Deck extol spiritual and psychological enlightenment as a path to (and product of) earthly righteousness. Beginning a motif of tailoring his production to match his guests’ stylistic hallmarks, Premo tops the trademark thump of his drums with off key Far Eastern strings reminiscent of the kung fu movie scores favored by Wu-Tang abbot, The RZA. As a result, “Above the Clouds” plays like the Gang Starr/Wu-Tang love child we never knew we needed.

Cognizant not to lose the masses in the clouds, Guru and Premo season Moment of Truth with an array of street narratives; always cautionary, never celebratory. The hyper aggression of M.O.P.’s Billy Danze and Lil’ Fame proves the perfect contrast to Guru’s measured monotone on the headbanging “B.I. vs. Friendship”. The three MCs offer a strident warning about the danger of striving to grow while surrounded with peers intent upon stagnation.

Scarface and Guru share parables on the perils of misplaced trust in the blues drenched “Betrayal”. While “The Rep Grows Bigga” initially presents as an unofficial sequel to 1991’s sobering crime tragedy “Just to Get a Rep,” the final verse celebrates growth. Guru offers he and Premier’s success as an example of how the street hustler’s ethos can be applied productively to build a more sustainable “rep”.

DJ Premier and Guru circa 1998 (Image from Noo Trybe Records, Inc.)

Moment of Truth is at its most powerful when Guru shares his own struggles traveling the bumpy terrain of a still-winding path to evolution. Delivered years before social media was even a gleam in the eye of MySpace Tom, the record marks Guru’s first opportunity to clear the air on his oft-sensationalized arrest. He doesn’t waste the opportunity. “JFK 2 LAX” feels like his “realest s*** I ever wrote” moment — equal parts record straightening, catharsis, and epiphany.

He shares the context for his decision to travel armed before stoically owning up to his his error (“The streets is war, that’s what brothers carry weapons for/And I take the weight as I did before”). Ultimately, he places his situation within a global context of systemic oppression. The record’s maturity and nuance are just as powerful as its raw emotion. Guru acknowledges the legal system’s racially predatory bent, while imploring his brothers (and himself) to greater vigilance in maneuvering the traps.

They’re always making trouble yo, against the righteous
Killing us in cold blood, those beasts, those vipers
And as I sit feeling the pain in my wrist
I vow to myself that I’ma change this s***
Or at least I gotta try, or part of me will die
And only by action will any ideas solidify
So I inhale, exhale as I ponder
This grown man will make mistakes no longer

If “JFK 2 LAX” represents Guru’s real time contemplation, the title track plays like the hard earned fruit of his labor. Over triumphant strings, he delivers an affirmational series of life lessons bolstered by his veteran bonafides and the honest assessments of his own mistakes shared throughout the album.

Suicide? Nah, I’m not a foolish guy
Don’t even feel like drinkin’ or even gettin’ high
’Cause all that’s gonna do really is accelerate
The anxieties that I wish I could alleviate
But wait, I’ve been through a whole lot of other s*** before
So I oughta be able to withstand some more
But I’m sweatin’ though
My eyes are turnin’ red, and yo
I’m ready to lose my mind
But instead I use my mind

Though never released as a single, “Moment of Truth” immediately resonated with a culture and a generation that was living through its own moment of truth embodied in the murders of Tupac and Biggie and manifesting in the commodification of hip-hop.

It’s telling that on a 20 song album running 79 minutes, the closest thing to a flaw is an embarrassment of riches. The solid, “It’z a Set Up,” for example, is tempting to skip because of its placement between the two aforementioned tracks. And I’ll reluctantly confess to having forgotten the jazz-inflected “My Advice to You” and “She Knows What She Wants.” They made for a pleasant surprise upon re-visit, providing a much needed pallet cleanser just past the album’s halfway point.

The album’s pacing and structure are so masterful that it’s still gaining momentum when the conquering horns of “Next Time” kick in at minute 72. Moment of Truth’s penultimate banger comes down from the album’s cerebral headspace to beat its chest in what feels liked a hard earned victory lap not only for Guru and Premier, but for everything they represent.

Many who grew up on and with hip-hop — from Run-DMC and Whodini, to Public Enemy and N.W.A, to 2Pac and Nas — found themselves suffering a crisis of confidence following the end of the Renaissance period. Having been steeped in the music and culture for the majority of their lives, they suddenly felt disoriented amid the sequin suited gloss and Dirty South bounce.

Moment of Truth shines as an immaculate affirmation that while trends ebb and flow, rugged beats, chopped samples, substantive rhymes, and New York City swagger will always have a place in the culture.

It also fortified the place of veterans in what had been presumed a young man’s game. At 36 and 32 upon Moment of Truth’s release, Guru and Premier’s uncharacteristic embrace of their gray beard status is perhaps the album’s greatest asset. Long one of hip-hop’s most prodigious beat makers, Premo truly emerges as an elite executive producer, structuring the project as a journey with sonic peaks, valleys, and detours. Guru was always a sound writer, capable of delivering braggadocio, narrative, or social commentary. Here, he displays an elevated mastery of craft, deploying his full arsenal in unison on many of Moment of Truth’s modern day allegories.

As the sampled voice of Biggie Smalls punctuates Premo’s shoutouts to a staggering list of fallen friends on the soulfully resolute coda, “In Memory Of…”, it feels like we’re closing the book on a magical era; a time of great triumph, but also great tragedy. It’s the culmination of a culture built in shadows that, en route to becoming the global connective tissue of a generation, sacrificed many of its brightest lights back home.

It also feels like the beginning of the next chapter. In that chapter, stable in its foundation, hip-hop would emerge from its darkest moment, scarred but fortified, as a pillar of artistic innovation and social galvanization. It’s a chapter that would see Golden Age standard bearers like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Nas, and Jay-Z not only survive, but grow into hip-hop’s first generation of revered legacy artists and titans of industry.

If the moment of truth is the inflection point at which adversity will breed either triumph or tragedy, Gang Starr’s capstone album is a timeless embodiment of the fortitude, reflection, and maturity required to choose a fruitful path at the road’s most treacherous fork. By the time Moment of Truth makes its final fade, hip-hop’s lane on the road to triumph feels lovingly paved.

By the Numbers

Production: 10
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 8.5
Delivery & Flow: 8.5
Content (Substance): 10
Cohesiveness: 10
Consistency: 10
Originality: 8
Listenability: 9.5
Impact/Influence: 7.5
Longevity: 9

Total — 91

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 4/20/24 on Medium.

Few rappers personify hip-hop’s hustle like Too $hort. Though his Oakland stomping ground was 3000 miles from the culture’s New York City epicenter and a bridge too far from California’s burgeoning Los Angeles scene, $hort built a local following tens of thousands deep through relentless grind and a true player’s ingenuity.

Too $hort’s X-rated raps made his early records a tough sell to local record stores, so he slung his self-produced tapes from his car. Vivid vignettes of life in “The Town” coupled with gleefully raunchy freaky tales kept fiends coming back to his trunk as though he was slinging the streets’ most potent pharmaceuticals. Brick by brick, Too $hort built his rep from local legend to regional star to global hip-hop icon. From the time he signed with rap powerhouse Jive Records in 1988, every one of his albums went gold or platinum for the remainder of the 20th Century.

Like any savvy hustler, Too $hort entered the game to win it and get out. 1996’s Gettin’ It (Album Number Ten), was imagined as Short Dog’s final score before the game’s preeminent player rode off into hip-hop’s first official retirement to enjoy the spoils (financial and carnal) of over a decade’s worth of grinding. Those expecting him to coast into the sunset with a paint-by-the-numbers swan song were in for a surprise.

At a moment when rappers regularly started their albums with extended intros, Too $hort wastes little time with prologue. He’d already had 9 albums to set the stage. With a succinct proclamation of “… it’s gettin’ close to the end ya’ll, and we gonna kick it like this on the last album,” the instantly infectious title track is off to the races.

Over a slinky slice of synth funk courtesy of Oakland’s Shorty B, Too $hort nimbly maneuvers “Gettin’ It” to the intersection of players’ ball, motivational seminar, and Black Panther rally. It’s a hustlers’ anthem to be sure. But it goes beyond mere celebration of the lifestyle’ spoils to unpack the methodology of, and ultimately the reason behind the grind. Embracing his hard earned elder statesman status, $hort deftly leverages the title track to reposition himself from pimp to evangelist of economic empowerment:

You should be gettin’ it, everything you want
Everything you dreamed of, never have to front
You should be gettin’ it, gettin’ money
I’m talking ‘bout you, Black, don’t laugh it ain’t funny
You should get a good lawyer, like Johnnie Cochran
Swear to tell the truth, ‘Hell nah, I didn’t pop him’
Get your kids in school, so they can get an education
Get a degree, and take a vacation
You see I got all my game from the streets of California
Young millionaire with no high school diploma

If “Gettin’ It” is the primer, “Survivin’ the Game” is Too $hort’s master class in navigating the myriad boobytraps littering the road to riches. With his trademark mix of dry humor and unhurried cool, $hort methodically outlines the obstacles posed by jealous peers, predatory institutions, and even the technology divide that was just beginning to emerge in the mid-90s. After 15 years of lyrical pimpin’, Too $hort uses his final lap to expose the real pimps and what they’re actually peddling.

Ain’t no bailin’ out, you mad as hell
Instead of sending you to school, they pay to keep you in jail
That costs way more, when you do time
When you creep through the hood and kill your own kind
They buildin’ county jails, and penitentiaries
They gettin’ ready for the 21st Century
Computers takin’ over, money’s obsolete
Now they buyin’ all the houses in the ghetto streets

The first two tracks are flip sides of the same coin, with Too $hort fiercely espousing personal and cultural growth as paramount to survivin’ the game and gettin’ it. Themes established, Too $hort uses “That’s Why” to clear the air on his 1995 migration from Oakland to Atlanta.

Over a slapping G-Funk groove from his long time producer, Ant Banks, $hort unflinchingly details his beef with The Luniz, the banning of his music by local radio powerhouse KMEL, dirty business dealings, and escalating violence that informed his decision to switch coasts. Within the context of the album, $hort’s statement is clear: he’ll forever rep The Town, but he’s worked too hard to come up to let Town biz pull him down.

“Bad Ways” illustrates just how easy a regression to the mean can be, with Too $hort, Studd, Murda One, and Joe Riz all back-sliding into their vices of choice. The easy-riding tranquility of Spearhead X’s production underscores the stealth with which old habits rear their well coiffed heads. While his guests’ demons lean more towards gunplay and intoxicants, it comes as no surprise that the devil on $hort’s shoulder’s got a baddie on each arm.

Even 10 albums in, hip-hop’s preeminent player still finds creative ways to lay down game. “F*** My Car” is player philosophizing at its finest. $hort uses car culture to illustrate the circularity of a game in which women use sex for material gain, and men flash status symbols to lure women for sex. That Texas dirty riders UGK coopted the concept, complete with a similar chorus, two months later speaks not only to the potency of the particular pimp psalm, but the national reach of Too $hort’s ministry.

The universal appeal of Too $hort almost certainly owes much to the malleability of his player ethos to a myriad of milieus. At first pass, “Take My B****” plays as a pimp flex, the likes of which $hort fans had already heard in spades on his previous 9 outings. A closer listen reveals a sly relinquishing of his true bottom b****, the one he’s traveled the world and gotten rich with for 15 years.

Found a b**** in East Oakland, broke silly and young
Don’t let her fool ya playa, she ain’t really dumb
Don’t be a sucka and give an old hoe new life
She got so much game, ya wanna make her your wife
From California all the way to Miami
I pimped that b**** and now the hoes can’t stand me
Cuz when I put my b**** on the streets
N****s rush to the store, cuz they love the beats
We gettin’ all the money, we cashin’ all the checks
I ain’t no fake pimp n****, you can take my b****

Leave it to Too $hort to offer the antithesis of Common Sense’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.”. Common’s classic from two years prior wrapped its metaphor in sentimentality, romanticizing hip-hop’s artistry, even in the face of growing exploitation. In true mack fashion, $hort revels in the exploitation, essentially boasting that he built the game up and pimped it for all it was worth. Now that it’s used up, he’s more than willing to pass it down to the hopeless romantics and captain save-a-hoes.

Lest the bravado fool you, $hort chases “Take My B****”’s cynicism with a pure “for the love” moment. “Buy You Some” hits like a hip-hop summit, bringing together the West ($hort), the East (Erick Sermon), the Mid-West (MC Breed), and the dirty South (Kool-Ace) over a sinewy funk grind from Shorty B that somehow feels authentic to all four regions. Even lacking a hook, the street single became a staple on mixtapes and rap radio shows nationwide, representing a potent moment of unity amidst the era’s escalating regional wars.

“Gettin’ It” music videio, 1996 (Image from Jive Records)

While Gettin’ It is slightly front loaded, the back half still manages to flesh out the themes established early with enough standout tracks to make the fillers forgivable. “Nasty Words” is equal parts explanation for and defiant celebration of $hort’s long history of “Cuss Words” and “Freaky Tales.” The quietly menacing “Never Talk Down,” features $hort, Rappin’ 4-Tay, and MC Breed flexing their O.G. bona fides.

But its the freaky funking “I Must Confess” that emerges as the B-Side show-stealer. Over a burrowing bassline and seductive keys, Too $hort brings us full circle, slyly serving up the final freaky tale we didn’t realize we were craving amidst all the empowerment affirmations. It’s everything we’ve come to expect from Short Dog, but delivered in a decidedly grown and sexy (okay, grown and nasty) fashion. It’s also a sneakily well constructed song, embodying the culmination of the subtle growth integral to Too $hort’s longevity.

If Gettin’ It isn’t Too $hort’s best album — I’d argue it is, but if you countered with ‘93’s Get In Where You Fit In, I wouldn’t object — it’s certainly his most complete. Musically, conceptually, and culturally, it feels like both apex and deconstruction of one of hip-hop’s most unlikely journeys. The range of subjects and the clever insightfulness with which they’re mined exemplify the value that age and experience can add to a traditionally youth-driven genre. While not as sonically showy as the Southern Cali G-Funk that defined the era, Gettin’ It’s production carries a similar musicality, even as the crisp smack of the snares harkens back to the rawness of Too $hort’s early classics.

Ironically, it was $hort’s “retirement” album that proved a tipping point. In the wake of Gettin’ It’s platinum success, he landed a string of high profile feature appearances on albums by top stars from every region. Memorable turns on fan favorites from The Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, Scarface, Jermaine Dupri, and Sermon’s Def Squad only bolstered the legend of Too $hort. The accolades those tracks received may well have played a role in inspiring his official return in 1999.

Too $hort’s second act has now lasted longer than his first. His biggest commercial hit, “Blow the Whistle,” improbably came seven years into his encore. Still, Gettin’ It (Album Number Ten) feels like a pinnacle, and not just of Too $hort’s ascension. In that moment, $hort’s rise from indie go-getter slinging tapes from the trunk to platinum international star seemed like the personification of hip-hop’s emergence from urban outgrowth to full-fledged global culture.

It’s the final piece of a puzzle that clearly paints Too $hort as every bit the embodiment of hip-hop’s hustler spirit as any of his more lauded New York and LA contemporaries and successors. That he got out while the gettin’ was good, right before outsized success led the culture down its darkest timeline (and came back just as the heat was dying down), showed just how thoroughly hip-hop’s original pimp truly did get it.

By the Numbers

Production: 8
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 7.5
Delivery & Flow: 8.5
Content (Substance): 8.5
Cohesiveness: 9
Consistency: 8
Originality: 8.5
Listenability: 9
Impact/Influence: 8
Longevity: 8

Total — 83

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 5/16/24 on Medium.

On a Venn Diagram of East Coast hip-hop in 1990, the point of intersection would be One for All. When unrelenting militance, whimsical experimentation, and exuberant dance floor revelry were jockeying to define hip-hop’s next iteration, Brand Nubian’s dynamic debut deftly triangulated. The result is an album that feels like 1990 — both the culmination of all that came before, and the genesis of a new era.

“All for One” establishes the album’s motifs immediately. The quasi-title track digs into the tried and true James Brown stacks upon which countless late ’80s MCs feasted. But where their predecessors gravitated toward’s The Godfather’s frenetic proto-funk rhythms, Brand Nubian crib the afro-futuristic atmospherics of the mid-tempo “Can Mind” over which to introduce their aesthetic with measured precision.

The crew’s most recognizable voice, Grand Puba Maxwell (formerly of ’80s stalwarts Masters of Ceremony) sets it off with a breezy blast of nonchalant braggadocio. Puba’s rakish wit and seemingly intuitive vocal modulation reel the listener in immediately. Despite a nasal tone similar to Puba’s, Derek X differentiates himself with a stutter stepping flow and searing intensity. His verse is a declaration positioning X as the underdog with bite to match his bark. Running the anchor leg, Lord Jamar undergirds his partners’ braggadocio with a Black empowerment ethos seasoned with Five-Percent mathematics.

While Jamar is the most overt in positioning himself as a teacher and evangelist, it was a shared commitment to music as a tool to uplift that drew the three MCs together. That unity, as partners in rhyme and mission, is celebrated in the track’s minimalistic but sticky hook consisting simply of Brown’s sampled voice, sliced in courtesy of DJ Alamo, growling “it’s all for one” and the three MCs chanting the group name in unison.

Despite all three MCs migrating from previous group and solo endeavors, their chemistry feels as organic as it is electric. One of two singles released shortly after the group’s formation in 1989, “Feels So Good” finds the trio passing the mic in rapid succession and coming together to punch home key lines. Stylistically, it conjures ghosts of park jams past. Lyrically, Brand Nubian pepper the freewheeling revelry with messages of self love and Black pride in line with their present day.

“Ragtime” and “To The Right” both build on the established template, flipping recognizable Golden Era samples with a newfound looseness foreshadowing the mid-90s Renaissance. While there are no shortage of jewels dropped amid both tracks’ playful boasts, it’s “Drop the Bomb” where the party truly finds its purpose.

Pairing familiar samples from two percussive powder kegs — Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Jazz” and Trouble Funk’s “Drop the Bomb” — the track builds on the urgency of its source material while bending it to Brand Nubians’ mission. Their “jungle” is an early ’90s New York boiling over with long simmering tension inflamed by a string of racially charged killings and a decade of Reagan and Bush. The “bombs” they’re dropping are truth bombs, giving the track’s pulsating percussions the feeling of war drums. The propulsive rhythms compel bodies and minds into motion on more than just dance floors.

As galvanic as the chemistry between the three MCs is, it speaks to the unifying power of their vision that their respective solo offerings don’t slow the momentum of One for All’s fast moving A-Side. The solo tracks actually add layers to the Brand Nubian quintessence, allowing each MC to expound upon his unique style and and philosophy.

Derek X (soon to become Sadat X) unleashes a rapid fire foray of righteous indignation tempered with strategic pragmatism on “Concerto In X Minor”. X’s musical manifesto lays out the genesis of his worldview, incisively drawing parallels between the inflammatory racial attacks of the late ’80s and the aggressions that have defined America throughout the centuries.

Now, Huey Newton was slain
And we all felt the pain of Yusef Hawkins
And they was mad, but we was squakin’
They tried to show a false compassion
Yet, at the rally, they tried to bash in our brains
Further addin’ to the bloodstains
I was mad at this news, and so was my brothers
And I wanted to get violent, but I’m a lover of Black mothers
And Black mothers need sons
Not children that’s been killed by guns

Built atop the jaunty bounce of Cannonball Adderley’s “Walk Tall”, “Concerto in X Minor” marks One For All’s only overt foray into the jazz aesthetic beginning to supplant proto-funk and hard soul as the go-to sampling source for New York hip-hop producers. The sonic choice, paired with X’s unconventionally shape-shifting rhyme patterns, positions the group’s youngest member as both a stylistic and ideological leader of the new school.

Exuberant drums and cosmic horns courtesy of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Bad Tune” lend Lord Jamar an air of majesty, cementing him as the group’s most strident proselytizer on “Dance to My Ministry”. His solo soul session moves beyond mere sermon, evolving into a full-throated exultation of libration through knowledge of self.

Ayo, come, into my laboratory
I’ma take you on a tour
An ankh is the key, and the key is knowledge
Which unlocks my lab’s door
Kemet lets you enter
Heat generates from the center
Lord Jamar’s an inventor
Production of Black facts, put onto a black wax
I got a lot to say, set in stacks

Grand Puba’s magnetic charisma and agile flow add an alluring flavor to his Five-Percent jewels, elevating “Wake Up” from didactic primer to roisterous anthem of purposeful partying. If the slick funking guitar riff from The Night-Liter’s “Tanga Boo Gonk” is the gas that fuels One For All’s breakthrough single, the match that sets it ablaze is Puba’s pure force of personality.

The solution — knowledge of self to better ourself
Cause I know myself, that we can live much better than this
Nothing’s changed, it’s just another sequel
The devil’s still causin’ trouble amongst the righteous people
Drugs in our community (that ain’t right)
Can’t even get a job (that ain’t right)
Poisonin’ our babies (that ain’t right)
Lyin’ who is God (that ain’t right)

After a trifecta of potent verses bolstered by a crowd rocking bridge and dancehall-inspired call and response chorus, the upshot is clear. While his partners’ unerring righteousness may be the foundation of Brand Nubian, Puba is the star with the preternatural magnetism to draw the masses to the message.

Puba’s star power proves a double edged sword. It’s fitting that the Grand man’s first bars on the project find him likening himself to David Ruffin. As Ruffin’s star rose, the Temptations’ vocal wunderkind unsuccessfully demanded his group be renamed “David Ruffin & The Temptations”. In direct contrast to the egalitarian ethos implied in its name, One for All’s B-Side plays like a quasi-solo Puba showcase. (One for All’s production is, ironically, credited to “Grand Puba Maxwell & Brand Nubian”.)

Puba proves more than capable of commanding an extended sequence by his lonesome. “Step to the Rear” brings his rhythmic fluidity to the forefront, his cadence and vocal tone shifting with the ease of a Suzuki motorbike without ever falling out of pocket. His melodic toasting and slyly slack flow imbue a kinky reggae undercurrent to the the slow grooving funk of James Brown’s “Popcorn With a Feel” as Puba celebrates his effortless proficiency on the mic and in the bedroom on “Who Can Get Busy Like This Man”.

Yet, it feels incongruous that on a project purportedly designed to showcase Brand Nubian as a unit, Puba cronies Positive K and L.G. rhyme on the same number of B-side tracks as X and Jamar: one. (The CD/digital version benefits from the bonus tracked inclusion of 1989’s full-group single “Brand Nubian”.) Puba proves sufficiently fluent in Five-Percent mathematics and social justice flash points. Yet, when left to his own devices, his tendencies lean more toward braggadocio and flirtation than edification. Though enjoyable, the album’s back half feels insubstantial in the shadow of the blistering A-Side.

It’s no coincidence that when the three MCs reunite, the result is Side 2’s runaway standout and the album’s most iconic song. Combining the moody guitar licks of Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians’ “What I Am” with the explosive funk flourishes of Kool & the Gang’s “Kool It (Here Comes the Fuzz)”, “Slow Down” wraps a trio of cautionary tales inside the infectious boogie of a hard grooving dance floor filler.

All three rappers pepper their stories with enough ribald humor to make the medicine go down easy. That every verse centers a woman in its allegory of toxic excess saddles the song with an undercurrent of the misogyny that sometimes undercuts Five-Percent ideology’s principle of unity. Yet, it also speaks to the vulnerability of Black women in a predatory society.

Brand Nubian’s ability to sound stark warnings about the perils of drugs, materialism, and promiscuity within an ear worm that scored heavy rotation in clubs, mix shows, and music video outlets offers a tantalizing hint of what the group could have accomplished had it stayed together. Predictably, Grand Puba exited shortly after One for All’s tour run. Brand Nubian soldiered on as a duo, delivering the follow-up, In God We Trust, in 1993. It held its own in a crowded field, but missed Puba’s flavor. Puba’s freestyle heavy 1992 debut, Reel to Reel, would’ve similarly benefitted from his former partners’ focus.

By the time the three reunited for 1998’s Foundation, their chemistry was still intact, but their moment had passed, leaving One for All as a singular bolt of lightening in a bottle. That lightening, however, magnetized a coast. One for All sold nearly 400,000 units, almost entirely along the Northeast Corridor. Had Soundscan counted the flood of bootlegs rampant on New York City streets and dubs floating about HBCU dorms, Brand Nubian surely would have scored a gold plaque.

By combining the unrepentant Black righteousness of New York’s late ’80s vanguard with the colorful exuberance of the burgeoning alternative movement, Brand Nubian presented a path into the new decade for conscious rap. They made consciousness fun and accessible just as fans were beginning to grow fatigued from the lyrical density and sonic intensity of hip-hop’s first wave of revolutionaries. That none of the imitators who briefly emerged found similar success speaks the degree of difficulty of marrying such disparate elements and the industry’s hard lean into gangsta rap following the outsized success of N.W.A’s Efil4zaggin the following year.

As a result, One for All holds a unique place in the pre-Renaissance cannon. It’s both a time capsule, succinctly capturing all of 1990’s seemingly divergent hallmarks, and a glimpse down an alternate timeline of what could have been were hip-hop able to sow all of those creative threads into one cohesive vision.

By the Numbers

Production: 8.5
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 9
Delivery & Flow: 9
Content (Substance): 10
Cohesiveness: 7
Consistency: 8
Originality: 9
Listenability: 9
Impact/Influence: 8
Longevity: 7.5

Total — 85

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 3/2/24 on Medium.

In 1992, a heavy burden rested upon Common Sense’s slender shoulders. Among the first featured artists in the The Source magazine’s Unsigned Hype column, the Chicago MC was positioned by the ’90s hip-hop bible as not only the valedictorian of a potentially paradigm shifting “Avante Garde School,” but a wunderkind MC tasked with hoisting America’s third largest metropolis on his back and carrying it onto the national stage.

Despite showing flashes, his debut, Can I Borrow a Dollar? failed to deliver on all fronts. It’s not that Common Sense was scorned. Amid the long shadows cast by seminal debuts from fellow chosen ones on either coast (Snoop’s Doggystyle and Nas’s Illmatic) in the ensuing years, he simply got lost. By fall of ’94, hip-hop’s mid-90s Renaissance was in full swing, and Common Sense was simply one of many interesting, if ultimately unimpactful, footnotes from hip-hop’s free-for-all early ’90s transitionary period.

In a year marked by debuts from a new class of golden children (Nas, Biggie, Method Man, Outkast) and opuses from decorated veterans (Scarface, Gang Starr, Redman, MC Eiht) Chicago’s prodigal son flew under the radar. Amid the storm of now classic missives, Common Sense tiptoed back onto the scene with the quiet precision of the disarmingly delicate piano loop that invites us into Resurrection via its unhurried title track.

In a moment marked by bombast and melodrama, there was something instantly alluring about the easy assuredness with which Common tap danced with No I.D.’s tingling keys and deceptively robust drums. In stark contrast to Can I Borrow a Dollar?’s spastically frantic flows, “Resurrection” is decidedly leisurely, even as Common’s syllabic gymnastics retain their degree of difficulty.

I stagger in the gatherin’
Possessed by a patterin’ that be scatterin’
Over the global
My vocals be travelin’, unravelin’ my abdomen
It’s lines that’s babblin’ grammatics that are masculine

Like a jazz soloist, Common’s performance feels born of a symbiotic relationship with the track’s other elements. As first pass, the entendre heavy rhymes feel like a free association exercise in wordplay. Yet, there’s a palpable sense of direction. With the music as his muse, it feels like Common is reconnecting with his essence as an MC and a person — from his affection for BET’s Madelyne Woods to his ongoing struggles with alcohol. As a table setter, “Resurrection” offers a subtle but clear indicator that any rebirth that’s going to occur over the course of the next 50 minutes will begin with a retrenchment; Common’s recommitment to the essence of himself and his art form.

If the title track marks a push of the reset button on Common’s hip-hop career, “I Used To Love H.E.R.” is his plea for a reset of hip-hop itself. In turns nostalgic, mournful, and strident, the album’s lead single plays like couples therapy through extended metaphor. Positioning hip-hop as a first love gone astray, Common meticulously sorts out their shared history en route to reckoning with their current crossroads.

Now, periodically, I would see
Ol’ girl at the clubs, and at the house parties
She didn’t have a body, but she started gettin’ thick quick
Did a couple of videos, and became Afrocentric
Out goes the weave, in goes the braids, beads, medallions
She was on that tip about stoppin’ the violence
About my people she was teachin’ me, by not preachin’ to me
But speakin’ to me, in a method that was leisurely
So easily I approached
She dug my rap, that’s how we got close
But then she broke to the West Coast, and that was cool
’Cause around the same time, I went away to school
And I’m a man of expandin’, so why should I stand in her way?
She’d probably get her money in L.A.
And she did, stud, she got big pub, but what was foul
She said that the pro-black was goin’ out of style

Released as G-Funk — with its seductive pairing of unrepentant hedonism and lush synth arrangements — was reaching its commercial apex, “I Used To Love H.E.R.” gave voice to the unsettling feeling starting to percolate among early generations of hip-hoppers. Just as it was enjoying unprecedented embrace and long withheld monetary spoils, hip-hop seemed to be growing distant from the very people who shaped it.

That 1994 is now often cited as hip-hop’s greatest year lends the track a touch of unintentional irony. Today’s reverence for ’94 also speaks to how thoroughly the hallmarks of commodification were being woven into the culture, making Common’s now signature song all the more bittersweet.

As strong as the opening song suite is, it’s the 4th track “Book of Life”, on which Resurrection’s mission truly comes into focus. Over wandering winds and arguably the album’s heaviest drums, Common delivers one of the most nakedly personal reflections hip-hop had seen. Completely shorn of bravado, aggression, and theatricality, “Book of Life” is a living, breathing portrait of a young man negotiating the treacherous roads of late 20th Century early adulthood.

Common’s middle class upbringing sheltered him from the punishing perils of poverty that drove most hip-hop narratives of the time. His stakes aren’t life or death. Yet, the relative ease of his journey makes his failure to navigate it all the more frustrating, his frank self-reflection all the more unforgiving.

I want a job but I ain’t lookin’ (how come?)
I ain’t tryin’ to degrade myself, bein’ nobody’s Calvin
I’m a couch bum
What makes it bad, I had incentive
But that disintegrated to a state that stagnated
I procrastinated
I can’t recall a day without bein’ intoxicated
Or blowed
I’m dealin’ with a full deck, and any day I can fold
What makes it bad, I wasn’t dealt that bad a hand

Having looked unflinchingly inward, Common uses the next two tracks to cast an equally piercing eye on the world he inhabits. While No I.D. steps from behind the boards to open “In My Own World (Check the Method)” with a leisurely flex of clever braggadocio, Common follows with a moody meditation on his personal evolution and changing place in a familiar world. His tone vacillates from boastful to strident to restless as he struggles to balance his seemingly opposing realities: rising fame and escalating pressure, militance and lustiness, professional growth and personal awakening.

The tone shifts to warm nostalgia on “Nuthin’ To Do”, a journey through the high jinks of the exhilaratingly aimless nights on Chicago’s South Side that comprised so much of his youth’s tapestry. The track’s unhurried joie de vivre is disarmingly inviting, even as some of Common’s early ’90s pastimes haven’t aged well. (A casually tossed off reference to gay bashing lands particularly uncomfortably on the modern ear.) Yet, the past tense phrasing of the song’s verses stands in jarring contrast to the present tense chorus. It’s as if, as fondly as he remembers his teenaged exploits, he’s well aware that they represent a closing chapter, past which he has already read. (“But the s*** ain’t as fun now, and the city’s all run down.”) What he’ll grow into is the question with which the album seems to wrestle throughout.

“Communism” opens the B-Side with a clever mission statement in which Common strives to define an ethos using the first syllable of his stage name. It’s a playful diversion punctuated by with moments of profundity reminiscent of Tribe’s “What?”

To my comp I’m a ton I get amped like Watts in a riot
My compact disc is a commodity, so buy it
Instead of competing with Pete
Com compromised, Com made a promise
Not to commercialize, but compound the soul
With other elements, compelling sense into Communism

In many ways, “Thisisme” feels like the culmination of Resurrection’s journey. Sonically, No I.D. stays true to the album’s airy jazz aesthetic. Yet, the crisp drums and spare arrangement barrel forward with a newfound certitude to match the scratched chorus cribbed from Boogie Down Productions’ “Build and Destroy”: “I love the way I am, and can’t nobody out here change me.”

Lyrically, Common reaches a state of acceptance of himself and his current place, existential uncertainty and all. His delivery lags behind the beat, his off-kilter rhyme patterns refusing to settle into a pocket. The unorthodox delivery holds attention on his words despite the temptation to float away on the serene saxophone sample from Alton McClain and Destiny’s “The Power of Love”. Explicitly connecting to the original’s theme, Common concludes his stream of consciousness trek by finding harmony in simplicity, proclaiming:

I love my music, I love my mama
I love myself, I love you, and you love me

“Thisisme” feels so much like a resolution that the album struggles to retain its taut intentionality for the remainder of its runtime. “13th Chapter (Rich Man vs. Poor Man)” a roisterous tag team with fellow South Sider Y-Not, makes for a spirited coda. Beginning as a devil-may-care lampooning of the two MCs’ struggles to crack the cheat code to late stage capitalism (peppered with a heavy dose of ingenious word play), it slyly builds into an allegorical callout of class hierarchy and a rallying cry for economic empowerment. It presents a clear maturation from the generational apathy chronicled through so much of the album.

However, the braggadocious boom-bap of “Orange Pineapple” feels reductive on the back half of an album so otherwise strategic in its progression. Likewise, “Maintaining,” and “Sum S*** I Wrote” (which features the album’s hardest beat, courtesy of Y-Not) would have made for inspired B-Sides to 12-inch singles. As the album’s thirteenth and fourteenth tracks, they simply feel like walking in circles at the end of a sojourn that’s already reached its natural conclusion. Had “Pop’s Rap,” the closing monologue delivered by Common’s father, Lonnie Lynn Sr., come directly after “13th Chapter,” its messages of upliftment and subtext of “this too shall pass” would likely have felt more far more resonant, their connections to the album’s themes cutting through clearly.

The only real criticism consistently leveled at Illmatic, to which Resurrection is periodically compared, is that at 10 tracks, it’s too short. The latter’s expansive scope actually validates the brevity of the former. An Illmatic-length Resurrection could well have stood among the best albums of a truly stacked year.

Though Resurrection sits firmly on ‘94’s second tier (certainly no small feat), Common succeeded in breathing life back into his career and taking the first steps in carving out a new lane in hip-hop. The Native Tongue collective, with whom Common would be affiliated for the remainder of the ’90s, are often credited with creating the “regular guy” mold from which the struggle rap of the earlier 2000s grew. In actuality, they were eclectics and bohemians. It may not have been the identity previously associated with the rap star prototype, but it was an identity. Common Sense truly spoke for the faceless 75% of every high school. The kids who play a little ball, but aren’t jocks. Get descent grades, but aren’t academics. Get a few girls, but aren’t players.

It’s fitting that following Resurrection’s success, Common was forced to drop “Sense” from his name due to a lawsuit by an Orange Country reggae band that held the copyright. The abbreviated moniker perfectly captured his position as hip-hop’s thinking everyman, giving voice to the gradual, and at times painstaking, process of self-discovery that defines early adulthood.

Resurrection represents the beginning of an odyssey of self-reflection marked by transcendent peaks (2000’s Like Water for Chocolate) and polarizing detours (2002’s Electric Circus) before culminating in Common’s triumphant actualization on 2005’s Be. A fully actualized Common would ultimately transition from searcher to sherpa, using his music and accumulated wisdom to guide others along their paths of discovery. He’s still engaging when inspired. Perhaps even necessary. But much less interesting.

Art, like life, truly is about the journey. Resurrection embodies the difficulty, the power, and ultimately the beauty in simply taking the first step.

By the Numbers

Production — 8.5
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 9.5
Delivery & Flow: 9
Content (Substance): 10
Cohesiveness: 8.5
Consistency: 8
Originality: 8.5
Listenability: 9
Impact/Influence: 7
Longevity: 7

Total — 85

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 9/21/25 on Medium.

I wish I remembered how “Hustle Don’t Give” first crossed my radar.

The lead single from Apollo Brown & Che` Noir’s 2020 album is an anthemic affirmation of out-of-the-mud resilience that hits the gut, heart, and head in equal measures. A verse-of-the-year caliber feature from Black Thought that lives up to every connotation of The Roots’ frontman’s stage name is simply the icing on the cake. The duo’s first collaborative single quickly emerged as one of my favorite songs of the year. I immediately pre-ordered the album despite being unfamiliar with Che` Noir.

So it speaks to the singular surrealism of 2020 that the precise moment of discovery has long since been absorbed into the existential chaos that defined a most trying year. That’s likely why As God Intended went largely overlooked, even in the indie hip-hop circles where Apollo Brown’s soul-drenched boom bap beats had long been a mainstay.

Now five years removed from its release, As God Intended stands as one of the decade’s best hip-hop albums. It’s a no-skip journey that lives and breathes as a complete body of work, even as each song resonates as a stand-alone statement. It marries naked introspection with universal themes set against a vividly depicted backdrop of Noir’s native Buffalo, NY. However, it was uncomfortably out of step with what overwhelmed audiences craved in the moment.

As God Intended landed on July 10th, 2020. We were four months into COVID quarantine. The murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor were still fresh. Store shelves were barren. City streets were ablaze. Audiences sought escapism, finding solace in old favorites and distraction through TikTok bait. It wasn’t that Brown’s gritty beats and Noir’s incisive rhymes didn’t match the moment. They might have matched it too well.

Perhaps that’s why the album stuck with me. It’s a late-night headphone sojourn through a world, pulsating with humanity in all its struggles, contradictions, and resilience. For all its tensions and disillusionment, it feels achingly alive. From the moment the muscular drums kicked in behind the plaintive piano keys and contorting electric organ on “Anti-Social,” I was locked in. When Che` Noir took the mic nearly a minute in, I was primed to hang on every word.

Within the first 16 bars, the then 26-year-old MC methodically introduces herself to the world with equal doses of pride, self-possession, and determination. Weaving street savvy, personal reflection, social consciousness, and spirituality into an easy-flowing stream of consciousness, Noir wastes little time proving she’s a voice with a lot to say and an extensive toolkit with which to say it.

If the opener is an introduction to who Che` Noir is, the remaining 13 tracks are a chronicle of how she came to be. “Blood is Thicker” breathes vivid life into the environment that shaped her and countless others. It’s a perfect primer on Noir’s style, best described as unsparingly efficient. In contrast to a moment when the mainstream scene was dominated by double-time mumble rap and the underground reveled in masturbatory wordplay, her style springs from her substance. Every pregnant pause, verbal inflection, and cadence shift feels intentional, offering rich shading to the picture she’s painting.

In the first verse, she personifies the inner-city. The cold detachment of her delivery mirrors the environment, as she unspools its role as a cauldron that both mints steel and melts more fragile compounds:

I may be the reason that your seed deceased
I birth kings and queens, gangstas, fiends and thiefs
Most of my buildings either vacant or drug spots
You dream to make it out, but then you wake up to gunshots
I know you consider me your home, your family for life
But I betrayed you, left you scarred and damaged for life

In the second verse, Noir yanks away the veil of abstraction. Her tempo and intensity increase as she lays bare how the environment both traumatized and fortified her, and unpacks the complexity of her ongoing relationship with it:

To make it out is a journey, take a while to embrace
But it’s a celebration once you make it out of this place
Then survivor’s guilt, hardest pill to swallow
Make it out the hood, and then you thought your peers would follow
You was like my family, now I gotta burn down my bridge
Blood thicker than water, but that’s why I learned how to swim

“Money Orientated” takes a similar scalpel to the belief systems fueling the often contradictory aspirations of Noir and many others: capitalism and spirituality. With Brown’s pensive keys and elongated strings setting the tone, it’s more meditation than dissertation. Noir is content to sit in the tension rather than resolving it. Even as she stoically observes that “jail and death is where this money don’t matter,” the iconic AZ sample Brown scratches into a chorus affirms that “my mentality is money orientated.”

On “Daddy’s Girl,” Noir leverages Brown’s most ethereal track to deliver not only one of the album’s most nakedly personal narratives but also one of hip-hop’s most nuanced explorations of family. In lesser hands, it could have devolved into a paint-by-the-numbers lament about an absentee father. Instead, Noir stitches a tapestry of ripple effects. Her father’s absence is positioned as a defining force for an entire family dynamic, shaping her relationship with the women in her life, who themselves are struggling to fill the void.

It also offers the album’s first extended critique of a criminal justice system that appears as subtext throughout. Noir acknowledges her father’s incarcerations as a systemic cause of his unavailability. In one of the album’s most palpably human choices, she offers empathy, but not absolution.

You blamed it on your bids and your time inside
I wrote you letters, first time I learned to fly a kite
A quiet kid with a Tyson fist
You was facing life in bids
I was wearing diapers then
Back when granny took us all to church, teachin’ Christ and sin
Truth be told, you’ll never make up for all that time you missed
Life’s a bitch

As the album rounds into its back half, throughlines become more prominent. It becomes clear that As God Intended isn’t simply a collection of individually potent songs, but an intricately woven urban mosaic.

“Worth Gold” and “The Apple” land like a two-part clarion call for self-worth in a world constructed to dehumanize. The former paints with a broad brush, Brown’s throbbing drums lending it the feel of a defiant march. The latter burrows inward, offering a pinpointed love letter to Black women and girls. The pairing also surfaces Che` Noir’s gradual evolution from documenting survivor to advocate and guide. She doesn’t preach from the mountain top so much as offer a roadmap for others aspiring to walk the path that she’s still maneuvering.

With its unflinching critiques of the criminal justice system, “Freedom” universalizes what “Daddy’s Girl” personalized. Landing in the immediate aftermath of the Floyd, Arbery, and Taylor murders and at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, “Freedom” provided As God Intended’s most timely moment in 2020. Sadly, it’s still the most immediate track today.

For my n****s behind the wall tryna learn up a trade
You get free, and they make it hard just to earn up a wage
You either return to the cage or get murdered in graves
That’s the power, how racist judges can turn us to slaves

Ultimately, Noir positions knowledge as a higher form of freedom and herself as a frontline soldier in the war to unlock it. “Follow the Wisdom” and “Live by the Code” build on the principle. The former distills lessons passed down, through nature and nuture, from the people and places that shaped her. Skyzoo’s guest verse, complete with extended Macbeth analogy, lends Noir’s no frills-life lessons an aura of mythology. The latter compiles those lessons into an ethos. It’s a survival guide, not a cheat code to circumvent struggle. Struggle is baked into its foundation.

The closer, “‘94,” uses Che` Noir’s birth on the most historic day in one of hip-hop’s definitive years to position her clearly within the lineage of the genre’s re-imagined Horacio Alger mythology. It solidifies the feeling that undergirds the entire album: for Noir, hip-hop isn’t simply a formative influence, it’s in her DNA.

April 19, doctor say “It’s a girl”
In ’94, Illmatic dropped the same day I came in this world
My mother said “The World is Yours”, she was givin’ me game
It’s only right I take a trip down “Memory Lane”
In ’94, that’s when Biggie dropped Ready to Die
The first time I heard “Gimme the Loot”, I kept pressin’ rewind
I grew up hearin’ 2Pac’s “So Many Tears”
That’s when I fell in love with rap, and said “I’m supposed to be there”

KRS-One once defined hip-hop as “victory over the streets.” It’s a narrative delivered across eras and styles by rappers from Melle Mel to Nas to Kendrick Lamar. Yet, despite coming out more than 40 years after hip-hop’s first formal recording, As God Intended may be the first album-length rendering of that narrative by a female artist.

Che` Noir doesn’t simply do what the boys do. She tells the story through a distinctly female lens, centering her perspective as a daughter, sister, girlfriend, and future mother — all roles typically relegated to supporting characters (if not adversaries) in hip-hop’s male-driven hero’s journey.

The album also moves with a blue-collar stoicism reflective of both Noir’s Buffalo and Brown’s Detroit stomping grounds. There’s no melodrama, no aggrandizement, no histrionics. Just beats, rhymes, and life’s battle scars. That’s hip-hop in its most timeless form. As God Intended never felt “new.” As a result, it doesn’t get old.

That’s why 2026 feels ripe for a Che` Noir/Apollo Brown reunion. Since 2020, Che` Noir has taken the frequency-over-scope approach most expedient in the algorithmic era. She has steadily expanded her fanbase with a flurry of EPs and mini-albums. Most are under 30 minutes and largely self-produced. Her output is consistently good. She has grown as a technician. But she has yet to deliver another statement as nuanced or visceral as As God Intended, in part because the miniature canvases don’t give her the space to truly paint.

Now, with more eyes on her, a well-executed As God Intended II could generate the critical and digital buzz that the pandemic robbed its predecessor of. It could also bring enough fresh ears to the original to reframe it as the contemporary classic that it deserves to be.

Originally published 2/17/24 on Medium.

“Be havin’ dreams that I’m a gangtsa,” Nas confessed to open the second verse of 1994’s “N.Y. State of Mind”.

…drinkin’ Moëts, holdin’ TECs
Makin’ sure the cash came correct, then I stepped
Investments in stocks, sewin’ up the blocks to sell rocks
Winnin’ gunfights with mega-cops

Perhaps young Nas’s pen contained a crystal ball as he poured his life onto the loose leaf pages that would ultimately become his storied debut album, Illmatic. Maybe it was his lyrical version of vision boarding: a vivid rendering of the future to which he aspired etched along the path to actualization.

Whatever the case, It Was Written, Nas’s sprawling 1996 sophomore effort unfolds like the long form version of his younger self’s lucid dream. Call it art imitating. Or life imitating art.

“The Message,” It Was Written’s arresting opener, even carries a dreamlike uneasiness thanks largely to an acoustic guitar riff cribbed from Sting’s plaintive “Shape of My Heart.” Nas’s lyrics follow suit, deploying a labyrinthian dream logic that shape shifts in tone, setting, and rhyme scheme while feeling hauntingly of a piece.

Whether Nas is flaunting his firepower (“32 shotguns, regulate with my dunns”), flossing the spoils of his newfound success (“17 rocks gleam from one ring”), or slinging scathing subliminals at rap rivals 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G., the message is clear: we’re not in Queensbridge anymore.

While the infamous housing project that birthed Nas and served as the inspiration and backdrop for Illmatic features just as prominently on It Was Written’s cover as it did its predecessor’s, the perspective is jarringly different. Illmatic’s cover featured a prepubescent Nas, eyes narrowed, keenly observing the rhythms and contours of his environment. It Was Written’s replicates the structure, but replaces the child with an adult Nas knowingly presiding over his domain. While the designer sweater and crisply lined Caesar subtly convey his position atop the throne, his eyes carry a sober melancholia suggesting he’s not quite comfortable there.

Despite its cosmetic gloss, “The Message” ultimately paints a picture of a new world filled with the same greed, brutality, and treachery as the street life. The money is bigger, so the stakes are higher and the danger greater. For all that Nas has gained through Illmatic’s success, the song is undergirded by a sense of loss. As the beat drops out behind the final bars, pushing brooding guitar chords to the forefront, Nas reconciles the weight upon the head that wears the crown:

Contemplatin’ war on n****s I was cool with before
We used to score together uptown coppin’ the raw
But, uh — a thug changes, and love changes
And best friends become strangers

“Street Dreams” trades the pensive atmospherics of “The Message” for a cinematic keyboard cacophony. Still, the dizzying swirl of the synths paired with Nas’s re-imagining of the Eurhythmics iconic “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” retains the opener’s ethereal moodiness. The hit second single and its decadent video contributed heavily to the popular perception of It Was Written as an exercise in mafioso cosplay. Yet, a closer listen reveals a far more nuanced approach that speaks to the album’s artistic ambitions.

Though Nas paints himself as a hustler on the come up, the lifestyle he evokes of relentless paper chasing interspersed with opulent indulgence could apply just as easily to a ’90s rap god as a street kingpin. The track’s third verse ties the threads together, detailing the childhood experiences that shaped the “get rich or die trying” mentality that not only informed both worlds, but provided the intersection at which they were hurdling towards an eventually fatal collision.

Growin’ up project-struck, lookin’ for luck, dreamin’
Scopin’ the large n****s beamin’, check what I’m seein’
Cars, ghetto stars pushin’ ill Europeans
G’in’, heard about them old timers ODin’
Young, early 80’s, throwin’ rocks at the crazy lady
Worshippin’ every word them rope-rockin’ n****s gave me

Indeed, there is no bigger idol or target than the holder of new wealth in a world where “everybody’s lookin’ for something.” That disorienting reality informs the somber paranoia of “Watch Dem N****s”. It’s easy to get lost in the head nodding haze of the track’s strolling synth bass and elongated G-Funk chords, but beneath the smokey cloud of tranquility lies a meditation on the lethality of the crabs-in-a-barrel mentality.

The lyrics could certainly have been inspired by the Shakespearean demise of any number of street titans Nas observed in Queensbridge. They could just as easily have been inspired by the 1994 robbery and shooting of 2Pac at Quad Studios, widely believed to have been orchestrated by Stretch, an associate of Pac and Nas. Pac notoriously believed it to have involved his once-friend, B.I.G. Stretch himself was murdered in 1995.

Produced by Stretch’s Live Squad, “Take It In Blood” couches a fatalistic meditation on cyclical violence and the price of fame behind a veneer of braggadocio. Nas vividly evokes the kingpin lifestyle increasingly embraced by hip-hop’s elite in the back half of the decade. Yet, within his shiny imagery, Nas seems to be hiding in plain sight, observing from the shadows the ultimately hollow decadence of his new world and even himself.

I never brag how real I keep it, ’cause it’s the best secret
I rock a vest prestigious, Cuban link flooded Jesus
In a Lex, watchin’ Kathie Lee & Regis
My actions are one with the seasons
A TEC squeezin’ executioner, winter time, I rock a fur
Mega popular, center of attraction
Climaxin’, my b****es, they be laughin’
They high from sniffin’ coke off a twenty-cent Andrew Jackson

2Pac’s murder, and the string of era defining hip-hop deaths it put into motion, was still two months away at the time of It Was Written’s July ’96 release. Yet, Nas seems well aware of the ways in which the moment’s molotov cocktail of new money and age old pathologies is likely headed.

Skies are misty, my life predicted by a gypsy
I’ll one day walk into shots, drunk off champagne from Sicily

Nas details the explosive violence inherent in the life he’s chosen from a vantage point as immediate as it is unexpected on “I Gave You Power”. From the perspective of a semi-automatic pistol, Nas unfolds a gut wrenching story of nihilism, retribution, and cyclical fatalism. It’s a master class in storytelling and personification, with DJ Premier’s string inflected beat cutting the gravel hard grit with cinematic flourish.

Is it a stretch to suggest that given the phrasing of Nas’s spoken intro — “Damn, look how muh’f***ers use a n****… Sell me, throw me away… It’s like I’m a f***in’ gun”— that there’s a circularity to the metaphorical structure? Perhaps. But many of the lyrics are eerily evocative of the thankless existence of a rapper subsumed by the era’s increasingly corporate machine that aggressively sold the most destructive elements of the culture despite the risk they posed to the artists and their communities.

For years, I’ve been used in robberies
Givin’ n****s heart to follow me
Placing peoples in graves,
Funerals made ’cause I was sprayed

Such an outlook would certainly be in line with the ambivalence that appears to have marked Nas’s relationship with mass media rap stardom in the years since It Was Written. That ambivalence rears its head on the album’s back half, in which seemingly contradictory impulses hurt its continuity, even as the caliber of the writing and MCing remains top shelf.

“Street Dreams” official music video (1996). Image from Columbia Records.

At a moment when coastal tensions were rapidly simmering to a scalding boil, “Nas is Coming” makes a powerful statement of bi-coastal unity. Nas floats atop Dr. Dre’s percolating synth concerto, but the free verse blend of bravado and kingpin allusions feels like a missed opportunity to offer a call for conciliation. In addition, an awkward chorus robs the record of the accessibility that could have propelled it to a wider audience.

Similarly, the melodically rendered chorus to “Black Girl Lost” is as earnest in its rawness as it is calculated in its play to take the song’s lament of women’s degradation (internal and external) in pursuit glamor into the realm of commercial viability. Still, it ultimately falls flat. It’s not that Nas sings off key. He was far from the first or last rapper to hit a tin note on a vocalized hook. It’s that he seems to shrink from the microphone, as if uncomfortable with the vulnerability inherent in melodic vocalization.

Contrary to popular perception, much of the back half returns to the grittily vivid street narratives that grounded Illmatic. “Shootouts” stands as one of Nas’s most gripping tracks, deploying a pair of rich vignettes of everyday life explosively upended by violent eruptions as unsparing as they are sudden. The song’s narratives, along with those spun on surrounding tracks, provide a ground level view of the environmental nihilism in which the zero sum desperation of the characters we’ve met on earlier cuts is forged.

The brooding boom bap of the L.E.S. produced “Suspects” drops us into the carnage and chaos of a murder scene immediately after the fatal shots have fired. Nas methodically captures the cultural codes of violence, retribution, and silence that perpetuate the cycles of destruction detailed throughout the album. The second verse goes a layer deeper, unpacking the historical traumas through which the culture took shape.

I meant it, I represent it, descendant made of early natives
That were captured, and taught to think backwards
Trapped us in a cracker’s psychiatric, it’s massive
A Million Man March, alert the masses
Tan Clarks, Armani in small print upon my glasses
Don assassins, Armageddon
The wedding of a freak and a beast
Seven heads, got the righteous threatened
Life was written, the plot curves behind the settin’

It Was Written closes with “If I Ruled The World”’s utopian fever dream. It’s a credit to Nas’s conceptual commitment that, for all its aspirational fortitude, the lead single — Nas’s first bonafide crossover smash — incorporates the pathos and contradictions detailed in the previous 14 tracks into its vision rather that placing itself above them. Ostentatious flexes of material wealth are celebrated hand in hand with spiritual enlightenment. A dream world in which we’re “more conscious of the way we raise our daughters” is powered by a paradigm in which “every girl I meet’ll go downtown.”

Few albums in hip-hop have experienced greater revisionism than It Was Written. Despite its commercial success (or perhaps because of it), the album was initially met with aggressive backlash from critics and the East Coast purists who drove Illmatic past half a million in sales.

It Was Written hit shelves the same day as De La Soul’s Stakes Is High, the album that best embodies the crystalization of the dividing lines that had been forming in hip-hop. The synth tinged sonics and pristine engineering of It Was Written’s seven Trackmasters produced selections, an increased focused on earworm choruses, and mafioso aesthetics drew a barrage of “sellout” accusations.

History has been kind to It Was Written. With the release of Biggie’s posthumous Life After Death a year later came greater acceptance of the marriage of virtuosic MCing and commercial conceits. Fans and historians alike now freely acknowledge It Was Written’s lyrical wizardry. As hip-hop, in all its iterations, has moved toward cleaner digital sounds, many younger fans prefer it to Illmatic.

The truth is, It Was Written probably falls somewhere between the stinging rebukes with which it was first met and the gushing superlatives with which it is now lauded.

Conceptually, it’s hugely ambitious. Nas was never truly adopting the blinging excesses and mafioso motifs that color the album. He was attempting to speak to his post Illmatic life using the imagery and ethos that was quickly subsuming mainstream hip-hop. Whether it was an act of conciliation (meeting the masses where they lived) or subversion, it can’t be declared an unequivocal success if few got it. Nas even seems to lose his own thread on the album’s backend.

The vastly disparate track order on the CD/LP compared to the cassette suggests an artistic uncertainty that is ultimately reflected in an album that lacks the seamless flow of the era’s top shelf classics. (For my money, the track order of the now virtually extinct cassette is vastly superior.)

Still, it’s a very good album that contains some of Nas’s best tracks. It was essential in elevating Nas from the people’s champ of New York’s Timb and hoodie crowd to bona fide A-Lister with a brand capable of generating millions in sponsorship deals and investment ventures.

That It Was Written predicted the tragedy that was soon to befall hip-hop speaks to Nas’s prescience. That he was able to avoid the fate of so many of his peers speaks to his pragmatism. The album, in all of its triumphs and stumbles, is ultimately a testament to that pragmatism. The enduring relevance of It Was Written and Nas says all that needs to be written about the nature of the album’s success.

By the Numbers

Production: 8.5
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 10
Delivery & Flow: 10
Content (Substance): 9.5
Cohesiveness: 6.5
Consistency: 7.5
Originality: 8
Listenability: 9
Impact/Influence: 9
Longevity: 10

Total — 88

Score reflects the tracklist for LP, CD, and Digital/Streaming editions. The cassette features an alternate track order and a bonus track, “Silent Murder”.

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 2/3/24 on Medium.

Efil4zaggin is one of hip-hop’s most confounding albums. It detonated in Spring of ’91 like an atom bomb. The ensuing mushroom cloud engulfed the entire hip-hop landscape. The entirety of popular culture soon followed.

Album for album, ’91 is quietly one of hip-hop’s most compelling years. Yet, the sheer force and potency of N.W.A’s second and final full length release instantly overshadowed all that came before it. The year’s subsequent releases, including a few certified classics, were relegated to the outskirts of an ecosystem radiating with N.W.A’s singularly nuclear brand of bravado.

Efil4zaggin’s unrepentantly outsized gangsta boogie effectively obliterated conscious rap’s unlikely commercial foothold, despite a spirited late-year last gasp by Public Enemy. It elbowed the musically and culturally progressive stylings of left-of-center iconoclasts like the Native Tongue collective to the “alternative” fringes.

Selling nearly a million copies in its first week, Efil4zaggin solidified gangsta rap as the commercial face of hip-hop — a jarring juxtaposition to MC Hammer’s sequined parachute pants and flamboyant dance routines that marked rap’s emergence as a mainstream juggernaut just a year prior. In doing so, Efil4zaggin is often tagged with stripping gangsta rap of the strident social commentary that underscored its ’80s iterations and contracting it to cartoonishly reductive caricature.

While N.W.A’s countless disciples unquestionably oversimplified the formula, Efil4zaggin is a far more complex work than it gets credit for. Intentionally or not, N.W.A’s swan song effectively offered two paths from which subsequent gangstas could choose. How much culpability does N.W.A hold for the choices of the next generation (and their record labels)?

Efil4zaggin bursts from the starting block with the velocity of a shotgun blast. After “Prelude” quickly lays to rest any apprehension that N.W.A might stumble following the 1990 departure of star MC and primary writer Ice Cube, the remaining four deliver a mesmerizing treatise on the tao of gangsterism in one of hip-hop’s most relentless opening song sequences.

“Real N****z Don’t Die” and “N****z 4 Life” deliver a 1–2 punch of a dissertation on the epistemology and attitude behind the word that instantly made their group’s name a new lightening rod in a generations old debate.

The former is a cacophonous anthem of chest-thumping machismo. Atop Dr. Dre’s sonic tsunami consisting of no less than 10(!) credited samples, Dre, MC Ren, and Eazy-E seize defiant ownership of the word weaponized for centuries to disenfranchise. In verses evoking police harassment and the criminal justice system as symptoms of systemic oppression, the MCs position their outsized bravado as a survival mechanism. The opposite of respectability politics, the ethos of gangsta rap as espoused by N.W.A seems to be “don’t try to assuage their fear; wield it as your weapon.”

The latter dials back the sonic pyrotechnics. Leaning heavily on a sped-up rendering of the ominous bassline from Parliament’s “Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk,” the track delivers a surgical explanation of the Black community’s cooption and subversion of the most American of epithets. The three MCs embrace the word as an acknowledgement of their ongoing struggle, a celebration of cultural resilience, and a thumb in the eye to an establishment bent on perpetuating the practices of the past.

[MC Ren]
Why do I call myself a n****, you ask me?
Well it’s because motherf***ers wanna blast me
And run me outta my neighborhood
And label me as a dope dealer, yo, and say that I’m no good
But I gave out jobs, so n****s wouldn’t have to go out
Gave ‘em some dope and a corner, so they could show out
When the cops came, they gave a fake name
Because the life in the streets is just a head game

“Appetite For Destruction” thrusts the ethos of the previous two tracks into action. At once sharply aggressive and coldly menacing, Dre’s production is a meticulously calibrated exercise in controlled chaos. Lyrically, Dre, Ren, and Eazy savagely lay waste to any and all adversaries, whether on the mic, in the street, or from the establishment. While not as anthemic as the group’s 1988 assault, “Straight Outta Compton,” “Appetite For Destruction” is every bit as bracing.

In Ice Cube’s absence, Dr. Dre establishes his production as the true star of Efil4zaggin. With lead single “Alwayz Into Somethin’,” Dre spins a breaking curveball providing a much needed break from the unrelenting intensity of the album’s first leg. If the slippery synths of The D.O.C.’s “No One Can Do It Better” represented Dre’s first step toward the G-Funk sound that he would soon make his signature, “Alwayz Into Somethin’” is a full on long jump.

Mid-tempo percussions percolate. A persistent rhythm guitar builds tension. It culminates in elongated synth lines that resolve into a punctuative horn sample from Bob James’ “Storm King” backing staccato adlibs from Jamaican chatter Admiral Dancehall. In sharp contrast to the bombast of the early tracks, Ren and Dre seep into the contours of the beat with the slow rolling ease of warm maple syrup, evoking late night creeps as unhurried as they are untoward.

Ice Cube’s unique combination of charisma and ferocity would have shined atop the immaculate soundscapes of the opening song suite. Yet, the sheer intensity of the remaining 3 mic wielders combined with the potency of The D.O.C.’s pen as the Cyrano de Bergerac behind Dre’s unexpectedly assured emergence as a full-time rapper allows Cube’s departure to fly largely under the radar. The most glaring signal of Cube’s absence is the incessant string of disses fired his way.

The beef culminates in “Real N****z,” a rumbling war cry punctuated by DJ Yella’s surgical turntablism. The actual disses lean towards the generic, at times even tepid (“We started out with too much cargo/So I’m glad we got rid of Benedict Arnold”). But the track still lands as a potent salvo thanks to the urgency of Ren and Dre’s rapid fire back and forth and the rhythmic pugilism of the production.

“Alwayz Into Somethin’” music video, 1991 (Image from Ruthless/Priority Records)

Had N.W.A carried the sound and fury of the album’s first half into its second, they may well have crafted a sophomore opus to rival their debut. Instead, the back nine takes a sharp detour, stumbling with nearly the same velocity the front end soars.

In the cases of “One Less B****,” “Findum, F***um and Flee,” and “She Shallowed It” the book can be judged by its cover — or rather the song by its title. N.W.A venture into 2 Live Crew territory with graphic tales of sexual exploits. But where the Miami posse built its brand on raunchy camp, N.W.A marry their smut with the jarring brutality of their patented gangsta rap. The mash-up proves tonally awkward. Killing women is the antithesis of gangsta and undercuts the hyper masculine posture of the early tracks. The members’ persistent references to their own ejaculate are as puzzling as they are redundant.

When over-the-top sex rhymes work, they’re generally cut with cleverness (see $hort, Too). Here, the wit is painfully absent. “Automobile” and “I’d Rather F*** You” fall flat in their attempts to send up P-Funk excursions (Parliament’s “Automobile” and Bootsy’s Rubber Band’s “I’d Rather Be With You” respectively). Given the inherent transgressiveness of P-Funk, neither record feels as irreverent as the original, underscoring that vulgarity doesn’t necessarily equate edge and you can’t parody a parody.

The cringy detour ends as abruptly as it begins with a pair of album-closing standouts. Sonically, “Approach To Danger” is one of Dre’s most arresting concoctions. Foreboding keys, piercing strings, and filtered screams converge into a symphony of depravity. Staccato drums pound with the ferocity of a bareknuckled brawl. In stark contrast to the devil-may-care revelry of the album’s earlier murder sprees, the stark vignettes of brutality are chilling in their matter-of-factness. It’s as if, on the album’s penultimate offering, we’ve reached the inevitable erosion of the soul inherent in the earlier embrace of gangsta tropes.

“Dayz of Wayback” closes the album with an origin story. Circling back to the earlier themes of self-definition, Ren and Dre paint pictures of a community in decay. It feels as though they’re speaking for a generation when detailing their embrace of brutality in the name of surviving it.

[Dr. Dre]
When I was a kid and puttin’ my bid in
Yo, Compton was like still waters — discretely calm
Now it’s like motherf***in’ Vietnam
Everybody killin’, tryin’ to make a killin’
N****s stealin’, motherf***ers wheelin’ and dealin’
With so many ways to come up
The average n**** didn’t give a f***
About another motherf***a in this game and
Claimin’ what he claimin’, livin’ like he livin’, killin’ after killin’
Murder was a dirty job, to rob a dead man was the best plan
’Cause a dead man never ran
But now your best friend is your worst friend
Greed, kids to feed, make ’em need mo’

Efil4zaggin was a divisive album from the moment it dropped. Yet, few of its acolytes or critics truly grappled with its duality. While true heads embraced the lyricism of the more substantive tracks, casual fans and cultural dabblers latched onto the shock, awe, and gimmickry of the extended detour.

For suburban teens in search of vicarious thrills and performative rebellion, the over the top antics made for easy cooption. A full unpacking of the truly challenging moments — far more nuanced and subtext heavy than a broad “F*** Tha Police” — would have required a level of critical discourse mainstream fans and critics alike were still reticent to grant hip-hop.

Ice Cube’s absence is perhaps most conspicuous not in what he might have added, but what likely would not have made the cut had he remained. By ’91, Cube was a disciple of the Five Percent Nation. His 1990 solo debut, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, pioneered a revolutionary but gangsta ethos, in which scathing social commentary was couched behind a gangsta aesthetic. It’s hard to imagine 20 minutes of pointless debauchery making the final tracklist with him in the fold.

Without that 20 minutes, Efil4zaggin would be a taut, relentless marriage of chest-pounding machismo and paradigm-challenging concepts that may well have set gangsta rap on a course of true social disruption rather than salacious distraction.

It would have denied critics easy talking points with which to sully hip-hop and lesser artists the option of an easier, if decidedly lower road to gangsta rap stardom. Instead, in what proved to be their swan song, N.W.A paved that lane. For the remainder of the decade, the low road would remain bumper-to-bumper like the 405 in rush hour.

By the Numbers

Production: 10
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 8
Delivery & Flow: 8.5
Content (Substance): 7
Cohesiveness: 6
Consistency: 7
Originality: 8
Listenability: 8
Impact/Influence: 10
Longevity: 7.5

Total — 80

Backspin is a look back at the albums that shaped and defined hip-hop. It explores what made them resonate, the impact they had on the culture, and where they fit in today’s ever-expanding hip-hop canon.

Originally published 11/19/25 on Medium.

D’Angelo’s passing in October of 2025, a quarter century after neo-soul’s definitive year, truly crystallized the thesis I’ve been circling since Soulspin 2000 launched on Voodoo’s 25th anniversary in January. It wasn’t simply the embarrassment of musical riches that made the year 2000 neo-soul’s zenith. The conversation — how the seminal albums engaged with each other — was equally integral.

The multitude made 2000 bountiful. What made it definitive was the arc built between two towering bookends that operate in rhythmic and spiritual dialogue. D’Angelo opened the year (and century) with a seance. Voodoo summoned the spirits of Black music’s past en route to conceiving a musical and cultural future. Ten months later, eventual neo-soul standards by artists like Jill Scott and Musiq Soulchild had dominated the musical landscape, and the spirits D’Angelo conjured were the present.

On Mama’s Gun, delivered November 21, Erykah Badu closed the year using the same musical palette to make sense of the moment. Where D’Angelo floated in ethereal timelessness, Badu walked, boogied, and basked in immediacy, even transience.

Where Voodoo faded in with a communal conjuring through tribal drums and ancient chants, Mama’s Gun fades up into Badu’s lone voice — weary, scattered, quietly frantic:

Why, why are all these voices in my mind?
(“I have to write a song again.”)
(“I have to remember to turn on the oven, to warm up the apartment.”)
(“I hope Seven’s okay, I wonder if he took his medicine.”)
I have to stop it
(“I need to take my vitamins.”)
Why won’t they stop?
Stop it

It’s the internal chaos of information overload that would come to define the 21st Century. The culmination erupts as a full-throated yawp of creative clarity in the form of “Penitentiary Philosophy.” The sprawling opener is one of neo-soul’s most viscerally unhinged moments. It’s a hard left turn from the delicate jazz textures that colored the groove-heavy soundscapes of Badu’s genre-defining debut, Baduizm, three years earlier.

As a backdrop for Badu’s strident callout of the confinement, internal and external, in which so many found themselves as the millennium turned, the funk-rock rapture feels fitting. Vacillating from lament to clarion call to rebel yell, “Penitentiary Philosophy” sets the stage for an album as intimate as it is worldly; firmly anchored in the present while keeping an unflinching third eye trained forward.

Powered by James Poyser’s haunting Fender Rhodes and Dez Andres’ deliberate percussion, “Didn’t Cha Know” settles the album into a more familiar groove. Yet, the majestic second single is grounded by a quiet urgency that cuts a subtle contrast to Baduizm’s easy comfort. It finds Badu at once rooting herself in the moment while also acknowledging its impermanence.

On its face, “Didn’t Cha Know” resonates as an intensely personal reflection on the turn of the century inflection point. But the song’s unlikely staying power — it peaked at 28 on Billboard’s R&B charts and has remained a radio staple — is rooted in its mirroring of the uncertainty so many felt. While amplified by the moment, the sentiment has always been a rite of passage into adulthood.

Time to save the world
Where in the world is all the time?
So many things I still don’t know
So many times I’ve changed my mind
Guess I was born to make mistakes
But I ain’t scared to take the weight
So when I stumble off the path
I know my heart will guide me back

If “Didn’t Cha Know” finds beauty in the stillness of existential ennui, “My Life” offers resolution in the form of brisk strides toward self-actualization. Poyser’s keys and Jay Dee’s drums bounce with a playful swagger, belying the rigors of growth conveyed in the lyrics. Badu sheds the opacity that often characterized her early songwriting to deliver a plain spoken affirmation.

But it’s “… & On” that truly lays bare how Badu’s quest for clarity manifests through her pen. Often overlooked as a playful coda to Baduizm’s “On & On,” Mama’s Gun’s follow-up isn’t a sequel so much as an interrogation. Where the original seduced with its elusive tapestry of astrology, Five Percent theology, and southern gothic folk wisdom, “…& On” asks simply and unsparingly: “What good do your words do, if they can’t understand you?”

It’s the oracle stepping off her pedestal to meet her petitioners where they live.

The deconstruction pays quick dividends in a pair of playful flexes. “Cleva” boasts swagger and insecurity in the same breath, while embracing both as two sides of a perfectly imperfect coin. The signature twinkle of Roy Ayers’ vibraphone gives the mid-tempo groove an aural wink, as if to say, “I know I’m feelin’ myself right now, but I’m not taking it too seriously.”

“Booty” adds a cheeky sashay to the affirmational strut, as Badu flaunts her storied mystical magnetism. If the first twist is Badu’s hips winding with the Bayou funk of Roy Hargrove’s trumpet, the second and most powerful twist comes in her pivot from individual boasts (“Your booty might be bigger, but I still can pull your n***a”) to solidarity statement (“I don’t want him, cause of what he’s doin’ to you”) and ultimately, an appeal to self-worth (“And you don’t need him, cause he ain’t ready”). Beneath the bump of the boogie and Badu’s deadpan wit, “Booty” is ultimately a repudiation of the soap opera drama that was beginning to permeate R&B at the turn of the century.

If Voodoo’s back end opens up into a sonic and spiritual ecosystem, Mama’s Gun’s second half contracts its cypher, burrowing into the depths of a singular mind as it processes a singular moment. Beneath its supple funk and sinewy psychedelia, “Kiss Me On My Neck (Hesi)” offers a quiet plea for intimacy in a world of distraction. The subtle tension between the plaintive melody and the muscular groove is echoed in the lyrics, which balance naked vulnerability with the uncompromising self-empowerment established on the earlier tracks. Badu wants to be wanted, but on her terms and her path.

Co-written by soul icon Betty Wright, “A.D.” lends the album one of its quietest moments. And it’s most haunting. If Voodoo was D’Angelo’s real time reckoning with lineage and legacy, “A.D.” is Badu’s stoic counterpoint. Over Jef Lee Johnson’s gentle acoustic guitar, Badu offers a quietly definitive rejection of legacy and an equally understated embrace of existential transience.

No you won’t be namin’ no buildings after me
To go down dilapidated, no
No you won’t be namin’ no buildings after me
My name will be misstated, surely

As Poyser’s ethereal synths and Pino Pallandino’s weighty bass creep into the mix, the song moves from quiet acceptance to thesis statement for the album’s growth arc, Badu repeating: “this world done changed since I been conscious.” The line cuts myriad ways, but they all point to the same fundamental truth.

“Orange Moon” tip-toes in with equal subtlety behind Shaun Martin’s delicate piano and Badu’s tenderest vocals. On the surface, it appears to be an unabashed homage to the early 20th-century jazz balladry to which her early work often alluded. But just beneath the vintage warmth and unhurried phrasing lies arguably Badu’s most layered songwriting achievement.

Most listeners initially took it as a grown-up torch ballad. It works beautifully on the romantic level, but that’s just the packaging. Peel back the first layer, and “Orange Moon” offers a gently resolute reminder that, for all the encroaching anomie of the digital age and battle-of-the-sexes rancor of its music, humanity’s natural state is in partnership. Sun and moon. Yin and Yang. Kick and snare.

“Orange Moon” also refracts through the lens of the Five Percent cosmology that Badu deliberately holds at arm’s length for much of the album. In Five Percent teachings, the sun and moon represent the Black man and woman, respectively. In that light, the song becomes not simply a celebration of Black love but a stoic show of support for Black men at the close of a century defined by their marginalization and misrepresentation.

Many nights he was alone
Many, many, many nights
His light was too bright so they turned away
And he stood alone
Every night and every day

Badu’s son, Seven, was three years old upon the album’s release, introducing a fourth layer. As a new mother, Seven’s future almost certainly factored into her reflections on Black manhood. If heard as “I’m an orange moon, reflecting the light of my son” instead of (or in addition to) “sun,” “Orange Moon” quickly reveals itself as the closest thing to a title track on Mama’s Gun. It also resolves Badu’s earlier question (“What good do your words do if they can’t understand you?”), revealing the top layer as an entry point to the greater truth. Sometimes paving the path to understanding is the good.

If the acoustic Stephen Marley duet, “In Love With You,” quietly embodies “Orange Moon”’s ethos, it’s the two subsequent tracks that manifest it into actionable empowerment. “Bag Lady” — appearing in a quieter, more leisurely form than its Dr. Dre-sampling radio mix — speaks directly to women with a blend of empathy and tough love. Badu acknowledges the burden of pain and struggle that the 20th Century demanded that women carry, while stressing the imperative to “let it go” on the path to progress.

On “Time’s a Wastin’”, she gently flips the script. Badu’s unconditional support as the “moon” to their “sun” already minted, she implores young men to step into their light and meet the challenges of the moment.

Run baby, run, run
Where you running to?
And who you running from?
Some people may not understand
What it means to be a man
Taking full command

The message of controlled urgency stands in stark contrast to the “take your time” platitudes with which an entire generation of young men were coddled (see Junior’s seminal ’80s hit “Mama Used to Say”). It’s a clear-eyed acknowledgement of all that was at stake in the new century, making time a luxury Black men couldn’t afford. Yet, Badu frames the urgency through a lens of empowerment rather than resignation.

It’s easy to hear epic closer “Green Eyes” as a journey unto itself, existing outside the album’s arc. Having just warned us “don’t you take your time” on the previous track, Badu proceeds to do precisely that.
“Green Eyes” painstakingly processes a love gone south over the course of 10 minutes and three movements. But, the more time you spend with the album, the clearer it becomes that “Green Eyes” was always the destination at which this journey would ultimately conclude.

It’s the answer to her opening question, “Why are all these voices in my mind?” Within that framework, the album’s journey has been a brilliantly illuminative avoidance spiral. Having burrowed deep, circled wide, and aspired high, Badu finally has nowhere else to go but back to the voices in her mind and the pain they’re frantically speaking to drown out. “Green Eyes” feels like a real-time dam break, reckoning with loss, jealousy, denial, ego death, and ultimately the discomfort of the reckoning itself.

As the track fades, the album’s final words are a whispered “thank you.” That Badu is finally ready to sit in the silence, at one with the moment itself, feels like a hard-earned actualization of the ethos Mama’s Gun preaches.

The celebration of D’Angelo’s catalogue in the weeks since his passing feels like validation that he achieved the timelessness he sought. On Mama Gun’s 25th anniversary, it seems equally fitting to celebrate Erykah Badu in the present tense, while she is not only still with us, but still a vital force shaping Black music’s 21st-century trajectory. (Her collaborative album with The Alchemist, Abi & Alan, is due any day.)

Just don’t be naming no buildings after her.

Simply give Mama’s Gun the attentive listen it deserves and bask in its perfection as the closing bookend of neo-soul’s defining year. In the year 2000, D’Angelo gave us origin mythology, and Erykah Badu gave us judgment call. That may well be why the neo-soul movement quickly lost momentum in subsequent years. The genre’s reflecting standard bearers — sun and moon, spiritual father and earth mother, eternal traveler and transient nester — had already completed the conversation.

That the conversation not only still resonates, but reveals new layers 25 years later, speaks to the brilliance of its principals. Neo-soul may have been a brief moment on the flat circle of music’s timeline. But, just as Mama’s Gun preaches, the moment was the movement.

Soulspin 2000 is a limited series commemorating the year neo-soul found its voice. Throughout 2025, we’ve celebrated some of the year 2000’s seminal neo-soul releases — game changers, chart toppers, and a few unsung gems — as they reach the quarter-century mark.