The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed

by Serrano, Shea

  REBUTTAL: “AROUND THE WAY GIRL” LL COOL J

  I suppose you could have learned to kick game from “Bonita Applebum”—meager, mealymouthed, soothing “Bonita Applebum” for your meager, mealymouthed, soothing game. Good luck, guy. I’ll take “Around the Way Girl” any day, and twice on days my hair looks good. This is peak pickup, talk so slick you could ice-skate on it. No one before or since has exuded the raw vigor of LL Cool J in this era, a cocksure lip-licker with a cherubic glow. And don’t forget the song’s video, a platform for James Todd Smith’s Handycam perversions, teeming with graffiti’d clothing and doorknocker earrings and a swarm of handsy dancers with pendulum hips that wouldn’t quit. Lisa, Angela, Pamela, Renée—I still love you. I’ll never not love you.

  —JON CARAMANICA

  1. The line is a callback to Richard Pryor’s “The Wino and the Junkie” bit. Richard Pryor was legit a gift.

  2. Several others have songs called “You’re All I Need,” too. Mötley Crüe’s is the best (or the worst, depending on your gauge). It’s about a man who loves a woman desperately but she doesn’t love him back, so he murders her. Vince Neil sings, “Killing you helped me keep you at home / I got so much to learn about love in this world,” and yes, I would agree that he has a fair amount to learn about love (mostly, “Don’t stab to death the person you love” seems like a good start).

  3. It was directed by Michael Rapaport, who has the unique distinction of having played a neo-Nazi who shot Tyra Banks in a movie once.

  4. I am not very good at making bedroom eyes. My bedroom eyes look less like bedroom eyes and more like pre-pink-eye eyes.

  5. The general assumption here has always been that Q-Tip is talking about Bonita’s V, but a theory online asserting that he’s talking about her B has gained popularity. I feel weird writing about this, but I also feel good writing about it because part of being a writer is trying to get people to think a thought they’ve never thought before, and Q-Tip eating a butt is probably up there.

  WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT

  It’s directly about paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, and schizophrenia, and it’s indirectly a commentary on the structures that cause those psychoses.

  WHY IT’S IMPORTANT

  It’s the best examination of mental health as it relates to rap. It was also the first.

  In 1990, Geffen Records, the company that was going to distribute a remix album by the Geto Boys called The Geto Boys, decided the night before the album’s release not to go forward. This is the explanation Bryn Bridenthal, who was the vice president of media and artist relations at the time, offered:

  “I’ve never been frightened by a record before in my life, but for me the graphic details of the violence were really frightening. Finally we decided that we have a right as a private company to decide what kind of materials we want to be associated with, and this one, we decided, went too far.”

  His comments were somewhat focused on a song called “Assassins,” which opens with Johnny C, a producer and ex–Geto Boys member, rapping about beating and then shooting a schoolteacher. But mostly he was talking about “Mind of a Lunatic,” a six-verse nightmare starring Bushwick Bill, Scarface, and Willie D, the lineup that would eventually constitute the most substantial version of the Geto Boys.1 Bushwick Bill, a Jamaican-born dwarf, is the first performer, and he lasts exactly three lines into the song before he’s committed murder. The violence somehow increases exponentially from there; he spends the whole second verse talking about raping a woman he’s seen through a window, murdering her, raping her corpse, then drawing his name on the wall and calling the cops on himself. And beyond just stating the particulars of his crimes, he presents them through some truly startling imagery (“She begged me not to kill her, I gave her a rose / Then slit her throat, and watched her shake till her eyes closed”). I can’t say that I agree with Geffen’s decision, but this was near the same time 2 Live Crew had been charged for indecency while performing some of their songs in a nightclub in Florida and Judas Priest had been blamed for the suicides of two men by their families, so I suppose I understand.

  This whole thing—the controversy, Geffen Records refusing to release the album because the lyrics were so violent and threatening—was the first real exposure to the Geto Boys people outside of Houston had had en masse.

  “Mind of a Lunatic” is a precursor to “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” It spoke of the particular psychoses each member of the group was dealing with, though it did so at the expense of sophistication. “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” angled the general idea of “Lunatic” (we are crazy motherfuckers) inward, making it less about the consequences they ascribed to insanity and more about the process of feeling insane. The self-examination was markedly more powerful than the hyperbolized violence. It was a completely new thing, and it was real and serious and real serious. It seemed unlikely that Bushwick Bill would ever have sex with a dead body and then draw his name across the wall for the police like he said he had on “Lunatic,” but it was completely plausible he’d gotten into a fight with a person who didn’t even really exist like he said he had on “Tricks.”

  ♦

  “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” samples a song called “Hung Up on My Baby” by Isaac Hayes. The song appeared in a 1974 movie called Three Tough Guys starring Isaac Hayes. There are a lot of very amazing parts in Three Tough Guys. One of them is a funeral scene for a pimp named Gator. As the funeral guests take turns viewing Gator’s corpse, other pimps, the most spectacular of whom is a white man with pork chop sideburns wearing a jeweled eye patch and a bedazzled suit jacket, sprinkle cocaine on him. I suspect this is a way that pimps pay respect at funerals, but I’m not sure. I’ve never (knowingly) spent time with a pimp, so I’ve never been privy to that information. I Googled “Sprinkle Cocaine on Dead Bodies” but didn’t find anything pimp-related.2 One of the other pimps who shows up to the funeral—a rival pimp in a garish white fur coat holding a cane and a purple hat—spits on Gator. So I guess the good thing about inviting pimps to your funeral is that they will be dressed interestingly, but the bad thing is that they will either sprinkle cocaine on you or spit on you.

  ♦

  OTHER SONGS THAT HAVE DEALT WITH BEING A NUT, DIRECTLY AND INDIRECTLY

  “Somebody’s Watching Me,” Rockwell (1983): He thought people were watching him.

  “The City Sleeps,” MC 900 Ft Jesus (1991): This one is a first-person narrative told from the perspective of an arsonist. It’s not that good of a song, but I’m including it here because we don’t have any other arsonists on this list and I don’t want to appear like I’m anti-arsonist, which I assume will be a hot topic by the time this book comes out because people get mad about everything so it’s only a matter of time before someone starts talking about arson discrimination.

  “Insane in the Brain,” Cypress Hill (1993): It kind of feels like Cypress Hill maybe didn’t know exactly what a membrane was.

  “Suicidal Thoughts,” The Notorious B.I.G. (1994): Biggie calls Puff, admits he is overcome with stress and is considering suicide, then talks himself into doing it.

  “1-800-Suicide,” Gravediggaz (1994): 1994 was a big year for suicide, I guess. (One of the ways the Gravediggaz say you can tell you’re an insane person is if you’re Sicilian but you don’t like lasagna or the guy who delivers your pizza. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of either of those claims.)

  “Beautiful Night,” Prince Paul (1996): This is Prince Paul in a therapy session admitting to sexually assaulting a girl, killing a bartender who refused to serve him because he was black, then killing a guy at a Beastie Boys concert who’d bumped into him, then sexually assaulting another girl with his friends. Paul is so casual in his description of the depravity that he somehow makes it enjoyable to hum “It’s a beautiful night for a date rape” with the background singers.3

  “Kim,” Eminem (2000): By 2014, Eminem’s turmoil had grown a chore to absorb. (It was uncreatively offensive, and that’s way worse than
being morally offensive.) But when he let it bloom fully in 2000 on “Kim,” it was completely transfixing.

  “Dance with the Devil,” Immortal Technique (2001): The protagonist violently assaults and rapes a stranger with some other men as a way to prove he’s tough and respectable. Turns out, the stranger was his mother. He kills himself by jumping off the roof of a building after he sees who it was. The guys shoot the mom in the head. Eesh.

  “Lemonade,” Gucci Mane (2009): It doesn’t deal with any slivers of mental instability directly, but, I’m saying, you kind of have to be crazy to make a song as perfect as “Lemonade” is.

  “Devil’s Son,” Big L (2010): Spends the whole song talking about being the son of the devil. When he said, “When I was in pre-school I beat a kid to death with a wooden block,” that’s when I knew I wasn’t putting my kids in day care.

  “What’s Yo Psycho?” Tech N9ne, featuring Brotha Lynch Hung and Sundae (2010): The three take turns explaining their psychoses. In the third verse, Sundae explains, “It’s dollars over dick,” and that’s the best summation of a business plan I ever heard.

  ♦

  The most famous picture of Scarface + Bushwick Bill + Willie D is the one used for the cover of 1991’s We Can’t Be Stopped, where Willie D and Scarface are pushing Bushwick Bill down a hospital hallway on a gurney.

  Willie D, the most physically imposing member of the group, looks slightly angry but also slightly urgent. Scarface, who later would explain that he had no interest in capturing that particular moment on film and certainly no interest in using it for the cover of their album,4 looks discordant and disgusted. And Bushwick, who is sitting on the gurney pretending to be on a cell phone,5 looks like he’s just been shot in the face at close range with a .22-caliber derringer, because he had just been shot in the face at close range with a .22-caliber derringer. His right eye, which hours earlier had been fine, is completely destroyed. It looks like a very unappetizing strawberry. This is the explanation Bush-wick gave of the incident in a radio interview later that year:

  “When I came home, my girl was asleep so I woke her up and told her to kill me ’cause I wanted to die. I was tired of my life. She said she didn’t want to shoot me, so I shot at her and my [adopted] three-month-old baby first. Then I tried to beat her head in with a vacuum cleaner, but I missed. Then I gave her the gun and jumped at her. When I [saw] her hand reach the trigger I put my eye in front of it.”

  He did an interview on the Howard Stern show later, and his story expanded a bit. He explained that the reason he wanted to die was financially inspired: His mother needed money to pay a medical bill, he said, and, despite the success of “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” he didn’t have the $500 she needed him to give her. He’d hoped that by getting himself killed she’d benefit from his life insurance policy. But he didn’t want to be at odds with God, and suicide, he’d learned in Bible school, is an unpardonable sin, so he got very drunk and tried to goad his then-girlfriend into murdering him. He also explained to Stern that he’d picked up the baby and threatened to throw him out a window if she didn’t shoot him.6

  This is the sort of thinking that surrounded the Geto Boys when they were at their apex, and that’s how you end up with a song as masterfully conspired and executed as “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” the finest examination of one’s own psychoses in rap, and in all of music, really.

  REBUTTAL: “CHECK THE RHIME” A TRIBE CALLED QUEST

  The impact of the lead single from Tribe’s sophomore album on the musical landscape of 1991 cannot be overstated. Within seconds, the listener is captivated by an Average White Band horn sample that is nothing short of iconic. The nostalgia of Q-Tip’s opening lines is palpable. You may have never set foot in Queens, New York, but this song took your spirit there, right to Linden Boulevard, where you found yourself in that cipher with Tip and Phife as they ran through their fly routine. The subject matter, ranging from witty boasts to sage advice aimed at their aspirational peers, continues to resonate decades later. You would be hard-pressed to find an MC living who hasn’t been counseled on Industry Rule #4080. The single would herald the arrival of The Low End Theory, a masterpiece of an album that would solidify ATCQ as one of the defining groups of a generation.

  —eskay

  Mind Playing Tricks on Me

  “I sit alone in my four-cornered room staring at candles” (0:04)

  “Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned” (0:12)

  “When I awake I don’t see the motherfucker” (0:39)

  “Every twenty seconds got me peeping out my window” (0:54)

  “It’s fucked up when your mind’s playing tricks on ya” (1:05)

  “I feel I’m being tailed by the same sucker’s headlights” (1:29)

  “I take my boys everywhere I go because I’m paranoid” (2:04)

  “I keep looking over my shoulder and peeping around corners” (2:10)

  “Day by day it’s more impossible to cope” (2:30)

  “Having fatal thoughts of suicide” (2:52)

  “Now I’m feeling lonely” (3:21)

  “This year Halloween fell on a weekend” (3:41)

  “The he disappeared too” (4:19)

  “My hands were all bloody, from punching on the concrete” (4:29)

  Introspective, Powerful, Examining, Insightful, Descriptive, Thrilling, Psychological

  1. The group was created by Rap-A-Lot founder J. Prince in 1986. He moved pieces in and out as he saw fit. J. Prince is as mysterious a figure in rap as has ever been. He’s basically the southern version of Suge Knight, except he’s about three times as small and ten times as smart. His most famous dodgery: In 1999, California congresswoman Maxine Waters and Attorney General Janet Reno made a federal drug investigation targeting Prince and Rap-A-Lot Records disappear.

  2. Looking up information about pimps on Google is, were I to guess, not a very pimp-like thing to do. I can’t imagine pimps use Google. Maybe they use Siri? They’re probably very disrespectful to her. Siri doesn’t deserve that.

  3. FYI, it’s enjoyable to hum, not to actually do.

  4. In 2010, Scarface told Vibe, “We took that picture at the actual hospital where Bill was at. And Chief, who was our manager at the time, said, ‘Bill, take the eye patch down.’ And I was like, ‘Awww, fuck! Man, this is some bullshit.’”

  5. I don’t know who he could possibly be calling. Who do you call when your suicide-by-girlfriend attempt goes haywire? Your mom? The devil? Mark-Paul Gosselaar?

  6. He tells this whole story in song on “Ever So Clear” from his 1992 album, Little Big Man. On a different song on the album he talks about how whenever he cuts off anyone’s arms he donates the fingers to charity. Bushwick Bill is not that great at charity.

  WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT

  How Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and the Death Row label (and all of the West Coast, really) were unfadeable, so please don’t try to fade them.

  WHY IT’S IMPORTANT

  It was the origination of G-Funk, a strand of rap that was so intoxicating, it made California the most important place in rap, and that was the first time it had ever not been New York.

  Dr. Dre does not seem like that fun of a guy to hang out with, and that’s surprising considering that just about every other fake doctor seems like a real hoot to be around. There’s Dr. J and Dr. Dunkenstein, and those guys are great if you’re super into basketball. There’s Dr Pepper, and he’s great if you’re super into sugary, carbonated, brown drinks. There’s Aretha Franklin’s Dr. Feelgood and Kiss’s Dr. Love. There’s Dr. Evil, whose name makes him seem bad but he’s actually good. There’s Doc Hudson from Cars and Doc McStuffins from lunch boxes, and she’s just adorable. Dr. Phil is nerdy but also very positive, and very positive people are dope. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman would of course be a handy friend. Dr. Moreau seems a bit weird, but he’d make for good conversation, I’m sure.1 So it’s surprising Dr. Dre seems so wooden.

  It’s also surprising because th
e greatest thing he ever did musically was take the gangsta rap of the late ’80s and early ’90s, a subgenre of music that was poignant and powerful and provocative but also very heavy, and turn it into the grandest, most accessible party of all.

  He did so in the third quarter of 1992 with “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang,” the first single from his debut album, The Chronic, the flagship track that introduced America to the G-Funk sound. G-Funk took the stripped-down, broken-glass harshness of gangsta rap and framed it with the liveliness and conviviality of ’70s Afrocentric funk. The synthesis created a fusion that managed to be as modern and inventive as it was instinctual. Suddenly, the aggressively autobiographical lyricism that hard-core rap was driven by, and what ultimately earned it a very specific kind of popularity, was surrounded by a warmth and lushness that was very nearly universal. And everything changed.

  Dr. Dre seems very smart. It only requires a tiny amount of transitive logic to firm up that conclusion, what with him having been born into the breach of poverty and now being worth somewhere near a billion dollars.2

  And he also seems very astute. In each of the interviews he’s given that are available for viewing/reading on the Internet, his answers are almost exclusively insightful and forthright, even when he seems less than enthusiastic about responding to any particular question (him being asked about his oft-delayed Detox album, mostly).