PHIFE,
I didn’t learn until years after I first heard it that you had to fight with Tip to make “Butter” yours and yours alone. I don’t know how else the song would work. The way the Weather Report sample floated onto the track and laid itself out made sense for you and only you. The Weather Report song is “Young and Fine,” and it has no language, but for the way the horns dance in and out of each other’s paths as a conversation, which I admire. But you are under no obligation to admire yourself. I also admire the way the bass barges into the song as an unwanted dweller who becomes the life of the party. I love Jaco Pastorius for the same reasons I love John Starks, I guess. It’s the thing about knowing a fighter when you see one.
It killed Jaco, so it wasn’t all good. After shows, he would start bar fights and let his ass get kicked. For the thrill of it, he said. In 1987, he got kicked out of a Carlos Santana concert and then walked into some bar in Florida, broke through a glass door, and started a fight with a bouncer, who beat him to his eventual death. So I guess not all fighters know when to call it quits and stick to what they’re good at. But in the moment, when the balance is found, there can be brief and unforgettable magic.
I’m glad you fought for “Butter,” because it is the song on The Low End Theory that most made it clear to me that you were now a member of the group, there to stay and flourishing, unable to be pulled away by the streets or your many distractions and passions.
You are of a different brand of storyteller than your partner Tip, and I always loved the lens through which you placed yourself directly at the center of a story, not sparing yourself for the sake of narrative. “Butter” is the song where you were at your best, doing that thing where you are half confident and half afraid. Comical, but taking the jokes out on your own body first. It’s dense and sprawling—a ride worth grasping on to. The crescendo, in which we figure out that you haven’t learned your lesson, goes like this:
You wanna be treated right, see Father MC
Or check Ralph Tresvant, for sensitivity
’Cause I am not the one, I got more game than Parker Brothers
Phife Dawg is on the mic and I’m smooth like butter
What you and I both understand about the diss is that it is not a diss to merely mention a name as a vehicle to end a line. It is, however, a diss to name names as a vehicle for your own boasting, or to place someone in opposition to your own greatness. You know your way around the punch line better than anyone. Some might say you’ve mastered it—all of its darkness and light, all of the harsh angles that become soft enough to laugh off so rigorously that someone doesn’t even realize the wound that has opened across their chest.
I loved you on “Jazz (We’ve Got),” even though I knew that when you spit out “strictly hardcore tracks, not a new jack swing,” someone would have to pay for the offense. And who knew it would be Wreckx-N-Effect who would run into Q-Tip outside of a Run-DMC concert and punch him in the face, mad at your slight poke of fun at them? I guess the thing about being a fighter is that, sometimes, you start the fights you can’t finish, and that’s a part of brotherhood I know well even though I don’t understand it myself. I have let my mouth write checks that my brothers, blood and not, have had to cash on my behalf, sometimes when I wasn’t even around. If there is one thing to take from all of this talk of bassists throwing fists in bars and shooting guards with hot heads, it’s that there’s always something pulling them back to the calm and somewhat neutral middle. Starks had Ewing, yes. Jaco had the dual singing horns of the Weather Report to calm him.
You had Q-Tip, who would stand in front of a closed fist on the back of some slick shit you said to get a punch line off on a song about jazz and who did or did not have the jazz. I think there is a moment in here—when the fist left its mark on an eye in the name of anger—when Tribe truly became Tribe. When it was established that you all were brothers, willing to stand on one another. I love you on The Low End Theory for this and this alone: how unwilling you were to provoke in the name of something that might make a listener laugh for a while, and damn, did we need to laugh, because the police beat a man right there in the street and we all watched it on television, Phife. They didn’t serve the time for it, either. So we all needed something foolish—a winding story about lost loves or a punch line about some wack shit. It’s all low, all the time. Even the laughter is low. Even the way one exhales after a good laugh rumbles the walls of a room can sound like bass flooding out of the speakers.
CHAPTER FIVE
Award Tour
So many artists fail because they try to get it all back in one swing, or they remain stubborn, in the hope that the trends will switch back. Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad had conquered the idea of jazz bleeding into hip-hop, but by 1993 the sound was changing, and they had the tools to change with it without the entire upheaval of their sound. Midnight Marauders was subtle in how it chose to catch up with the times. If hip-hop was to have a second wave, it needed A Tribe Called Quest with their ears to the West, unafraid and unthreatened.
Several things worked in favor of the West Coast in the early 1990s. Ice Cube had left N.W.A. in the late moments of 1989 over royalty disputes, leaving them without their chief songwriter and most versatile MC. In search of a solo career, Cube traveled east. He wanted to collaborate with chief N.W.A. producer, Dr. Dre, on his first solo album but was not allowed to do so by Ruthless Records, who still held the rights to the N.W.A. members. When Cube approached Dre about working together, Ruthless Records boss Jerry Heller nixed the idea, telling Cube that Dre contractually couldn’t work with any artists outside of N.W.A. This left Cube without a producer, and the West Coast had yet to develop a signature sound outside of what Dre was producing for the group. This left Cube as a bit of a man without a country. He was one of the first impactful West Coast MCs and writers, poised for a massive solo career, but he found himself handcuffed before getting it under way.
He linked with Dr. Dre’s cousin, producer Sir Jinx, and they worked together to bring new life to piles of prewritten notebooks of lyrics that Cube had originally saved for Eazy-E before he decided to part with N.W.A. Like everyone else in rap, Cube had been tuned in to the sounds coming out of New York, just like rappers in New York were tuned in to N.W.A.—Tribe themselves used Straight Outta Compton as a template for the righteous anger resting underneath The Low End Theory. Cube, though, was more interested in the sounds being used by Public Enemy, who, by 1991, were four albums into their run as a fiercely political rap group that didn’t sacrifice lyrics or beats to get their message across. To some, they were coastal siblings to N.W.A.—a group that was both unafraid and skilled at archiving their experience. Both groups were angry at the same system, but listening to Straight Outta Compton and Fear of a Black Planet back-to-back indicates something simple: the system has many hands and can place those hands around many necks at once.
More than just Public Enemy’s lyrics and the siren-like bombast of Chuck D’s voice, Ice Cube was drawn to the group because of their production. Public Enemy used an in-house production team known as the Bomb Squad, a group consisting of brothers Hank and Keith Shocklee, Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, Gary G-Wiz, and Bill Stephney.
What made the Bomb Squad perfect for Public Enemy and then Ice Cube was simple: they were unafraid to run directly into harsh, jarring sounds. If Phil Spector’s wall of sound was based on the perfect placement of sound waves and instruments, speaking in harmony with one another, the Bomb Squad took that concept and turned it on its ear. Their motive was chaos, and they fought to arrive at that sonic chaos any way possible. Horns, sirens, bells, the sound of machinery clanking together: their sound was deep and dense, almost overwhelming. One might finish listening to a Public Enemy record on headphones and feel as if you just exited the gym, gasping and covered in sweat.
The Bomb Squad was using methods not at all unlike the methods Q-Tip was using at the same time with A Tribe Called Quest. Both were using samples as their primary we
apons; it’s just that Q-Tip was using the sample as a razor, and the Bomb Squad was using samples as a machine gun. What Q-Tip’s ethos was—trimming the useful edges of a sample and blending multiple elements in the same song to create a type of harmony—was almost antithetical to what the Bomb Squad aimed for. While Q-Tip looked for connective tissue to create a single sound, the Bomb Squad was invested in piling noise on top of noise to create discord instead of harmony. This worked well, in part, because each member would work on their own aspect of a production in their own way before merging it with the other parts. Loops of sound would rest on top of other loops of sound. Samples were at odds with one another, seemingly speeding off a cliff but then coming together at the right moment.
Every full song on Fear of a Black Planet has at least three samples. Some have well over ten, like “Pollywanacraka,” which samples a total of seventeen songs, from George Clinton to Boogie Down Productions. Where Tribe leaned into the lifting of jazz sounds to create their landscape, the Bomb Squad wanted anything loud and unsettling. They pulled from funk and the loudest and most chaotic of soul: James Brown, or “Holy Ghost” by the Bar-Kays. When that failed, the Bomb Squad would sample older Public Enemy songs, such as “Bring the Noise” on “Who Stole the Soul?” and “Show ’Em Whatcha Got” on “Revolutionary Generation.”
If the wall of sound was initially created to find a home for every instrument in an attempt to let any listener in, the Bomb Squad was building a chaos loud enough to keep the wrong people out.
To be most effective, the Bomb Squad needed to craft its sound around a very particular type of MC. Chuck D was an obvious choice for Public Enemy: his voice was loud enough to work in concert with the clashing of sounds, and his flow was sharp and even enough to let the music work around him. He wasn’t trying to overpower it so much as he was trying to find a way to live within it. It takes a special MC to find a comfortable pocket amid the hectic rage swelling out of the production of the Bomb Squad. It needs an MC who is equal parts ferocious and generous, willing to bow a bit to production even if it means slightly muting some of the MC’s better instincts. It would take an MC who perhaps was used to being in a group already. That’s what the Bomb Squad’s beats were beckoning toward anyway—the music itself was a group inside a group. The band acted independently of whatever whims its leader might have. It was a question of control and who was willing to give themselves over to it.
Ice Cube wanted to echo that sound on 1990’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, his first album outside of N.W.A. He carried a bag overflowing with rhyme-filled notebooks and laid them at Hank Shocklee’s feet. Recording began in the fall of 1989 and wrapped right before the album’s release, in the early spring of 1990. Ice Cube is both Chuck D and not. His voice isn’t the instrument that Chuck D’s is, though the two are both deft dissectors of empire and systems. Cube not being as vocally bombastic as Chuck D didn’t harm the work on AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, as he’s just as good—if not better—at finding pockets in his flow. True to their work with Public Enemy, the Bomb Squad made their production work on AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted a buffet of clashing samples, pulling fearlessly from multiple artists’ back catalogs. “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate” sampled N.W.A.’s “Gangsta Gangsta”; “Turn Off the Radio” featured a sample from “Straight Outta Compton”; “Endangered Species (Tales from the Darkside)” sampled “Fuck Tha Police.” The album’s title track, which contains a total of fourteen samples—from Sly and the Family Stone to Richard Pryor—samples both “Fuck Tha Police” and “Straight Outta Compton.” Tongue-in-cheek as it might have been, it created an album as urgent and claustrophobic as it was meant to feel. It was an album that took the shape of an artist who left rap’s most infamous group and was going to have to fight his way out of whatever came next.
The album was a critical and commercial success, going gold two weeks after it was released. Due to Cube’s focusing his lens primarily on the narratives of south-central Los Angeles, the album was hailed as one of the West Coast’s first masterpieces. The West Coast now had a solo MC respected by peers on the other coast, one that might challenge their supremacy. It didn’t matter that AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was recorded with East Coast producers at a studio in New York City. The West Coast was starting to plant its flag in the ground.
The complete dissolution of N.W.A. took place in 1991, when allegations arose that Eazy-E had signed over the group’s contracts to Ruthless Records while holding on to a portion of N.W.A.’s publishing rights behind the group’s back. The N.W.A. fallout—starting with Ice Cube’s departure—began a series of events that would define the West Coast hip-hop moment of the early 1990s. After Ice Cube, the next biggest commodity in N.W.A. was Dr. Dre, the architect of the group’s sound, who was seen as the kind of producer one could build an entire label around. Dre had become frustrated with what he saw as a lack of proper payment for the amount of work he was having to do under Ruthless Records, producing for nearly every artist under the label’s imprint. He was a meticulous producer, one who was skilled enough to bow to the artists he was working with, as opposed to making artists follow his sound to his own creative ends. Like his peers on the East Coast, Dre did use samples, though he used significantly fewer than, say, Q-Tip and the Bomb Squad. Dre would, instead, have live musicians come in and closely re-create the sounds wanted on albums. It was a type of live sampling, heavy on synth notes and bass keyboards and flutes and saxophones. When N.W.A. fell apart for good, the genius of Dr. Dre was ripe for a new home—to the highest bidder.
This is where Suge Knight enters. He was a former football star who hailed from Compton, California. He’d gotten his start in the music industry working as a concert promoter and bodyguard for musicians after an NFL career didn’t pan out. He began a music publishing company in 1989, which made its big break when Vanilla Ice agreed to sign over royalties from his hit “Ice Ice Baby” when it was found that the song contained material that was written by Suge Knight’s client Mario Johnson. To help persuade Vanilla Ice, Knight allegedly entered his hotel room one night and threatened to dangle him by his ankles off a balcony. Knight became an effective businessman, but initially, he was in the business of fear. Fear as a currency can gain one actual currency, depending on how one uses the fear as a tactic to compel others.
In 1990, Knight went on to form an artist management company, signing already blooming West Coast artists DJ Quik and The D.O.C., both of whom introduced him to N.W.A. at a time when the group was in the midst of turmoil. In early 1991, Suge Knight teamed with The D.O.C. and SOLAR Records founder Dick Griffey to start a record label that was first known as Future Shock Entertainment, and then known as Def Row, before ultimately settling on Death Row Records. When the label was established, Knight and his team anticipated the inevitable N.W.A. fallout, waiting for Dr. Dre to come to them. When they grew impatient with waiting—and when Jerry Heller insisted he was refusing to release Dr. Dre from his contract—Suge Knight and his cohorts approached Heller and Eazy-E with lead pipes and baseball bats, demanding the final release of Dr. Dre, The D.O.C., and Michel’le from their contracts. Fear, again, was worth more than money.
With that, Death Row Records was formed, a project that Knight insisted would evolve into the Motown of the nineties, with Dr. Dre as all parts Holland-Dozier-Holland, the songwriting trio associated with Motown. The success of Death Row relied entirely on Dr. Dre’s first release, 1992’s The Chronic. Some were skeptical, in part because Dre was never known as much of an MC, but this was quickly solved when Dr. Dre got his hands on a mixtape that featured a rapper with a smooth, lazy flow rhyming over the instrumental for En Vogue’s “Hold On.” Dre sought out Snoop Doggy Dogg and invited him to an audition, telling him that he was looking for rappers to fill out an album he was working on for a new label. Snoop aced the audition and pushed Dre to check out his old starting group, Tha Dogg Pound, consisting of rapper Kurupt and rapper/producer Daz Dillinger. The production group L.A. Posse sent Dr. Dre so
me of the tracks they had been working on in late 1991, and on the song “Niggas Come in All Colors,” Dre was enamored with the lyrics and delivery of a woman MC, and he sought her out immediately. Lady of Rage was added to the team that was slowly building toward The Chronic. It was rounded out by rapper RBX and singer Nate Dogg, a cousin of Snoop.
With a roster strong enough to buoy an album’s worth of Dre’s production, which, by that point, had veered into chunky funk basslines and live, winding, screaming synths, Death Row Records seemed primed to soar. The production was groundbreaking for how much live instrumentation was forced into the studio, but also for sounding like the geography it was echoing.
When The Chronic was released, I listened to it as a child in a schoolyard park in the Midwest; it was winter, and I could feel the cold wind pushing into my coat, but for a moment, when the howling synth in “Let Me Ride” came on, I thought the sun had broken through and the cold briefly melted away. The sound was retrofitted, but it painted a landscape. New York production to that point worked from two ends of a spectrum: gritty and harsh or smoothed and sanitized. Dr. Dre’s G-funk operated somewhere in the middle. He was trying to create a visual space for the music to live beyond the record. Through the speakers, one could see cars with their tops dropped, sand from a beach filling up the hardwood floors of a too-small apartment, blue and red bandannas around every corner of a wall.
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