Decoded Page 17

  We locked out D&D studios and I would be in the lab by noon, going from one room to another working with producers. I was lucky to work with some remarkable producers for my first album. Clark and Ski from Original Flavor did a lot of the work. Ron G, Harlem’s mix-tape king, had switched his format from cassette to CD, and he named his first CD release of the year “Dead Presidents.” Being hot on mix tapes made it easier to work with a legendary producer like Premiere for “Friend or Foe.” Talented people were coming out to help me with my debut, and I appreciated the love. I don’t think I slept for weeks at a time back then. I was living off pure adrenaline.

  When Big came through one of my sessions to see Clark, Clark played him the beat for “Brooklyn’s Finest.” He told Clark he had to get on it. I remembered Big from Westinghouse; he was quiet like me, but I can distinctly recall passing him in the hallway and giving him the universal black-man-half-nod of recognition. This time around we clicked right away. More than anything, I love sharp people; men or women, nothing makes me like someone more than intelligence. Big was shy, but when he said something it was usually witty. I’m talkative when I get to know you, but before that I can be pretty economical with words. I’m more of a listener.

  When Big said he wanted to get on the track, I went into the booth and started laying down vocals. Big was in the back of the room smoking and nodding. He didn’t get on that night, though; he said he wanted to go home and think about his verses. In that moment, I gave his coming back to be on the song a fifty-percent chance of actually happening. There was a fifty-percent chance he was just talking shit like an industry nigga. We went to see Bernie Mack later that night and really clicked. He sent the song a couple weeks later.

  Another collaboration on the album was with Foxy Brown. I knew Inga Marchand from before she did LL’s “I Shot Ya” in the fall of 1995. She was a tough, pretty girl I knew from downtown Brooklyn and perfect for the concept I had for the song “Ain’t No Nigga.” One night I took a break from D&D to go to the Palladium—and when “Ain’t No Nigga” came on, it seemed like every single person on every level of the club went to the dance floor. That night the phrase put your drinks down and report to the dance floor floated through my mind for the first time. [I’d later use it as an ad-lib on the single “Do It Again (Throw Your Hands Up)].” I had never seen anything like the response to that record. They played it seven times in a row and the audience went wild every time.

  BURNT IT ALL, THIS MUSIC IS WHERE I BURY THE ASHES AT

  When I was a kid, my parents had, like, a million records stacked to the ceiling in metal milk crates. They both loved music so much. When they did break up and get a divorce, sorting the records out was probably the biggest deal. I remember “Walking in Rhythm,” by the Blackbyrds, “Love’s Theme,” by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, “Dancing Machine,” by the Jackson 5, “Tell Me Something Good,” by Rufus, “The Hustle,” by Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony, “Slippery When Wet,” by the Commodores, “Pick Up the Pieces,” by the Average White Band, “It Only Takes a Minute,” by Tavares, “(TSOP) The Sound of Philadelphia,” by MFSB (Mother Father Sister Brother), the Superfly soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Billy Paul, Honeycomb, Candi Staton, Rose Royce, the Staple Singers, the Sylvers, the O’Jays, Blue Magic, Main Ingredient, the Emotions, Chic, Heatwave, A Taste of Honey, Slave, Evelyn “Champagne” King, Con Funk Shun. If it was hot in the seventies my parents had it. They had a turntable, but they also had a reel-to-reel. My parents would blast those classics when we did our Saturday cleanup and when they came home from work. We’d be dancing in the living room, making our own Soul Train line with B-High, his sisters, and my sisters. I loved all music, but Michael Jackson more than anyone. My mother would play “Enjoy Yourself,” by the Jacksons, and I would dance and sing and spin around. I’d make my sisters my backup singers. I remember those early days as the time that shaped my musical vocabulary. I remember the music making me feel good, bringing my family together, and more importantly, being a common passion my parents shared.

  That music from my childhood still lives in my music. From my very first album, a lot of the tracks I rapped over were built on a foundation of classic seventies soul. On Reasonable, we sampled the Ohio Players, the Stylistics, Isaac Hayes, and the Four Tops.

  The music from that era was incredible, full of emotion. It could be exuberant like the Jackson 5 (who I would sample on songs like “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” later in my career) or passionate like Marvin Gaye records (whose “Soon I’ll Be Loving You Again” I sampled on my American Gangster album) or troubled and transcendent like Curtis Mayfield (I rapped over a snatch of his beautiful, mournful “Man, Oh Man” on “Go Crazy” with Jeezy). The songs carried in them the tension and energy of the era. The seventies were a strange time, especially in black America. The music was beautiful in part because it was keeping a kind of torch lit in a dark time.

  I feel like we—rappers, DJs, producers—were able to smuggle some of the magic of that dying civilization out in our music and use it to build a new world. We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift: We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves. That was part of the ethos of that time and place, and it got built in to the culture we created. Rap took the remnants of a dying society and created something new. Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced, but we took their old records and used them to build something fresh.

  I remember that when I was a kid in the eighties every song I heard had some kind of innovation. From Run-DMC to LL to Slick Rick to Rakim to BDP to PE to Tribe, everything was fresh, even though it was all built on ruins—dusted-off soul and jazz samples, vocal samples from old Malcolm X speeches, the dissonant noise of urban life that genius producers like the Bomb Squad turned into music.

  It wasn’t just another youth culture; it was something new and transcendent, the kind of art that changes the paths of people’s lives. I know that sounds overblown, but ask any kid of my generation—and this applies to black kids and white kids and kids in Indonesia and South Africa and Amsterdam—whether hip-hop changed their lives, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I’m not saying that these kids grew up to be rappers. I’m talking about kids who discovered politics from listening to Chuck D and were never the same. Or who felt connected to other eccentrics because of Tribe. Or whose love of language came directly from their first experience with Rakim. Or who got their sense of humor from Prince Paul skits or Biz Markie’s rhyming about picking boogers. There’s a whole generation who hear “Reminisce,” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth, or Bone Thugs’ “Crossroads,” and connect it to their own personal tragedies. There are cats who felt like Cube was saying all the shit they’d get arrested for thinking; some felt like Scarface was telling their story. I know for a fact that there are kids who learned about and got real cozy with the Cali behind “The Chronic.” Or who lost their virginity to don’t stop, get it, get it and learned to respect women (or themselves as women) from Queen Latifah and Lauryn Hill.

  Rap started off so lawless, not giving a fuck about any rules or limits, that it was like a new frontier. We knew we were opening up new territory even if we left behind a whole country, or sometimes our own families. But we struck oil.

  And it’s not over. The beauty of hip-hop is that, as I said at the beginning, it found its story in the story of the hustler. But that’s not its only story. At this point, it’s a tool that can be used to find the truth in anything. I’m still rhyming—not about hustling in the same way I rhymed about it on my first album, but about the same underlying quest. The hook to that first single, “In My Lifetime,” was sampled from Soul II Soul’s “Get a Life,” just these words repeated over and over and over again: What’s the meaning? What’s the meaning of life? That’s the question rap was built on from the beginning and, through a million different paths, that’s still its ultimate subj
ect.

  WE ARE REALLY HIGH, REALLY HIGH TONIGHT

  I hadn’t been on vacation since I’d gotten serious about music, so I was happy to go to Miami to shoot the video for “Ain’t No Nigga” with Foxy. Big was touring, but he took time out to fly down and make a cameo. Big loved to smoke, but I could count the number of times I’d smoked trees. Champagne and the occasional Malibu rum were my thing back then, but mostly I liked to stay sober, the better to stay focused on making money. I come from that class of hustlers who looked at smoking as counterproductive. We used to judge niggas who smoked as slackers, or workers. When I did smoke it was on vacation, in the islands.

  But when Big asked me to smoke with him, I told myself, “Relax, you’re not on the streets anymore.” It was happening and I had to admit it. I was out of the Life. So I smoked with Big—and he smoked blunts. The last time I smoked, whenever that was, I’m sure I was hitting a joint. A couple hits later and I was high as shit, sitting there, feeling outside of time, slightly stuck, and laughing uncontrollably.

  Big leans in so only I can hear him.

  “I got ya.”

  That fucked me up. Big was a friend, but also a competitor. He gave me an important lesson at that moment. They call it the game, but it’s not—you can want success all you want, but to get it, you can’t falter. You can’t slip. You can’t sleep. One eye open, for real, and forever.

  Big’s joke was such a small thing, but I was like, fuck that. The director was setting up shots and all that, but I went to my room and sobered up for twenty minutes before I came downstairs. When I came down Big was laughing—his laughter was a beautiful thing, even when the joke was on me. This titme I leaned in close to him. "Never again, my nigga."

  When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time in my ride, speeding back and forth between Brooklyn and New Jersey, where I lived (and worked) part of the time. I-95 in New Jersey runs along the New Jersey Turnpike, a famously boring stretch of highway, but we’d keep it live by blasting Slick Rick till the speakers bled. Slick Rick was the wittiest shit out back then, but his sense of humor was like Eddie Murphy’s or Richard Pryor’s, dark and subversive. Maybe his eye patch and English accent had something to do with it, but he could make the rawest rhymes sound like Masterpiece Theatre, just through the elegance of his style and his storytelling talent. He had the pimp’s gift for talking shit but making it sound like a seduction. And he had the kind of style that hustlers aspired to: at ease with the culture and language of the streets, but with the style and swagger of a prince. He never hit a wrong note. Today people associate the whole gold jewelry and gold teeth thing with a kind of down-south country style, but when Rick first rocked it back in the eighties—complete with a cape and a Kangol—it was the essence of sophisticated street fashion.

  Back then I loved his song “Treat Her Like a Prostitute.” It’s a great, totally ignorant song (and I mean “ignorant” in the best possible sense). But Slick Rick also wrote some of the first rap songs that were genuinely sad—which sounds like a strange thing to say about Slick Rick. His songs were always energetic and hilarious but could also feel bluesy or even haunted, like his classic “Mona Lisa,” which is a conversation between the rapper and a young girl he meets at a pizza shop. The two characters flirt with each other through clever disses (she said, “Great Scott, are you a thief / seems like you have a mouth full of gold teeth”) but then Slick Rick’s boy comes along, calls her a snake, and drags him away. The song ends with the narrator’s wistful memory of the girl singing the chorus of “Walk On By” as he leaves. As the voice trails off, the beat goes on for a few bars. It forces you to sit with that sadness for a few seconds longer than you’re comfortable.

  Slick Rick was too much of an artist to come out with straight-up tearjerkers, but like all great comics he knew how to hide deeper emotions between the punch lines, emotions like regret and loss, the kind of feelings that could make you pause even while you were speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to your hustling spot. And he never lost his cool, never got weepy and sentimental; the emotion was real, but not a big production. He kept it clean and honest and respected his listeners enough not to manipulate them. In another of his classic songs, “A Children’s Story,” he tells a bedtime story to his nieces and nephews, a comic fable about a kid who becomes a thief. The song is kind of a slapstick caper, but then it takes a sudden turn: This ain’t funny so don’t you dare laugh / just another case ’bout the wrong path. Then the final word in the song changes the tone again: Goodnight! Uncle Ricky chirps. Is it a joke? Maybe. But those previous lines stick with you, and the laughter dies in your throat.

  NOT ONLY MONEY BUT ALL THE EMOTIONS GOING THROUGH US

  Slick Rick taught me that not only can rap be emotionally expressive, it can even express those feelings that you can’t really name—which was important for me, and for lots of kids like me, who couldn’t always find the language to make sense of our feelings. As an instrument for expressing emotion, rap is as good as the writer. If you’re willing to put something into a song, the song can usually hold it.

  Scarface is one of my favorite rappers and maybe the first truly great lyricist to come out of the South. He’s known as a “rapper’s rapper,” and it’s true, he gets respect across the board and his influence is enormous. His music is an extended autobiography and his ability to weave complicated emotions into his songs is uncanny. But where Slick Rick specialized in crisp rhyming that creates spaces where the listener can fill in emotions, Scarface’s voice itself always seems filled to the top with feeling. Slick Rick keeps a certain distance from the listener; his songs are playful and witty. But Scarface always feels like he’s rapping right in your ear, like the guy on the next bar stool unburdening himself of a story that keeps him up nights or a nightmare that comes back to him all day.

  The power of his stories comes in part from his willingness to pull the covers off of taboos, to get into the shit that people pretend isn’t really happening, whether he’s rhyming about street life or about being in a mental institution.

  His most famous verse—on the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”—is a great example. He’s starts the song in the middle of a nightmare: At night I can’t sleep, I toss and turn / candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned. As the song progresses, you realize he’s writing about an all-consuming paranoia, the kind that comes from a guilty conscience or even from a kind of raw self-hatred. (In the song he’s being stalked by someone who wears a black hat like I own / a black suit and a cane like my own, lines that are both beautifully structured and cinematic.)

  Even though the two are probably opposites in a lot of ways, Slick Rick and Scarface share that ability to get under your skin by dredging up the kinds of emotions that young men don’t normally talk about with each other: regret, longing, fear, and even self-reproach. It’s always been my ambition to do the same, because you don’t spend every moment of every day as a fucking killing machine. That’s the stereotype of young black men, of course. And sometimes we play along with it. But it’s not true, even when we wish it was.

  DON’T GRIEVE FOR ME, MY ART REMAINS

  I’ve done a couple of collaborations with Scarface, and they’re always pretty intense. The first one was on the Dynasty album, a song with me and Beanie Sigel called “This Can’t Be Life.” The track we were rapping over was an early Kanye production, driven by a sample from “Miss You,” by Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, with big strings. Strings always pull me into a pretty deep place, in terms of the feelings and ideas they bring up. On my verse I went into some dark personal storytelling about a time in my life when I felt truly confused and lost, between worlds, the voice in my head screaming at me to leave the street shit alone, while outside I watched Big and Nas blowing up. On top of that, I’ve got heartbreaking personal issues dogging me.

  It was a verse about fear of failure, which is something that everyone goes through, but no one, particularly where I’m from, wants to r
eally talk about. But it’s a song that a lot of people connect to: The thought that “this can’t be life” is one that all of us have felt at some point or another, when bad decisions and bad luck and bad situations feel like too much to bear, those times when we think that this, this, can’t be my story. But facing up to that kind of feeling can be a powerful motivation to change. It was for me.

  On the day we were supposed to be recording Scarface’s verse, we were all just sort of sprawled out, bullshitting in the front room at Bassline Studios, which was the home studio for Roc-A-Fella Records. We had a pool table and some couches and we were just shooting, joking around with my engineer, Guru, and getting ready to go into the booth. Then Scarface’s phone rang, and as soon as he picked it up, the look on his face changed. He kept saying the same thing over and over again, “Nahh … nahhh, man …” Then he was quiet for a while. When he hung up, he told us what happened. His homeboy had called to tell him that a friend of theirs had just lost one of his kids in a fire. We’re all just sitting there like, Fuck. Then Scarface was back on the phone to his own wife to tell her the news and to check on how his own kids were doing.

  When he got off the phone I told him, “Yo, we’ll get the verse another time.” He shook his head. “Nah, Jig, nah, I’ll do it now.” He went off on his own for a while to compose his verse. When he came into the booth to record, he laid down the verse that’s on the album in one take. His first lines were, Now as I walk into the studio to do this with Jig, I got a phone call from one of my nigs.

  Scarface turned that moment of pain instantly into a great piece of writing, which he followed with a powerful vocal performance. It was incredible to watch. But really, what he did was to just compress the normal act of hip-hop songwriting into a matter of minutes. The raw material of life got mixed into that song, for real—in this case, the sudden sadness of life. But the great hip-hop writers don’t really discriminate. They take whatever’s at hand and churn it into their work. Whatever feeling demands a release at a given moment finds its way out in the songs. The music is as deep and varied as life.