1. This maybe makes him like Neo in The Matrix, though I can’t imagine Neo would ever do a record with Mario Winans and Ashanti.
2. His salary was $22,913.54.
3. December 1995 to June 1997.
4. This is a simplification of the events, though only marginally.
5. Some might remember his guest verse on Erick Sermon’s “Ain’t Shhh to Discuss” from 2000, though Ross was calling himself Teflon Da Don back then.
6. Yeah fucking right.
7. Lots of people for sure tried to replicate what Ross was doing. The best impression: Kanye West and Jay Z on Watch the Throne. The worst impression: Ace Hood on everything that wasn’t “Bugatti.” The best variation of it: Riff Raff’s bizarro brags. He called himself the white Eddie Murphy in a song once, and I don’t know how or why that line isn’t engraved into the side of the Statue of Liberty yet.
8. Esquire wrote this big story on him in 2013 that said Freeway Rick sold more than nine hundred million dollars’ worth of cocaine in 1980 alone.
9. This is the only chapter with two Rebuttals. These two are together because Sean and Rob, both incredible writers, are guys whom I’ve basically accidentally linked in my brain just through regular association. Reading one of them always seems to make me want to read the other, and I’m not sure why but it’s just that way. It seemed natural to connect them here.
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
Getting married, or at least choosing one woman, for marriage or for other things.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
It represented the death knell for the condescension that had been aimed at southern rap since southern rap became a thing.
“International Players Anthem” was a southern rap legend event song. It was a UGK record, and UGK is the greatest Texas rap group of all time.1 It had guest verses from Outkast, and Outkast is the greatest Atlanta rap group of all time. And it was produced by Three 6 Mafia, the greatest Tennessee rap group of all time. It was not specifically a celebration of the South, but it certainly felt like that, and still feels like that. It still feels like the moment when the South began to shake free of the caricature it’d been portrayed as.
Let’s make two arguments here, and maybe they’re wrong, but they’re probably not. Before we get there, though, here is some information that will be helpful:
1. For the rest of this passage, I’m going to use the phrase “the South” to mean “rappers and people in the rap industry who are from southern states.” It’s almost always a bad idea to write roundly like that. And the characters who constitute “the South” certainly don’t operate as a singularity. But this particular instance calls for that kind of grouping. Otherwise, the chapter would be sixty-five thousand words, and that’s about sixty-three thousand words over the limit, which is a lot to be over, FYI.
2. Bane is a bad-guy character from Batman. He’s been in the comics and in a video game and even cartoons, too, but when he’s mentioned here it’s in reference to when Tom Hardy played him in The Dark Knight Rises in 2012.
Now we can start:
For its first two decades, rap in the South existed as its own entity. The focus on the genre bounced from coast to coast and back again as it settled into itself, just out of reach of Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, and the other states in between. The South was trying to participate, but it wasn’t being engaged by anyone from outside its borders, and a lot of times it was actively being ignored, or pickled. Picture kids playing Monkey in the Middle. It was like that, except instead of a ball it was rap, and instead of kids playing it was rappers, and instead of a game it was the game, and instead of being it you weren’t it and that was the problem, and so maybe not like Monkey in the Middle after all. But, you get it.
This was happening, and the South could see that it was happening, so it did what it was forced to do: adapt. There were few-to-no major label record deals to be had, so rappers in the South created their own record labels and gave themselves their own deals. They booked their own smaller tours throughout the area and learned to generate a fan base out of nothingness. They brokered relationships with small distributors and basically sold their tapes one by one wherever they could. They figured out how to brand themselves (style of dress, of talking, of production), even if they weren’t aware all the time that that’s what they were doing. All of that was happening in the South all the time, and so it grew into its own kind of self-sustaining biosphere, containing its own regional stars and regional millionaires. UGK, Three 6 Mafia, Outkast, Master P and the No Limit label, the Cash Money family, etc.—their popularity didn’t instantly stretch across the United States on the back of MTV like how the New Yorkers’ popularity and the Californians’ popularity had, but it didn’t have to. Their importance was slow-cooked, but unquestioned, and that’s just as impactful. Think on it like this: Each of Ja Rule’s first four albums went platinum. JEFFREY ATKINS HAS FOUR PLATINUM ALBUMS. Do you know how many platinum albums UGK has? Zero. But nobody’s cared about Ja since 50 Cent shoved him into a burial plot in 2003. Bun B remains a hero, and Pimp C, who died in 2007, remains a hero, too.
That’s a Photoshopped version of the story, but it’s a version of the story nonetheless. So here are the two arguments, and they’re both about how the South was able to slide into dominance:
1. When the Internet began to flex its grip on the music industry, when the guaranteed platinum and gold plaques weren’t so guaranteed anymore, when album sales began to crater after 2004, it had a minimal effect on the southern rappers (or, at the very least, it had less of an effect). The South had (literally) operated out of the trunk of a Cadillac for so long that it felt natural to have to do it when that (metaphorically) became the way it had to be done. The southern rappers had accidentally prepared for that exact scenario. There’s a scene in The Dark Knight Rises where Bane and Batman are fighting in the sewer and Batman is getting housed so he cuts the lights off to try to gain an advantage. But Bane is unfazed. He’d been raised in a lightless prison pit, he tells Batman. “You think darkness is your ally?” he asks. “You merely adopted the dark. I was born into it.” Then he grabs Batman by the neck and pummels him some more. That’s not an exact metaphor for this situation, but it’s pretty close.
2. The best iteration of rap is the self-aware one (or the self-reflective one). That’s why gangsta rap was crucial early on (it drew from the crack plague), and G-Funk (it drew from the tempering and normalization of inner-city strife), and big-money music (it drew from rap’s own success), etc. So when sales turned downward, the way rap music sounded, and the way it was going to sound, changed direction as well. It aimed more toward locality, toward music identities that could be extended outward without being homogenized. The Internet fragmented rap’s landscape. It made it easier for a sound specific to an area—like drill music in Chicago, or Chopped and Screwed music in Houston, or club music in Baltimore—to not just be confined to that area. Subgenres of subgenres became nourished and vetted. There was still success to be found sounding like someone else had sounded, but there was iconography to be had sounding like something that’d not been heard en masse yet. The South had accidentally prepared for that exact scenario, too.
♦
Beyond the cultural implications and relevancy, “International Players Anthem” is just an amazingly constructed song. There were eleven songs that came before it that also sampled Willie Hutch’s “I Choose You” but none as effectively. Andre 3000’s verse, the way it lies in the grass at the beginning of the song, we have to get the original copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, rip it out of the frame, then replace it with his verse, because it’s real and true art. The two snare snaps that happen right before Pimp C’s verse, we have to take those two snare snaps and vote them president of the United States. The claps that happen during Bun B’s verse, we have to teach all the children that because that’s the new currency. Big Boi’s rubbery coo, put it in a time capsule and bury it for a billion years because we’re not r
eady for anything that buttery and soothing.
And then there’s the video that came with it.2
Pimp C’s fur coat and hat . . . Andre’s kilt . . . the premarriage mini roast . . . Bishop Don Magic Juan kissing a white woman . . .
♦
The Source today isn’t what The Source was in 1995. In 1995, it was operating as a premier publication. It was top notch, a true tastemaker magazine that could semi-seriously be referred to as the hip-hop bible, a nickname they gave themselves. So when they held their awards show in New York that year, it was a very large event and (almost3) all of the very important people were there.
Outkast, who’d released the trenchant Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik the year before, won the award for Best New Artist, as well they should have. And that maybe doesn’t sound strange or eventful right now because we are far enough removed from that time period, but consider this: The Source Awards gave out sixteen awards that night. Fourteen of them went to someone who was from either New York or California. The fifteenth was an award for Soundtrack of the Year, so a single person couldn’t win that. But even there, the winner was the soundtrack for Above the Rim, a movie that had been filmed in New York. And if the subtext wasn’t clear enough, what followed was.
As Big Boi and Andre 3000 walked up onstage, they were booed loudly. It was rough and unfair and representative of the way the South had been treated by rap up until (and then well beyond) that point. But it provided an opportunity. And Andre’s response was indicative of the way the South would respond from that moment forward.
Big Boi offered the setup. “So what’s up, Dre?” he asked. Andre, twenty years old and suddenly standing in front of an arena filled with rap stars, slid in front of the mic, his dashiki looking very much like a war flag, and, after a moment to gather himself, swaggered: “The South got somethin’ to say, that’s all I got to say,” and then he stomped away. It was so beautiful, and his defiance was a place marker. “It finally gave—clear-cut—an incision from New York wannabe-ism,” said Killer Mike, another respected Atlanta rapper. “It was a great thing that they were handled in that way because it finally cut the umbilical cord, saying, ‘We don’t have to impress you. We don’t have to be influenced by you in the same creative way. We’re gonna show you.’”
♦
“International Players Anthem” came fifteen years after UGK’s first album, Too Hard to Swallow (1992), thirteen years after Outkast’s first album in 1994, and twelve years after Three 6 Mafia’s Mystic Stylez came out in 1995. It was nominated for a Grammy, picked the tenth-best song of the year by Rolling Stone, and one of the 500 best songs of the decade by Pitchfork. These are the rap artists who had albums that topped Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart the same years these groups made their debuts:
1992: Kris Kross (Totally Krossed Out), Das EFX (Dead Serious), Ice Cube (The Predator). Only Ice Cube was still a force in 2007.
1994: Snoop Dogg (Doggystyle), Heavy D (Nuttin’ But Love), Warren G (Regulate . . . G Funk Era), Da Brat (Funkdafied), MC Eiht (We Come Strapped), Method Man (Tical), Redman (Dare Iz A Darkside). Only Snoop maintained his level of stardom.
1995: Too Short (Cocktails), DJ Quik (Safe + Sound), Tupac (Me Against the World), Naughty By Nature (Poverty’s Paradise), Luniz (Operation Stackola), Bone Thugs-N-Harmony (E. 1999 Eternal), Kool G Rap (4, 5, 6), AZ (Doe or Die), Tha Dogg Pound (Dogg Food). Tupac was Tupac, and Too Short is a folk hero, but that’s it from this list.
Fifteen years after their debut, UGK proved that they—and ipso facto southern music—were as relevant as they had ever been, if not more so, and probably more so.
An International Players Quiz
• Big Boi typed a text to a girl he used to see. (T) (F)
• Spaceships do not come with rearview mirrors. (T) (F)
• Money is located on the dresser. (T) (F)
• Trash likes to fuck with $50 in the club. (T) (F)
• Smashed the gray one, got a blue one. (T) (F)
• There are seven wonders of the world. (T) (F)
• Million-dollar macks require million-dollar bitches. (T) (F)
• Impregnating a woman is akin to making it rain every month. (T) (F)
• Child support can reach up to 30K a month. (T) (F)
• The gut is the appropriate place to dump. (T) (F)
REBUTTAL: “GOOD LIFE” KANYE WEST, FEATURING T-PAIN
Kanye West is a pop-culture wonder of the sort whose grand gestures kick up grand gestures of their own. See: The College Dropout’s sharp-dressed-everyman revolution or the still-cresting wave of sad singers post 808s & Heartbreak. 2007’s less heralded Graduation is increasingly important as a fulcrum between rap phenomenon Kanye and the present world-beating polymath Kanye. If you listen closely, you can hear the birth of the latter on “Good Life” as Ye sneers, “50 told me ‘Go ’head, switch the style up / And if they hate, then let ’em hate, and watch the money pile up.’” “Good Life” encapsulates all the tired-of-being-humble grandstanding, post-regional, kitchen-sink maximalism, auto-tune appreciation, and MJ idolization of the next decade of Kanye West in miniature. Ye has revisited all these elements frequently since but rarely with the sated champagne splendor he and T-Pain splash over DJ Toomp’s blown-out keys here.
—CRAIG JENKINS
1. There’s an argument to be made for the Geto Boys claiming that title. But UGK buzzer-beats them out because they pioneered the country rap sound, because their lineup never changed, because their best album (Ridin’ Dirty) is slightly more cohesive and slightly more perfect than the Geto Boys’ best album (We Can’t Be Stopped), because Scarface is a better rapper than Bun B and Pimp C, but Bun B and Pimp C are better rappers than Bushwick Bill and Willie D, because Pimp C said, “Top notch hoes get the most, not the lesser,” and also, “I eat so many shrimp I got iodine poisoning.”
2. Teeny, tiny sidebar here: Bryan Barber directed the video. He’s who Andre 3000 wanted. Andre said if Bryan wasn’t directing the video, then he wasn’t going to be in it.
3. Tupac was in jail. But Biggie, Puff, Nas, Suge, the Wu-Tang Clan, Ice Cube, Snoop, Dr. Dre, etc.—they were all there. Tupac had attended the inaugural Source Awards the year before and had run up onstage during A Tribe Called Quest’s set. I can’t even imagine the way he’d have magnified the mayhem of the 1995 awards.
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
So much stuff: Nigerian hair; the power of a ch-ch-ch-ch-chopper; Orville Redenbacher; intimidation, as it relates to the relationship between goons and goblins; a query regarding the location of Erykah Badu; more.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
It’s when Wayne translated the success his mixtape run had had into aboveground success. More substantially, though: It was when sounding like you were rapping on a mixtape actually became a way to achieve aboveground success. diving around in the folds of his own brain.
A famous story about Lil Wayne is that he accidentally shot himself in the chest when he was twelve years old. He has changed how it happened a few times,1 but the crux of the story has always stayed the same: He was home alone with a gun and then a little bit later he was home alone with a gun and also a hole in his body.
He told VH1 during a Behind the Music special in 2009 that the doctors said he missed his heart by less than an inch and that fragments of the bullet were still in there and they could never be removed because it was too unsafe, and that was pretty scary. Then he said it was okay because they weren’t going to move—unless, for some reason, he traveled through some sort of very large magnetic field, and when he said that he stretched his eyeballs for dramatic effect and also jutted his teeth forward for dramatic effect, too, and that was pretty goofy and weird.
And that’s Lil Wayne, given we can surmise the entirety of a person’s professional identity in a two-paragraph extrapolation.
He’s an intimidatingly talented technical rapper, and he showed that off early on as a rifle-mouthed marksman in a group called the Hot Boys;
particularly on his first solo album, 1999’s Tha Block Is Hot; and especially on “Respect Us,” where the stutter step of his cadence was matched impeccably by the complexity of the structure of his verses. And he’s a rapper who allows himself to be goofy and weird, which he showed off beginning in the second stanza of his career, particularly on 2007’s The Drought Is Over 2: The Carter 3 Sessions, and especially on “I Feel Like Dying,” which sounds like he’s scuba diving around in the folds of his own brain.
When he began to balance out those traits against one another at just the right pitch, he walked toward becoming a superhero, unstoppable, unbeatable.2 And when he figured out how to turn it all into something consumable beyond mixtape fodder, like he did during 2008’s Tha Carter III, where we find “A Milli,” where he perfected the mixture, he proved to be irreversibly influential.
♦
There was skepticism before Tha Carter III was released, as there should have been, and there was a tremendous amount of excitement before Tha Carter III was released, as there should have been.
Wayne had sold well in the past—Tha Block Is Hot went platinum, and Tha Carter II (2005) went platinum as well. But the success of Tha Block Is Hot was, to a degree, fated and blind, an ancillary effect of the country’s sudden infatuation with Cash Money Records, an independent label in New Orleans that had signed a distribution deal with Universal Music Group and presented a new brand of rap.3 And Tha Carter II, while well received structurally, arrived in the shadow of Kanye West’s wonderful Late Registration, and so when it came it was fine, but it also felt a bit like maybe rap had already moved on. That was the skepticism.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 23