The two have commingled ever since.
♦
To expand on the point made by Larry Smith about rap growing to become a demonstrable genre:
FOUR KEY MOMENTS FROM 1984 THAT WERE DIRECT EVIDENCE THAT RAP MUSIC WAS BIGGER THAN A FAD (AND TWO MOMENTS THAT WERE TANGENTIALLY RELATED)
DIRECT: Rap began being shown on TV. There were two shows that debuted on local TV in 1984 that focused on rap. Both were in New York. The first was called Video Music Box, which ran all the way through 1996. It played rap videos, though at the time that usually just meant footage of a group or person performing somewhere. The two guys who ran it/hosted it—Ralph McDaniels and Lionel C. Martin—eventually started producing the videos themselves, putting proper money behind them. The other show, Graffiti Rock, presented a rounder view of hip-hop, highlighting not just the music but also break dancing, graffiti, and DJing. Also, it was around this time that MTV started to occasionally play rap videos, too, owed largely to Run-DMC’s distinctly rock-inspired version of rap. It’s strange to think about now, but there was for sure a period where MTV was not all that interested in music by black musicians.
DIRECT: Rap got movies. There were two. There was Beat Street, which was praised immediately and is now fondly remembered for its authenticity. And there was Breakin’, which was pooped on immediately and is now fondly remembered for its accidental silliness. I remember watching both of them when I was a kid, probably somewhere between eight and ten years old. Beat Street, most famous for the scene where two guys get electrocuted to death while fighting on a subway track, was way too heavy for me. Conversely, the most serious part of Breakin’ was when a guy who was very good at break dancing swept the sidewalk outside of a convenience store with a magic broom. That was something I could get behind.7
DIRECT: Rap got a radio station. Los Angeles beat New York to it. They premiered KDAY that year, the first station in the country that played mostly rap music. Dr. Dre worked there, if you can even believe that (which you should be able to because it makes total sense).
DIRECT: The Fresh Fest tour was booked. It was the first rap tour to play the big arenas and coliseums and it was a resounding success. Kurtis Blow, Run-DMC, Whodini, the Fat Boys, Newcleus, some separate break-dance crews—they toured twenty-seven different cities, introducing rap’s swaggering bravado and aesthetics to large-scale audiences. The tour grossed more than $3.5 million dollars.
TANGENTIALLY RELATED: Oprah debuted as the cohost of a local TV show in Chicago. This wasn’t important to rap at the time, but it would be later. There’s a bit more information about this in the 2003 chapter (see this page).
TANGENTIALLY RELATED: The NBA introduced the slam dunk contest to the All-Star festivities. The slam dunk is connected to rap, if not for the philosophical connection then at least for the visual representation, because as far as sports moves are concerned, it is the closest to a physical manifestation of rap as it gets. If we continue the line of thought: A well-executed crossover likely comes in a very close second. A no-look pass, third. On the other end, the sports move second-furthest away from rap would be an underhand serve in volleyball. First-furthest away would be anything that Scott Skiles ever did during his career.8
♦
TOP 1,000 RAP SONGS ABOUT FRIENDSHIP, RANKED
1. “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” Tupac (1996). It’s perfect. I would very much like to meet the person Tupac wrote this song for. I’m sure he’s quite something.
3. “Just a Friend,” Biz Markie (1989). Did you know that Biz Markie was in Sharknado 2?9 He was.
4. “I Miss My Homies,” Master P featuring Pimp C and Silkk the Shocker (1997). This was like when Puff Daddy made “I’ll Be Missing You” with 112 and Faith Evans, except Sting was not involved. Master P rapped about a dead friend, Pimp C rapped about a dead friend, and Silkk the Shocker rapped about three dead friends and one incarcerated friend. Stacey Dash played a flying angel in the video, making her the second-most popular angel in a rap video in the ’90s (the death angel from Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s 1995 “Tha Crossroads” video is the first).
7. “Talk to ’Em,” Young Jeezy (2005). Young Jeezy raps to a frined of his who got locked up. It's very good. I wish I was Young Jeezy's friend. I saw him one time. It was right before a concert Jeezy had in Houston. I was walking around in the corridor area before the show started and he walked right by me. We literally brushed shoulders. When I realized who it was, I was like, “Oh snap! Jeezy! Hey, man. Wow. I’m such a big fan of yours.” He stopped for a moment, looked at me, then said, and I’ll never forget this, he said, “I’m not Young Jeezy.” It wasn‘t Young Jeezy.
24. “A’Yo Kato,” DMX (2003). This one’s DMX rapping to a friend of his who’d died. Being a rapper’s friend is very hazardous, it would appear.
1,000. “Best Friend,” 50 Cent featuring Olivia (2005). Nope.
“Friends” goes tenth on this list. It’s enjoyable to listen to still, but generally only when you want to be nostalgic or ironic. In terms of consequence, though, it’s first place—at worst, second.
“Friends” was an advice record where the group talked about paying attention to the type of friends you had, and that was kind of weird, because there just aren’t a bunch of times where a rapper tells you that you should try to be friends with a woman before you sleep with her. It was also very smart because they were vague enough in it that it was kind of a pop platitude (“Friends / How many of us have them?”) but also left enough gray area that it was able to remain a rap song. That’s really where Whodini excelled, and why their music remains vital, why “Friends” is the most important song of 1984. It smoothed out rap enough that it could be pop while still remaining a rap song. It suggested what would eventually become the entire premise behind mainstream rap.
REBUTTAL: “ROXANNE’S REVENGE” ROXANNE SHANTÉ
U.T.F.O.’s “Roxanne, Roxanne” was a cautionary, catcalling tale for the ages in which three dweebs rapped about being rejected by the same woman. So even though the Brooklyn trio’s balls were already blue by the end of the song, fourteen-year-old Lolita Shanté Gooden still gave them a swift kick with her answer track, “Roxanne’s Revenge.” The Queensbridge high schooler offered Roxanne—along with countless other ladies fed up with smooth-talking dudes in Kangols—a no-nonsense, gum-smacking voice. Not only was “Roxanne’s Revenge” an early example of female empowerment in the dick-swinging world of rap (a baton that Lil’ Kim and Nicki Minaj would pick up in the ensuing decades), it was a classic case of hip-hop as expletive-filled cultural dialogue, too; the track spurred on a brief cottage industry of Roxanne-based songs from the perspective of the imaginary femme fatale’s equally imaginary brother, sister, and parents, not to mention a conspiracy-theory twist titled “Roxanne’s a Man (The Untold Story).” But there was only one real revenge.
—RYAN DOMBAL
Pop Rap Index
Assessing Songs’ Positions on the Pop Rap Index
Pop
Pop Rap
Rap
Asher Roth, “I Love College”
DMX, “X Is Coming”
Nicki Minaj, “Starships”
Nicki Minaj, “Did It on Em”
The Black Eyed Peas, “Boom Boom Pow”
C-Murder, “Down for My Niggas,” Featuring Snoop Dogg
Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa, “Young, Wild and Free” featuring Bruno Mars
T.I., “Whatever You Like”
Anything by Will Smith
M.O.P., “Ante up”
Vanilla Ice, “Ice Ice Baby”
Gucci Mane, Guwop Nigga,” Featuring Trinidad James
1. Fletcher used to wear a hat like Zorro and call himself Ecstasy.
2. The song made its way all the way up to number four on the Black Singles chart and number eighty-seven on the Hot 100.
3. Smith would go on to coproduce Run-DMC’s second album, King of Rock, and also Whodini’s follow-up to Escape, Back in Black, as well as other things.
> 4. This is either a very great game or a very not great game, depending on how you feel about certain things.
5. A fun thing to note here is that Whodini was, if not the very first, then among the very first rap groups to have their own dancers perform while they rapped. It was very sophisticated at the time.
6. Blackstreet’s “No Diggity.”
7. The sequel, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo is actually a decidedly better—or at least more fun—movie. It leaned all the way into its goofiness, opting for an easy-to-follow plot (noble neighborhood break-dancers vs. greedy government officials) and accelerated hyperbole (in one scene, one of the main stars break-danced upside down on the ceiling of his apartment).
8. On the surface, it would seem the premise for this statement is “Scott Skiles is white.” That’s incorrect, though. Scott Skiles is white, yes, but the two aren’t related (at least not in this particular instance). Proof: Allen Iverson is universally agreed to be the most hip-hop basketball player that’s ever been. But do you know who the second person is? Chris motherfucking Mullin, that’s who. Chris Mullin is the illest white person.
9. Sharknado 2 is the sequel to Sharknado, a movie about a water tornado filled with sharks.
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
Slick Rick being romantically pursued by a woman and also the woman’s ultra-aggressive mother.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
It’s the archetypal storytelling rap song. It also made clear what would be rap’s eventual relationship with casual misogyny. It also hinted at the lavish pimp-lifestyle version that would fully form itself in the next decade.
By now, I figure you’re comfortable (or at least familiar) with the pacing and general structure of this book. In each chapter, there’s straight-arrow information about the song chosen for that year, there’s secondary color stuff that supports or buttresses the main idea of the chapter, and then, sometimes tucked away inside all of that and sometimes stated flat out in the open, there is the argument for why that song was chosen as the most important of the year.
This chapter will have all of that, too (as will the rest of the book), but I’m going to front-load this one because the last 70 percent of it will be taken up by a story.
INFORMATION
• Slick Rick was rap’s first great storyteller, and also its most influential. A large part of that was his actual rapping, which was fluid and effortless, and I’ll point you to the opening of “La Di Da Di” as proof. He owls his way through the first few lines before Doug E. Fresh begins beatboxing, saying he and Doug are going to show you something you’ve never seen before because he knows “You’re all sick of all these crap rappers / Biting their rhymes because, um, they’re backstabbers / But, uh, when it comes to me and my friend Doug Fresh here / There is no competition ’cause we are the best, yeah,” and he gets all that way and you don’t even realize that he’s already started rapping. Nobody who had come before him had flexed that sort of preternatural smoothness, that silkiness, that languidness. His words just strolled out of his mouth in silk pajamas. It was mesmerizing. Snoop Dogg remains the only other rapper to pull off a similar feat.
• Snoop Dogg covered “La Di Da Di” on his album Doggystyle in 1993. He called it “Lodi Dodi.” It was the first time a rapper had covered another rapper’s song on an album, and so “La Di Da Di” was important indirectly as well as directly.
• “La Di Da Di” was the first rap song to use up all of its time telling a cohesive story, which makes it an evolutionary step. To stay within just the bounds of this book, a fast comparison to make to “La Di Da Di” is the part in “Rapper’s Delight” (see this page) where Wonder Mike raps about going to a dinner at a friend’s house. “La Di Da Di” was like that, except laser-focused. There’s a very distinct beginning, middle, and end, and more important than that, there’s a very clear point to his telling you a story, which hadn’t happened before he did it. Basically every storytelling rap song that’s come after 1985 has used “La Di Da Di” as its template.
• “La Di Da Di” was the second rap song ever where the rapper referred to a woman as a “bitch,”1 and it was the first rap song ever to discuss the general appearance of an elderly woman’s vagina. (“And with your wrinkled pussy, I can’t be your lover.”) Rick’s low-volume British2 coo managed to make casual misogyny seem cool. That’s not a good thing, but it was a thing that had a tremendous effect on rap.
• Another thing “La Di Da Di” did was pioneer high-toned brand narcissism. Things Slick Rick mentions: Polo cologne, Oil of Olay, his Kangol hat, Gucci underwear, Bally shoes, Johnson’s Baby Powder, a bubble bath, and filing his nails.
• “La Di Da Di” was the B side of a record. The A side was “The Show,” also an iconic track, and so a fun thing to consider is that “The Show”/“La Di Da Di” is maybe the best combo record in all of rap.
• There aren’t any instruments on “La Di Da Di,” which was also peculiar and incredible. It’s all voice. Slick Rick raps the song, and Fresh makes the beats and buttresses Rick’s words with punch-ins. Doug has long argued that he invented beatboxing even though the Fat Boys had a song called “Human Beat Box” in 1984 and also even though Michael Winslow was on Police Academy making robot noises in 1984, too. Doug said that the Fat Boys stole the idea from him. He’s never said anything about Winslow though. Police Academy is beyond reproach.
♦
STORY
This is a story that I think about almost every time I hear either Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick on “La Di Da Di” or just Slick Rick by himself on “Children’s Story.” The story is about a date I went on, but really I think it’s about how sometimes the bigness of the universe is overwhelming even when it’s not trying to be. The reason I think about it is because, as I was driving the girl home that evening, “La Di Da Di” came on and then “Children’s Story” came on two songs after that. This was slightly weird, I suppose, because it was 1998, so Slick Rick had not been popular for a while, but it’s less weird when you remember that I was on a date and so I’m (almost) certain I purposely put those two songs on the tape we were listening to in an effort to appear interesting.
The story: When I was in the eleventh grade, I took a girl on a date to the beach. I’d like to say that we went there because I was very romantic when I was seventeen, but mostly I took her there because it was free and I didn’t like her all that much so I didn’t want to spend any of the tiny amount of money I had on her.
When we got to the beach, we laid out a blanket on the sand to put all of our stuff on, walked up and down the beach talking for a bit, then got in the water. Maybe twenty or so minutes into being out there, I noticed this thing floating out a ways from us. It was a brown leather wallet. It was very clearly a brown leather wallet. I said something close to “Is that a wallet?” and I’m not sure why I said that because I knew for sure it was, but I said it. I swam out, got it, then swam back. “Yep. Wallet,” I said, and I don’t know what I expected her to do, but what she did was nothing. I opened it and saw an ID. The wallet belonged to a man named Orlando something-or-other. I remember his first name because after I glanced around at the people in the water near us and realized I couldn’t tell if anyone was Orlando or not, I shouted, “Orlando! Ay, Orlando!” to see if anybody would look up. Nobody did. And so I took the nonresponse as proof that the wallet had become my property.
As I waded my way back to the shore, I thumbed through it. There was a $20 bill and four $1 bills, and so I was excited, but then I noticed there was more tucked off in the side, and I got even more excited. I pulled the edge of the money out and ohhhhh fuuuuuuuck. It was a $100 bill that Orlando had folded in half and tucked into the corner (for safer keeping, I’m assuming). Have you ever found a $100 bill before? It’s for real the best feeling. I lost one of my sons in a grocery store once for, like, forty-five seconds when he was three. I felt as good about finding him as I did about finding that $100. It felt life-changing, and I can tell y
ou I liked that girl a whole lot more with a sudden extra $124 in my possession.
But so here’s what happened: The girl and me, we decided to walk over to this little pier gift shop place that was down the beach a ways that we’d walked under earlier. The plan was to go in there, buy some stuff, maybe get some food, and then, hooray. Great date. But as we were standing in line, the guy in front of us, when he got to the register, we could overhear him asking if anyone had turned in a wallet. IT WAS GODDAMN ORLANDO. He described the wallet, gave her his name, everything. He was literally standing three feet in front of us. I was frozen. I looked at the girl. She looked at me. I looked back at her. She looked back at me. And I don’t know what she expected me to do, but what I did was nothing. I just stared straight through him. It was terrible. I know that now and I knew that then. But being amoral with $124 seemed like a way better thing than being moral with $0. So: nothing.
I told her, “Let’s go,” and so we left. We walked back to our blanket in the sand. I said, “I have a good idea. Let’s stop at a gift shop and we can use this money to buy stuff for our people.” I had three sisters and a mom and a dad and a grandma I lived with and she had an older sister and a mom and a nephew who she lived with. “Okay,” she said, and she actually seemed kind of happy about it, and I actually thought everything was going to work out. So the new plan was to stop on the way home at a beach store and buy our way out of the abyss we’d jumped into. And we did that. We spotted a store, we stopped, and in we went. We walked around for however long it was (it could’ve been ten minutes but it also could’ve been ten hours; time is weird in those sorts of situations), gathered some items—earrings, a T-shirt, things like that. And I won’t say that we felt all the way good about what we were doing, but we definitely felt better.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 6