Decoded Read online

  I’ve never been good at sitting still, and even when I’m sitting still, my mind is racing. I’ve built my life around my own restlessness in a lot of ways. School was always easy for me; I never once remember feeling challenged. I have a photographic memory, so if I glanced at something once, I could recall it for a test. I was reading on a twelfth-grade level in the sixth, I could do math in my head, but I had no interest in sitting in a classroom all day. When I was hustling, I wasn’t the kid who worked his home corner, in eyeshot of his own bedroom window. I stayed on the road.

  I love New York more than probably anything else in the world, but I’m thankful that I got away at a young age to see some of the world outside of Marcy. It opened my perspective on a lot of things, including my taste in music. People in other parts of the country think New Yorkers are snobs about hip-hop and defensive about their position as the birthplace of the art. That’s unfair, but being outside of the city so much definitely helped me avoid having any kind of narrow sense of what rap music could sound like.

  For instance, the famous East Coast–West Coast beef in hip-hop in the 1990s was based on a lot of things: personal animosities, unsolved shootings, disrespect at awards shows, women, and other assorted bullshit. But as far as I was concerned, one thing it wasn’t about was the quality of the music. I was spending a lot of time in Washington, D.C., and Maryland when West Coast hip-hop, led by NWA and then Cube, Dre, and Snoop, started to sweep the entire country. I was a Brooklyn MC to the bone—I wasn’t trying to pretend otherwise. But I also got why people loved NWA. I started listening to all kinds of rappers from all over the country, including the Southern rappers and West Coast MCs like Too Short, whose lazy-seeming flows were the opposite of my fast-rapping style at the time and completely contrary to what most New York MCs were doing. I loved the variety that was developing outside of the world of New York hip-hop and absorbed elements of all of it, which helped me enrich my own style.

  When you step outside of school and have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I’ve never been a purely linear thinker. You can see it in my rhymes. My mind is always jumping around, restless, making connections, mixing and matching ideas, rather than marching in a straight line. That’s why I’m always stressing focus. My thoughts chase each other from room to room in my head if I let them, so sometimes I have to slow myself down. I’ve never been one to write perfect little short stories in my rhymes, like some other MCs. It’s not out of a sense of preference, just that the rhymes come to me in a different way, as a series of connecting verbal ideas, rather than full-fledged stories.

  But that’s a good match for the way I’ve always approached life. I’ve always believed in motion and action, in following connections wherever they take me, and in not getting entrenched. My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps and links than simple steady movement, or worse, stagnation. It’s allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I’m supposed to be doing next. Stories have ups and downs and moments of development followed by moments of climax; the storyteller has to keep it all together, which is an incredible skill. But poetry is all climax, every word and line pops with the same energy as the whole; even the spaces between the words can feel charged with potential energy. It fits my style to rhyme with high stakes riding on every word and to fill every pause with pressure and possibility. And maybe I just have ADD, but I also like my rhymes to stay loose enough to follow whatever ideas hijack my train of thought, just like I like my mind to stay loose enough to absorb everything around me.

  YOU WANT WAR THEN IT’S WAR’S GONNA BE

  I was in a London club when I first heard Panjabi MC’s “Mundian To Bach Ke.” It wasn’t like anything else playing. The bass line was propulsive and familiar, but it took me a second to realize it was from the theme song of Knight Rider, a bass line Busta Rhymes had also recently used. On top of the crazy, driving bass line were fluttering drums and this urgent, high-pitched, rhythmic strumming, which came, as it turns out, from a tumbi, a traditional South Asian instrument. I didn’t know all that when I heard it in the club. All I knew was it was something totally fresh. It felt like world music in the best sense, like a bunch of sounds from different parts of the globe joined up like an all-star team. People in the club heard it and went crazy. I did, too.

  I tracked down the artist and called the next day to see if I could do a remix of the song. It was 2003, early in the Iraq invasion, early enough that people in America still mostly supported the war. Bush had flown onto the aircraft carrier with the big MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner and people were thinking it was an easy win for Team America. But I’d been traveling all over the world and knew that there was a different perception outside of the United States. Whatever sympathy we had after 9/11 was vanishing. I was able to pick up on some of the arguments that weren’t being made on American television. I was one of the people who thought 9/11 was an opportunity to rethink our character as a nation. With the war in Iraq it felt like we were squandering a window of goodwill. It wasn’t just that it was a war; as Barack Obama said, it was clearly a dumb war.

  When I started working on my remix of “Mundian To Bach Ke”—we called it “Beware of the Boys,” which was the Punjabi title translated into English—I wanted to make it a party song, which was the mind-set I was in when I first heard it. But the international feeling of the track—which some people thought was Arabic—moved me into a different direction. So I dropped in a line against the Iraq War. That got me thinking about the recent history of America in the Middle East, so I added something about the Iran-Contra scandal in the eighties—which brought me back to that whole era of big drug kingpins and my own life back then, copping and selling just like Ollie North. I compared Osama Bin Laden to Ronald Reagan in their indifference to the destruction each of them brought to the city I lived in.

  I was wading into deeper waters with every connection. So I stopped myself and took it back to the club: But for now mami turn it around and let your boy play.

  BEWARE (JAY-Z REMIX)

  As soon as the beat drop / We got the streets locked / Overseas at Panjabi MC and the ROC / I came to see the mamis in the spot / On the count of three, drop your body like its hot / One Young / Two you / Want to, three / Young Hov’s a snake charmer / Move your body lika snake mama / Make me wanna put tha snake on ya1 / I’m on my 8th summer / still hot / Young’s the 8th wonder / All I do is get bread2 / Yeah, I take wonder / I take one of ya chics straight from under ya arm pit / The black Brad Pitt / I mack till 6 in the AM / All day I’m P-I-M-P3 / I am simply / Attached to tha track4 like SMPTE5 / It’s sinfully good young Hov infinitely hood / [Chorus] / R.O.C. and ya don’t stop / Panjabi MC and ya don’t stop / Nigga NYC and ya don’t stop / It’s the ROC, it’s the ROC / R.O.C. and we don’t stop / Panjabi MC and we don’t stop / It’s your boy Jay-Z and we don’t stop / Nigga, ROC and we won’t stop / Ma, I ain’t gotta tell ya / But it’s your boy Hov from the U.S. / You just lay down slow6 / Catch your boy mingling in England meddling in the Netherlands / Checkin in daily under aliases / We rebellious we back home / screamin leave Iraq alone / But all my soldiers in the field / I will wish you safe return7 / But only love kills war, when will they learn?8 / It’s international Hov, been havin the flow / Before bin Laden got Manhattan to blow, / Before Ronald Reagan got Manhattan to blow,9 / Before I was cabbin it there back before / raw we had it all day, Papi in the hallway, cop one on consignment / to give you more yay / Yeah, but that’s another story / But for now, mami,10 turn it around and let the boy play.

  BLUE MAGIC / FEATURING PHARRELL

  Roc-A-Fella records / The imperial Skateboard P / Great Hova / Y’all already know what it is (Oh shit!) / C’mon! / Yeah / So what if you flip a couple words / I could triple that in birds / open your mind you see the circus in the sky / I’m Ringling brothers Barnum and Bailey with the pies1 / No matter how you slice it I’m your mothe
rfucking guy / Just like a b-boy with 360 waves / Do the same with the pot, still come back beige2 / Whether right or south paw, whether powdered or jar / Whip it around, it still comes back hard. / So easily do I w-h-i-p / My repetition with wrists will bring you kilo bitches3 / I got creole C.O. bitches for my niggas who slipped, became prisoners / Treats taped to the visitors / You already know what the business is / Unnecessary commissary,4 boy we live this shit / Niggas wanna bring the eighties back / It’s OK with me, that’s where they made me at5 / Except I don’t write on the wall / I write my name in the history books, hustling in the hall (hustling in the hall)6 / Nah, I don’t spin on my head / I spin work in the pots so I can spend my bread / [Chorus: Pharrell] And I’m getting it, I’m getting it / I ain’t talking about it, I’m living it / I’m getting it, straight getting it / Ge-ge-ge-get get get it boy / [Jay-Z] (Don’t waste you time fighting the life stay your course, and you’ll understand)7 / Get it boy / It’s ’87 state of mind that I’m in (mind that I’m in) / In my prime, so for that time, I’m Rakim (I’m Rakim)8 / If it wasn’t for the crime that I was in / But I wouldn’t be the guy whose rhymes it is that I’m in (that I’m in) / No pain, no profit, P I repeat if you show me where the pot is (pot is) / Cherry M3s with the top back (top back) / Red and green G’s all on my hat / North beach leathers, matching Gucci sweater / Gucci sneaks on to keep my outfit together / Whatever, hundred for the diamond chain / Can’t you tell that I came from the dope game / Blame Reagan for making me into a monster / Blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra / I ran contraband that they sponsored / Before this rhyming stuff we was in concert9 / [Chorus: Pharrell] Push (push) money over broads, you got it, fuck Bush10 / Chef (chef), guess what I cooked / Baked a lot of bread and kept it off the books / Rockstar, look, way before the bars my picture was getting took / Feds, they like wack rappers, try as they may, couldn’t get me on the hook11 / D.A. wanna indict me / Cause fishscales in my veins like a pisces / The Pyrex pot, rolled up my sleeves / Turn one into two like a Siamese / Twin when it end, I’ma stand as a man never dying on my knees12 / Last of a dying breed, so let the champagne pop / I partied for a while now I’m back to the block

  My father was crazy for detail. I get that from him. Even though we didn’t live together after I was nine, there are some things he instilled in me early that I never lost. He’d walk my cousin B-High and me through Times Square—this is when it was still known as Forty Deuce—and we’d people watch. Back then, Times Square was crazy grimy. Pimps, prostitutes, dealers, addicts, gangs, all the shit from the seventies that other people saw in blaxploitation flicks, Manhattan had in living color. Kids from Harlem and Hell’s Kitchen used Times Square as their backyard—they’d be out there deep, running in and out of karate flicks, breakdancing—but for Brooklyn kids, like me and B-High, midtown Manhattan might as well have been a plane ride away.

  My father would take us to Lindy’s and we’d get these big-ass steak fries. We would sit in the restaurant looking out the window onto the streets, and play games that exercised our observational skills. Like my pops would make us guess a woman’s dress size. There was nothing he missed about a person. He was really good about taking in all the nonverbal clues people give you to their character, how to listen to the matrix of a conversation, to what a person doesn’t say.

  For my pops it was just as important to take in places as people. He wanted me to know my own neighborhood inside out. When we’d go to visit my aunt and uncle and cousins my father would give me the responsibility of leading, even though I was the youngest. When I was walking with him, he always walked real fast (he said that way if someone’s following you, they’ll lose you) and he expected me to not only keep up with him but to remember the details of the things I was passing. I had to know which bodega sold laundry detergent and who only stocked candy and chips, which bodega was owned by Puerto Ricans and which one was run by Arabs, who taped pictures of themselves holding AKs to the Plexiglas where they kept the loose candy.

  He was teaching me to be confident and aware of my surroundings. There’s no better survival skill you could teach a boy in the ghetto, and he did it demonstratively, not by sitting me down and saying, “Yo, always look around at where you are,” but by showing me. Without necessarily meaning to, he taught me how to be an artist.

  I GIVE YOU THE NEWS WITH A TWIST, IT’S JUST HIS GHETTO POINT OF VIEW

  That same kind of close observation is at the heart of rap. Great rappers from the earliest days distinguished themselves by looking closely at the world around them and describing it in a clever, artful way. And then they went further than just describing it. They started commenting on it in a critical way. Rap’s first great subjects were ego-tripping and partying, but before long it turned into a tool for social commentary.

  It was kind of a natural move, really. The 1970s were a time when black art in general was being used as a tool for social change, whether it was in the poetry of people like the Last Poets or in the R&B of Marvin Gaye or Donny Hathaway or in movies like Shaft. And politics had a real cultural angle, too. The Black Panthers weren’t just about revolution and Marxism, they were also about changing style and language. Jesse Jackson recited poems like “I Am Somebody” to schoolchildren of my generation. Art and politics and culture were all mixed up together. So it was almost obligatory that any popular art include some kind of political message. Some early rap was explicitly political, like Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation movement. But other rappers played it safe and nonspecific: They’d throw in a line about peace, or supporting your brotherman, or staying in school, or whatever. It took a while before rappers as a whole really sharpened their commentary, but, again, it was hard not to—there was so much to comment about if your eyes were open to what was going on around you.

  There was the general squalor of the ghetto, which got aired out in early songs like Run-DMC’s first hit, “It’s Like That,” or “The Message” by Melle Mel. But over time, rappers started really going in on specific issues. Crooked cops were attacked by groups like NWA. Drug dealers were targeted by KRS-One. Drug addicts were mocked by Brand Nubian. Ice Cube called out Uncle Toms. Groups like Poor Righteous Teachers denounced shady churches with bootleg preachers. Queen Latifah was pushing back against misogyny. Salt ’N’ Pepa were rallying around safe sex. Public Enemy recorded manifestos on their albums addressing a dozen different issues. You could name practically any problem in the hood and there’d be a rap song for you.

  The hip-hop generation never gets credit for it, but those songs changed things in the hood. They were political commentary, but they weren’t based on theory or books. They were based on reality, on close observation of the world we grew up in. The songs weren’t moralistic, but they created a stigma around certain kinds of behavior, just by describing them truthfully and with clarity. One of the things we corrected was the absent-father karma our fathers’ generation’s created. We made it some real bitch shit to bounce on your kids. Whether it was Ed O.G. & Da Bulldogs with “Be a Father to Your Child,” or Big mixing rage with double entendre (pop duke left ma duke, the faggot took the back way), we as a generation made it shameful to not be there for your kids.

  I’M TALKING BOUT REAL SHIT, THEM PEOPLE’S PLAYIN’

  Artists of all kinds have a platform and, if they’re any good, have a clearer vision of what’s going on in the world around them. In my career I’ve never set out to make songs that function as public service announcements (not even the song “Public Service Announcement”) with a few exceptions, one of which is the song “Meet the Parents.” But in honoring the lesson of my father—to pay attention—and the lesson of hip-hop—which is to tell the truth—I’ve been able to create my own kind of social commentary. Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

  THIS LIFE FOREVER1

  I ride through the ghetto windows down halfway2 /
Halfway out of my mind music on 9, blasting Donny Hathaway3 / Me and my niggas spending half the day / Plotting, how we gon get this math today without getting blast away / I wake up to the same problems after today / Life is harsh, niggas gotta right to spark4 / Right from the start they place me in the ghetto tender age of nine / my tender mind had to surrender to crime / Wouldn’t wish this on nobody life to end up like mine / Ever since I was quite young a nigga been in a bind / Had to scratch for every plaque, even rap aint even all it’s cracked up to be / Niggas dont stack up to me / Had to hustle in a world of trouble / trapped in, claustrophobic the only way out was rapping5 / America don’t understand it, the demographics I tapped in6 / I’m the truest nigga to do this nigga and anything else is foolish / Like those who stay high, under God’s gray skies / My lyrics is like the Bible, made to save lives / In the midst of all your misery nigga, stay fly / Never let em see you frown, even smile when you down / Shit, I floss on my off days, fuck what they all say / Niggas cant stop me with rumors, I’m too strong / All day7 / Socks explode and sweatpants pockets is bulging8 / Holding it down on the corner with my block frozen / My spot is rollin, drop the price of the coke and / Drove the competition out and let the dough flow in / The cops is closing in, I can do the time / But what’s really on my mind aint no hoes in the pen / I play the low and try and make it hard to find me / Feds still tryna build a case since ’93 / I told them, I’m retired but they like whatever / You know them pigs don’t wanna see you get your life together9 / I’m stuck in this life forever / The more things change the more they stay the same / Who am I to change the game? / You gotta move quick like her-o-in and cocaine / The block’s hotter than it’s ever been / Once again / Hold the gun at eye level, I ain’t afraid of conflict / I let the nine rip, nigga say “hi” to the devil / I blind with the bezel, I’m in line with the ghetto10 / What y’all niggas afraid of my mind or the metal / Niggas tryna subtract my life, my mathematics is precise / I carry the nine, so fucking with me just ain’t the answer11 / I just can’t lose when I was young I was like Fresh / Poppa raised me with chess moves / And though you’re gone I’m not bitter you left me prepared12 / We got divided by the years, but I got it from here / Don’t sweat that, sounds bump from Marcy to Lefrak / To that pocket in DC where my man caught his death at13 / Over my years I’ve seen rooks get tooken by the knight / Lose they crown by tryna defend a queen / Checkmate in four moves the Bobby Fischer of rap14 / with raw moves in a time where we all move / Let’s face it either you’re dough chasin, or basing / Lacing, crack’s gotcha feeling strong like Mason / Careful, any infiltration I’m leaving niggas / Leaking more than just information ///