MC Eiht
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The Game
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Ice-T
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Schoolly D
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Dr. Dre
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Snoop Dogg
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Post-2011 T.I.
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MC Ren
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Ja Rule
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Spice 1
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Dj Quik
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Pusha T
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Freddie Gibbs
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Master P
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Warren G
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Ice Cube
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Eazy-E
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Pre-2011 T.I.
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2003 50 Cent
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1. There was also a scene in Colors where Damon Wayans danced with a large plush rabbit in a pawnshop while wearing only boxers and a shower cap because he was high on PCP. It was less central to the plot, but it’s something a lot of people remember.
2. The thing I’m not sure of is whether or not his best role was Tom Hagen in the first two Godfather movies, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, or Otto Halliwell in Gone in 60 Seconds. I kind of want to say Godfather, but I don’t remember Marlon Brando pulling off a sixty-car heist in a single night.
3. My favorite example: He catches a kid spray-painting a wall. He holds the kid up and spray-paints his face. Sean Penn is not that great at graffiti.
4. He later slept with her, FYI. You have to appreciate his focus.
5. Rick James was originally tapped to do the song. His contribution, which is actually on the Colors soundtrack, is as ill-fitting for the movie as you’d expect.
6. P = people who don’t understand how one homebody became a man; S = the way we scream and shout; K = the way his DJ was cutting.
7. “I wasn’t alluding to shit. I harped on the criminal exploits.” —Ice T, Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption—from South Central to Hollywood
8. That’s why my wife takes baths sometimes. Best I can tell, she is not a pimp.
9. RP was actually the first hip-hop album to have a parental advisory sticker on it. It sold over 500,000 copies, and nobody seems to be sure if the sticker helped album sales or hurt them.
10. “I have the ability to break things down so a ghetto kid can understand what rich white people see and rich white people can see what ghetto kids see. That’s what I do. That’s my job.” —Ice-T, on his Behind the Music special
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
It’s about figuring out a way to make some money, but also figuring out a way to make yourself complete without money. It’s also about a plate of fish.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
Rakim perfected rapping on it.
The most popular rap song in 1987 was LL Cool J’s “I Need Love.” It was the second single from his second album, Bigger and Deffer, and it came out while his first album, 1985’s Radio, was already firmly on its way to eventually selling a million-plus copies, so it had a fair amount of kinetic energy behind it. It became his first-ever Top 40 hit (number 14) and was the only rap single to make it to number one on Billboard’s Hot R&B/HipHop Songs chart in 1987, though back then the chart was called Hot Black Singles, and nineteen-year-old LL Cool J on a chart called Hot Black Singles is the most accidentally appropriate thing I can think of.
But, so “I Need Love” was a big song. And it has sat in history as a big song since, because up until then there’d been rap love songs but no rap love ballads, and “I Need Love” was definitely that.1 And let me be clear when I say that Early Career LL Cool J was something truly special and occasionally transcendent, so “I Need Love” worked, and “worked” is the important word, because it worked, but it didn’t fit what we’d been told about LL by LL.
LL had aggressively marketed himself as cool over his first six singles, most perfectly with “Rock the Bells” and most intentionally with “I’m Bad,” which came with a video that was about LL taking down a gang of kidnapper bad guys by taking off his jacket and then pretending to squish a jelly bean. And right after “I’m Bad” is when “I Need Love” came out. It was a foot sweep. All of his uncontainable bravado, his alpha-male arrogance, his unstoppable hubris—he traded it in to talk about the temperature of his loveless soul (cold, as it were). LL was simpin’. It was like the end of Napoleon Dynamite where Napoleon does that dance scene, except the reverse.
But that’s sort of when it became clear, if it wasn’t clear already: LL, rap hero, was cool, but he was a version of cool that required upkeep. He was cool the way Tom Cruise was cool, or the way Samuel L. Jackson2 was cool. Not the way Paul Newman was cool or Philip Seymour Hoffman was cool or John Coltrane was cool, which is to say effortlessly cool, quietly cool, cosmically cool.
Rakim was all of those things. Rakim was more. And he injected all of it into rap. 1987 belongs to him. 1987 belongs to the God MC.
♦
“People are just like, ‘Oh, rap music now? It sucks. It’s so bad. Rap music now sucks. Back in the day, that was the good rap music. That was where the good rap music was at.’ . . . No, it’s not. Have you ever listened to rap from back in the day? It’s always some dude being like, ‘Well, I went to the hat store today / And I bought myself a hat / Huh-ha hahuh.’ Nigga, I don’t wanna hear your hat stories.” —Donald Glover, Weirdo, 2011
Rakim revolutionized rap by revolutionizing rapping, and so let’s talk about that, and a good comparison to draw here is to Michael Jordan, because both are regularly considered the greatest of all time, so let’s do that:
Henry Abbott is a senior writer and an editor at ESPN. He knows a lot about basketball—more than I could ever hope to know, really. So I emailed him and asked him to send me a list of some of the ways that Michael Jordan changed the game. I had an idea of the way Jordan had affected the literal style of basketball (the bald head, the longer shorts, the tongue as expressionism, etc.), but I wanted actual ways the actual game actually changed after him. Abbott sent back four things, and those four things are all how Rakim changed rap, too, because being great at something is universal:
Before MJ, there was no building around a shooting guard to win a title. Without a killer center you were pretty much not winning titles, which is why two centers were drafted before him.3
The line to connect here is that the earliest kinds of rap were often DJ-centered and DJ-driven. The DJ was the central figure, and that’s easy to see by just looking at the names of the first batches of rap stars, because lots of times the DJ was listed first: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force, then Eric B.4 and Rakim, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and so on. That’s why in so much of the first kinds of rap the rapper is bouncing around doing the call-and-response. His job was mostly to keep the crowd engaged. Rakim didn’t do that. His voice wasn’t cartoonish or overblown. It was this cold, icy, methodical thing that “interjects danger into even harmless phrases,”5 and h
e wielded it with forethought and jurisprudence, delivering perfectly metered declarations that moved with the sort of velocity nobody had seen.
Rakim told a story to Vibe in 1997, explaining how the first time he recorded with Marley Marl and MC Shan they kept telling him he wasn’t energetic enough, imploring him to stand up and be louder while he rapped because otherwise he wasn’t going to get anyone’s attention over the DJ. Rakim seemed to be the first rapper to realize he was in a recording booth.
Before MJ, there was a lot less money to spread around.
This is true of record contracts and deals, but also true of rap itself. Rakim introduced rap’s materialism explicitly on “Paid in Full” (the song is called “Paid in Full”), but also on the album cover (he and Eric B. are both holding stacks of money and wearing large gold chains and medallions, and the background behind them is a screen of money, too, and also the album is called Paid in Full,6 too). All of the complexities of the Five Percenter philosophy7 hiding inside the song don’t negate that it’s a rap song about getting money.8
After MJ, everybody drafted super-athletes, because that seemed to really matter, but most of them couldn’t fly and switch hands or drain a pull-up jumper, so they ended up just being all these physical beasts who didn’t make for exciting basketball, but did get really physical on defense, which actually made the game less exciting for a while, with all the grabbing and shoving and in-your-face D that led to rule changes, zone D, and, over time, the three-point revolution that is taking over right now this very second.
Everybody wanted to be the next Rakim. Nobody was. However, all of the attempts at replicating him or his style changed rap—but sometimes not in good ways.9
Before MJ, nobody really took working out seriously.
In this case, and this is truly how Rakim became a king, what he did was take the very basic rap style that all of the first rappers were doing—that hat-store style—and then placed it in a super-missile and fired it toward irrelevance. The sophisticated terms for what he did are internal rhyming schemes (where words within a sentence rhyme rather than just the words on the ends of sentences) and multisyllabic rhyming schemes (more than one syllable rhymed). He used these instead of the end rhyme style. But another way to describe this that is just as accurate is: He was making shit that could never be considered corny or unartistic.
Example: Run-DMC rapped, “You can see a lot in this lifespan / Like a bum eating out of a garbage can,” on a song called “It’s Like That” in 1983.
Example: Kurtis Blow rapped, “Basketball is my favorite sport / I like the way they dribble up and down the court,” on a song called “Basketball” in 1984.
On “Paid in Full,” Rakim said, “I used to roll up, this is a holdup, ain’t nothin’ funny / Stop smiling, be still, don’t nothing move but the money,” and all of the lithospheric plates on earth shattered into a trillion pieces and everyone died wow you’re a ghost right now R.I.P. you.
On “My Melody,” he said, “I take seven emcees, put ’em in a line / And add seven more brothers who think they can rhyme / Well, it’ll take seven more before I go for mine / Now that’s twenty-one emcees ate up at the same time,” and oh wow your spirit was just raised from the netherworld you’re no longer dead wow welcome back your family is going to be so happy.
Nobody had ever done anything like that, said anything like that, the way that Rakim rhymed. He took it seriously. He rapped seriously.10 He was an orator, and he was so utterly skilled that he was able to rap in this supreme way without spreading his personality all over the track, which is what people who weren’t even talented enough to do what he was doing were unable to avoid when they came along later.11 This is no hyperbole and no half-truth: All of every style of rapping that has occurred since 1987 and will ever occur can be traced back to when Eric B. and Rakim released Paid in Full.
REBUTTAL: “9MM GOES BANG” BOOGIE DOWN PRODUCTIONS
The author, while deft with his pen, is only partially correct. “Paid in Full” is indeed a noble jam rich with that rolling beat, Rakim’s sing-song flow, and the best culinary couplet involving “fish, which is my favorite dish” this side of Three 6 Mafia’s “We eat so many shrimp / I got iodine poisoning.” But Shea ultimately stumbles when it comes to ’87. That year, and much of ’88, was all about Boogie Down Productions’ “9mm Goes Bang” and the album on which it appeared, Criminal Minded. Long before KRS-One’s self-righteous teacher-poet pose grew tired, Criminal Minded tore through the country one B-Boy cassette at a time. In the St. Louis record store where as a youth I stocked a massive hip-hop tape wall, Criminal Minded was everywhere. We sold thousands of copies of that, Paid in Full, How You Like Me Now, and Yo! Bum Rush the Show. For a lot of us, it was the year that changed hip-hop. BDP’s wicked, proto-gangsta, first-person-shooter narrative “9mm,” part of the lone album-length collaboration between KRS-One and the late DJ Scott La Rock, is raw and scary. Where producers Eric B. and the Bomb Squad were crafting layered tracks that took full potential of sampling technology, “9mm” is menacingly simple, a bullet of a track. Skeletal snare snaps echo, a basic melody circles, gunshots ring.
—RANDALL ROBERTS
Paid in Full
“Thinking of a master plan” (1:08)
“Cause ain’t nothing but sweat inside my hand” (1:20)
“I need money, I used to be a stick-up kid” (1:32)
“I used to roll up, this is a hold up, ain’t nothing funny” (1:42)
“But now I learned to earn ‘cause I’m righteous” (1:46)
“If I strive then maybe I’ll stay alive” (1:53)
“Feeling out of place ‘cause man do I miss . . .” (2:00)
“Fish, which is my favorite dish” (2:07)
“Cause I didn’t like to dream about getting paid” (2:11)
“Hit the studio, ‘cause I’m paid in full” (2:21)
Declarative, Descriptive, Get Money, Introspective, Hopeful, Observational, Examing
1. “I Need Love” was also well timed, at least as far as expanding the LL Cool J brand was concerned. You could probably even argue that his willingness to make it was the first indicator that he was going to eventually transition out of rap and into Hollywood with little trouble, though I’m not so sure how many people sit around and discuss such things.
2. Nobody has suffered more from being labeled “cool” early in their career than Samuel L. Jackson. The same thing happened to Common, though it’s a less extreme case.
3. Hakeem Olajuwon and Sam Bowie.
4. Eric B. was an especially talented DJ. There are parts across Paid in Full where he fills in empty space with mixing and scratching, and it lives as its own thing. He also helped popularize sampling multiple records at once, as well as concentrating a song’s efforts around drums rather than making them a supplement. All that is to say he did some very impactful things and was still relegated to an existence in this chapter found mostly in the footnotes, because that’s just how massive Rakim’s presence is in rap.
5. Nelson George, Village Voice, 1987.
6. Eric B. speculated that the album, which cumulatively took about a week to record, cost possibly less than $5,000 to put together.
7. Rakim is a member of the Five Percent Nation. They are “an American organization founded in 1964 in the Harlem section of the borough of Manhattan, New York City, by a former member of the Nation of Islam.” And “members of the group call themselves Allah’s Five Percenters, which reflects the concept that ten percent of the people of the world know the truth of existence, and those elites and agents opt to keep eighty-five percent of the world in ignorance and under the controlling thumb; the remaining five percent are those who know the truth and are determined to enlighten the rest.”
8. Sidebar: The first car Eric B. ever owned was a Rolls-Royce. He said he bought it because Rick James told him to.
9. I suppose if we were going to extend this metaphor, Young Thug would be the three-point revolution.
11. Jay Z, Nas, Biggie, Wu-Tang, so on.
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
It’s about where three guys are coming from and how they feel about things and the crimes they either have already committed or will commit if they feel they have adequate reason to do so.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
It’s the song that introduced America to N.W.A, but more specifically: It’s the song that introduced America to gangsta rap.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 8