But just not very fun.3
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SIX SONGS FROM 1992 THAT WERE NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT RAP SONG OF 1992
“Tennessee,” Arrested Development: “Tennessee” was the Grammy-winning single from the group’s debut album, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of . . . , which eventually went platinum four times over. When I was a kid there was this guy named Tennessee who lived in our neighborhood. He was INCREDIBLE at dominoes. There’s a thing in Teen Wolf where the coach tells his basketball players that one of life’s rules is to never play cards with a person named after a city, and I definitely think an addendum should be added about playing dominoes with guys named after states. He was unbelievable. He looked at the domino board like how Russell Crowe looked at the walls of newspapers and magazine clippings in A Beautiful Mind.
“Rump Shaker,” Wreckx-N-Effect: This one wasn’t ever really a contender, but the video for it featured a woman wearing a bikini fake-playing a saxophone on the beach, and that’s just an image that we should talk about any chance that we get. We can never, ever let time push it into oblivion.
“Jump Around,” House of Pain: Matched in its iconography only by its own annoyingness.
“Don’t Sweat the Technique,” Eric B. and Rakim: A big, lovably lyrical record that has aged into importance. “Don’t Sweat the Technique” came in just as rap’s (and New York’s) boom-bap era was fading and its gangsta rap era was dominating. It was basically a basketball player hitting a seventy-foot buzzer beater at the end of the game with his team down ten points; impressive, but couldn’t change the eventuality of the loss.
“Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg,” TLC: “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg” was the first single from TLC, and let me be clear when I say none of the women I have ever known begged to have sex with me. I had a girl beg me for $300 once, but that’s not the same.
“Jump,” Kris Kross: “Jump” is the single greatest rap song by children wearing their clothes backward to heavily promote aerobic activity that’s ever been. It sold more than two million copies in 1992 alone, remarkable considering that neither Kris nor Kross was older than fourteen when it was released.
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This is Ice Cube on the opening verse of “Straight Outta Compton” (see this page), the first single from N.W.A’s seminal gangsta rap album Straight Outta Compton:
“When I’m called off, I got a sawed-off / Squeeze the trigger and bodies are hauled off / You too, boy, if you fuck with me / The police are gonna have to come and get me / Off yo ass, that’s how I’m going out / For the punk motherfuckers that’s showing out.”
This is Dr. Dre on the first verse of “Fuck wit Dre Day (And Everybody’sCelebratin’),”4 a celebrated track from The Chronic:
“Used to be my homie, used to be my ace / Now I wanna slap the taste out ya mouth / Make ya bow down to the Row / Fuckin’ me, now I’m fuckin’ you, little ho / Oh, don’t think I forgot, let you slide / Let me ride, just another homicide.”
Both very plainly state that murdering a human is not altogether that big of a deal5 or even really more than an arm’s length of a departure from daily activities. But the first set of lyrics brought forth a locust swarm of criticism that carried with it radio bans, political protests, and more, while the second, its threats elbowed up next to an interpolation of Funkadelic’s gorgeous “(Not Just) Knee Deep,” inspired high fives and a very strong urge to stand near a barbecue pit.
G-Funk’s tranquility was instantly undeniable. “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” soared, doing lots of very impressive, very easy-to-categorize-and-celebrate things. It:
• Helped push The Chronic to triple platinum.
• Prominently featured a then-mostly-unknown Snoop,6 helping to propel him into the rap stratosphere.7
• Reached number two on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart (it was on the chart for twenty-seven weeks) and number one on their Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart.
• Was one of only eleven rap songs8 selected by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of the “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.”
• Was picked by XXL magazine as the best rap song of the ’90s.
• Was picked by Rolling Stone as one of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, as well as one of the 50 Greatest HipHop Songs of All Time.
• Was picked by VH1 as the third-best rap song of all time.
• Was named the third-best song of the ’90s by Pitchfork.
• Earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group,9 the first nod from them of Dr. Dre’s career.10
“Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” was transformative, and something larger than the song itself.
It took the anti-romance of gangsterdom and made it endearing, charming, almost insouciant. Even its video, which was built around a Day in the Life of Snoop and Dre premise, was perfect.11 People pined for the lifestyle. Being a gangster wasn’t dangerous, it was dope and wonderful, because you got to ride around in nice cars under ambient lighting from a perfectly warm sun and play volleyball with large-breasted women and pour beer on people if they weren’t accommodating.
“Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” did that. It took the nation’s most aggressive, most polarizing movement, a movement born of racism and classism and confrontation and unrest and riots, and made it, quite simply, fun, which made it ubiquitous, which made it unavoidable.
Perhaps the most insightful measure of the influence of “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” came from Public Enemy’s Chuck D, a forefather of gangsta rap. “We made records during the crack era, where everything was hyped up, sped up and zoned out,” he told Rolling Stone in 2012. “Dre came with ‘“G” Thang’ and slowed the whole genre down. He took hip-hop from the crack era to the weed era.”
In 1997’s documentary Rhyme & Reason, Dre talked about how The Chronic never wandered away from its Compton birthplace despite him having vacation homes in basically every affluent suburb in the country, saying:
“Gangstas like the album because the album is gangsta.”
It was.
G-Funk bent the path of rap for all time, momentarily wrestling it away from New York’s iron grip for the first time, and it did so without lending any of its power to anyone outside of the culture.
“Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” did that, too, did that first, and did that best.
REBUTTAL: “SO WHAT’CHA WANT” BEASTIE BOYS
“Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” is the monolith: preternaturally smooth, endlessly effortless, and quite possibly the closest that radio rap will ever get to platonic perfection. Which is exactly what makes “So What’cha Want,” in all its scratchy, tossed-off brilliance, way more important. Note the three bored goofballs in the video, traipsing through the woods, nowhere in particular to go; note them mean-mugging, pogo-spazzing, balancing stalks of grass on their lips for that impromptu mustache effect. “Y’all suckers write me checks and then they bounce / So I reach into my pocket for the fresh amount”—is Mike D attempting to brag about being the victim of check fraud?!
This is a distillation of life lived not as we want it to be at its best—there are no fridges full of 40s here, oh no—but as it actually is at its best: fragmented, trifling, loose, confused, hopped-up, and hopeful. “Well just plug me in just like I was Eddie Harris / You’re eating crazy cheese like you would think I’m from Paris”—does Ad-Rock believe he’d be made to feel comfortable by a host who confused Ad-Rock’s origins to be Parisian in nature by said host eating a lot of cheese around him?!
According to the liner notes on the Beastie Boys’ anthology The Sounds of Science, “So What’cha Want” was an afterthought: After two years of slaving over the rest of Check Your Head, the dudes tossed this one together at the last minute. Which of course they did. This is “true art” of the throwaway variety. If they’d thought too much about it, it wouldn’t be this kind of classic.
—AMOS BARSHAD
Nuthin But A ‘G’ Thang
Things It’s Like – This/That/This a
nd Uh
Things It’s Not Like – Door/Bear/Cell Phone
Trouble/Compton/Long Beach
Unfadeable → So Please → Don’t Try To Fade This → Because I Am
Worth Getting An STD To Experience – Quality/Pussy
1. The very first question I would ask Dr. Moreau is “Why did you ruin Val Kilmer’s career?” and the second question would be “Can you please combine a tiger and an elephant? Because a tigerphant sounds like the most incredible thing.”
2. In comparison, I was born into the lower middle class, and have only managed to not fall backward into total squalor.
3. While I was working on this book, I watched hours of video of Dr. Dre lasering through interviews from the past twenty years. I’d begun to assume he was some sort of advanced automaton. However, in a sit-down interview he did for Peter Spirer’s 1997 documentary Rhyme & Reason, Dre responded to a question about what the then-future of hip-hop held by making an impromptu Dionne Warwick joke. I suppose this doesn’t exclude the possibility of him being an A.I. machine, but it at least proves that he’s trying to approximate a version of a human emotion, and that’s close enough. The machines will provide a recognizable future for us. We can’t ask for much more.
4. The verse is aimed at Eazy-E, whom Dr. Dre had decided to war against following his acrimonious departure from N.W.A.
5. Murdering a human is not that great of a thing to do, FYI. We should be clear on that.
6. Snoop actually wrote all of the verses on “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.” He was twenty-one years old.
7. Snoop’s own first album, Doggystyle, produced by Dr. Dre the year following The Chronic, went quadruple platinum.
8. The other ten: Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”; Arrested Development’s “Tennessee”; the Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)”; De La Soul’s “Me, Myself and I”; Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message”; LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out”; Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”; Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way”; the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”; U.T.F.O.’s “Roxanne, Roxanne.”
9. “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” somehow lost to the Digable Planets’ “Rebirth of Slick,” a loss as unforgettable as Metallica losing Best Metal Performance to Jethro Tull at the 1988 Grammys, Elvis Costello losing Best New Artist to A Taste of Honey at the 1979 Grammys, and me losing at four square in 1991 to a kid that I’m pretty sure was blind.
10. Dr. Dre’s first Grammy win came in the Best Rap Performance category for “Let Me Ride,” also from The Chronic.
11. Dr. Dre directed the video “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.” He did so over two days and with a budget of only $70K.
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
Cash, and how it rules things, but also how maybe it doesn’t rule anything that’s really important.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
It helped wrench loose G-Funk’s tentacles from the throat of rap, and offered a new dark and dirty alley for the sound of rap to wander down.
The density and complexity of the universe Wu-Tang Clan built for itself was, remains today, and will forever remain exhilarating, exhausting, and exhaustive. Here is an example, and I’m just going to wholesale paraphrase the beginning of a brilliant Wu-Tang article by Brandon Perkins1 from a 2007 issue of URB magazine called “Widdling Down Infinity”:
There were 9 members of the Wu-Tang Clan. The number 9, “according to Supreme Mathematics—a Five Percent philosophy and belief of the Wu, used to describe the Earth’s mechanics,” means “to bring into existence.” Each of those 9 members has a heart and that heart has 4 chambers, and 9 × 4 = 36, which represents the number of levels of mastery and also the title of their album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), but also 3 + 6 = 9, and we’re right back to where we started. There are 108 pressure points on the human body, and 1 + 0 + 8 = 9, but, also, of those 108, exactly 36 of them are deadly, and the 9 members + the 36 deadly pressure points = 45, and 4 + 5 = 9, and we’re right back to where we started again.
The article goes on like that for a couple thousand words, and it only ever really examines the mathematical segment of Wu-Tang’s spectrum. There are more cosmological layers, as well as superhero fantasies, chess metaphors, crime boss aliases, a clothing brand, and more, and more, and more. You could fill a book—lots of books—with information about them. And they have.2 But that’s not this, of course. So here is a mostly linear Wu-Tang primer:
There are nine members3 of the Wu-Tang Clan. Sometimes when people talk about them there are more members.4 And sometimes when people talk about them there are fewer members.5 They are most often linked to Staten Island, a New York City borough, though not all of the members are/were from there. (Staten Island = Shaolin, FYI.) Though not the singular founder, RZA is the leader of the group, and, in addition to establishing their creative arc, he also set in place a five-year business plan that guided their professional dealings (more on this later). Their first single, “Protect Ya Neck,” was an underground hit, and probably the first truly transcendent song to exist beneath the top layer of rap, which, by 1992/3, had firmed itself as a legitimate (very profitable) genre. Their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), is an unmitigated classic, and a handful of equally impressive projects followed.6 They are now regularly cited as the greatest, most influential rap group of all time. And now you know about one percent of the history of the Wu-Tang Clan.
♦
Where “Protect Ya Neck,” recorded for a few hundred dollars and sold out the backs of vans, sought to introduce Wu-Tang Clan into the rap conversation—any rap conversation, really—“C.R.E.A.M.,”7 the standout song from Enter the Wu-Tang, (36 Chambers), announced them as torchbearers.
“C.R.E.A.M.” was dusty and intimidating and raw and unflinching, just as the album was, and it framed a very bleak economic realism in a handmade collage of bizarro tinks and thumps. It was the inverse to what had been happening in rap on the West Coast for the two years prior,8 both sonically (Dr. Dre’s G-Funk creation was unhurried and loping and a reflection of its own coolness; Wu-Tang’s lo-fi bombast was frenetic and intricate and introspective) and ideologically (the whole first verse of “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” is about how Dr. Dre is unfadeable so please don’t try to fade him; the whole first verse of “C.R.E.A.M.” is about all the small-scale crime Raekwon had committed, only to realize he’d not advanced his station in life). It was a change matched in measure only by what Public Enemy had done five years prior with It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and it was invigorating.
G-Funk certainly didn’t disappear (Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle was released the same month as Enter the Wu-Tang) but the next direction of rap’s evolution had been made obvious.
♦
There are three eventualities that spiral back toward “C.R.E.A.M.,” which also means they lead back to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), which really means they lead back to Wu-Tang as an entity:
1. New York: I would argue that the strongest year in all of rap was 1994 (and, in fact, that’s exactly what happens in the next chapter). There were groundbreaking tapes from UGK (Port Arthur, Texas); Common (Chicago, Illinois); Bone Thugs-N-Harmony (Cleveland, Ohio); Outkast (Atlanta, Georgia); Master P (New Orleans, Louisiana); and on and on. But 1994, expansive as it was, belonged 100 percent to New York. Rap leaned all the way toward the right side that year. You have to attribute that to Biggie’s “Juicy” and Nas’s Illmatic, for sure. But you also have to attribute it to what the Wu-Tang Clan accomplished in 1993.
2. The Inspiration for Moguldom: Puff, Jay, Master P, 50, any other rap mogul you care to name—that level of entrepreneurship was created by RZA.9 Here’s a quote from his book, The Wu-Tang Manual: “I told them, ‘If y’all give me five years of your life, I promise you in five years I’m gonna take us to the top.’ And so we gave each other our word. The Wu-Tang Clan was born.” RZA’s plan was actually super-involved. In those five years,
along with the albums, he’d push to build the Wu-Tang “W” into broadband recognition status, including a proper Wu-Tang video game and clothing line in their portfolio. His most ingenious move, though: He arranged for the group to sign with an independent record label (Steve Rifkind’s newly formed Loud Records) that offered a unique clause in the contract: While the group as a whole was exclusive to Loud Records, each member was allowed to secure a solo deal with a competing label. GZA signed with Geffen Records. Ghostface went with Sony. Method Man went with Def Jam. It was the first time anything like that had ever been pulled off. RZA viewed the Wu-Tang Clan as a wide-based corporation, and so he positioned them as such.
(Note: Wu-Tang released their second album, Wu-Tang Forever, right at the end of RZA’s proposed five-year plan. It shipped more than four million copies in its first six months.)
3. Cheese Wagstaff: That’s the name of the character Method Man played on HBO’s The Wire, which I’m assuming you knew already because you paid money for this book and so that’s probably the sort of thing you’d know. I still can’t believe Cheese set up Prop Joe to be killed like that. I just really can’t. I almost threw away all my Method Man CDs after watching that scene. Top seven deaths on The Wire, ranked by emotional distress caused: 7. Prop Joe; 6. Snoop; 5. Bodie; 4. D’Angelo; 3. Stringer; 2. Omar; 1. Wallace. Oh great, now I’m crying again.
♦
Ol’ Dirty Bastard does not have a verse on “C.R.E.A.M.” He represents the duality of it as well as any of the members of the Clan do, though, and he probably does so more than most, really.
During the State of the Union address in 1994, President Bill Clinton talked about a lot of things, as presidents tend to do during State of the Union addresses. Here’s a thing he said about government assistance: “We have to end welfare as a way of life and make it a path to independence and dignity.” He said more, but that’s a fine enough summation of his premise.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 12