ambitionz az a writah
(that post title is for you, Todd, wherever you are)
So. Death Row Records.
Where to even start with this? Maybe with a statement of fact: love ‘em or hate ‘em, the records released on Death Row in the early 90s are classics — as foundational genre texts as, I dunno, Let it Bleed or, um, Trout Mask Replica. Or something.
At the time, though, it seemed like all anybody could talk about was the controversy. Death Row stood at one end of the notorious and bloody East Coast/West Coast hip-hop war, a pigheaded battle that resulted in a shout-down at the 1995 Source awards and didn’t completely end until it claimed the lives of two of the genre’s true geniuses (which I would argue, along with the death of Kurt Cobain, was a kind of tangible ending to the weird, inexplicable and yet-to-be-duplicated crossroads between creativity and commercial tastes that defined the early 90s [See also: Twin Peaks, Pulp Fiction]).
Still more of the brouhaha surrounding Death Row was about the lyrical content, but the irony is that if I had to make a case for these records, so many years down the line, that case would, in fact, be based on the lyricism. The best songs on Death Row — and I’m going to argue that the bulk of those ‘best songs’ are found on All Eyez On Me, but I think other people, including some in the eMusic offices, would disagree — combine nimble wordplay with imposing production, painting vivid pictures over menacing beats.
Here’s my exhibit A, the opening graf of “Ambitionz Az a Ridah”:
So many battlefield scars while driving in plush cars
This life as a rap star is nothing without heartWas born rough and rugged, addressing the mad public
My attitude was “Fuck it,’ ’cause motherfuckers love it
There’s two rhymes crammed into each line, and if it doesn’t look so hot on paper, I implore you to listen to the track and tell me that the “My attitude was ‘Fuck it,’” line isn’t the perfect combination of poetry and delivery. Throughout the song, Pac reduces sentences to syllables and lets them rip like a loose tommy gun. (For an even better version of the same thing, check out this run from Pac rival Biggie’s “Things Done Changed”: “If I wasn’t in the rap game/ I’d prob’ly have a ki’ knee-deep in the crack game / Because the streets is a short stop/ Either you’re slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot / Shit, it’s hard being young from the slums/ Eatin’ five-cent gums/ not knowin’ where your meal’s coming from.” Jesus. Just the last chunk of that verse. Anyway, I am digressing).
He pulls off the same feat in “Life Goes On,” a song I find as deeply moving as Ghostface’s “All I Got is You”:
As I bail through the empty halls
Breath stinkin’ in my jaws
‘Ring, Ring Ring’ — quiet y’all, incoming callPlus this my homie from my high school
He’s gettin’ by
It’s time to bury another brotha — nobody cry
I could go on and on and on, but I’ll stop here. I’m realizing, too, as I’m doing this that divorcing the lyrics from their delivery is idiotic — that you need to hear them, to hear Pac’s voice — the anger, the vulnerability, the desperation, the arrogance — for it all to truly make sense.
I’m also now realizing that I haven’t even begun to talk about Death Row’s other masterpiece, The Chronic, so I’ll leave that maybe for Jayson in the comments (Confession: I’ve always been kind of ambivalent about Snoop, so maybe someone else can make that case).
And so here’s where I put on my Old Man hat: I miss when commercial hip-hop was like this. Even if I don’t fully co-sign some of the things the artists are saying, I miss the days when they said those things with flair and panache, and when even the party anthems were cleverly assembled (See: “Nuthin But a ‘G’ Thang,” “Let Me Ride,” etc). You could argue (and many have) that Death Row was the turning point, the beginning of the end of the focus on lyricism, but just a cursory pass through the catalog gives the lie to that argument.
I’d be curious to opening this whole thing up to discussion — about Death Row, the albums, how it connects to the indie hip-hop we have on eMusic (if it does), and just to hear people’s feelings on the label and its output in general.
First of all:
Massive, epic, awesome post, Joe. So great. I’ve been waiting all morning for this, as will soon become clear. It was worth it (though I’m disappointed you didn’t title this post “All Eyez On Keyez”).
First, the hatergrams!
Re: your “I miss when commercial hip-hop was like this” lament: two things. First, I could just be a smartass and observe that, in fact, commercial hip hop is still EXACTLY like this, and, in fact, that is its main problem. Lil Boosie, who is looking to be 2009′s big breakout star, just titled his latest mixtape Thug Passion and, like every other prominent gangsta rapper, basically wouldn’t have a word come out of his mouth if it weren’t for 2Pac. (That’s simplifying matters a bit and possibly being unfair to Boosie, whom I find entertaining, but I also think it’s mostly true.)
Also: How much commercial hip hop are you lending your ear to these days? Because here are the opening lines from T.I.’s blinding “I’m Illy,” off of last fall’s Paper Trail:
“Rarely out my element/Barely out the ghetto with/one foot in and one foot out/intelligent as fellas get”
That’s just the opening five seconds. This was one of the highest-selling rap albums of last year. Also: Young Jeezy gets a bum rap from reactionary Wu-heads who heard him expel “yeaaaaahs” like a windy gasbag on his first record and never paid attention again. Last year’s The Recession – which sold three million records, a straight-up science-fiction number these days – is overflowing with simple but effective wordplay.
As far as these records go, I stand pretty firmly in the preferring-Chronic-Doggystyle camp. I prefer my militant, thuggish ignorance to be leavened with humor of some sort, and while Pac was compelling in all the ways you described, he was almost NEVER funny. (I can’t think of a SINGLE joke, be it a cleverly worded diss, guffaw-inducing punchline, or even just well-timed observation that made me chuckle on ANY Pac song). That’s totally a matter of taste, of course, but Snoop and Dre were frequently hilarious along with being totally fucking repellent human beings. The earlier Pac – the Pac of “Dear Mama,” “Keep Your Head Up,” and “Brenda’s Got A Baby” — was a lot more interesting to me. Some rappers can shed their humanity and become MORE interesting –Cam’ron is an example of a guy who only got more compelling the further he traveled away from basic human decency – but I tire of Death Row-era Pac really quickly. He flattened out as his tough-guy shell hardened.
Also, the beats on The Chronic and Doggystyle have somehow paradoxically dated more and better than those on All Eyez. We’ve come so far from Dr. Dre’s goofy-George-Clinton-sampling period that it sounds more like a fond time capsule, a classic one-two punch party album, whereas All Eyez On Me actually suffers for seeming more up-to-date. We’ re still living in this moment, unfortunately, and that gives Pac’s album a weird air of being both of this era and slightly stale.
Yeah, ok….I should stop here/now. Other eMusic hip hop fans? Hip hop despisers?
Both of you guys make great points in regards to your arguments.
Joe: Yeah, 2pac’s actual lyricism always seemed underrated to me, too. There was/is so much obsession over his persona, his death, and, really, whether or not he lived the “thug life”. The fact that 2pac was well educated, multi-talented (he wasn’t that bad of an actor), and politically just as, if not more influenced, by the radically left-wing militant politics of his mother and step-father as a Chuck D or KRS-One, seem unfairly ignored. The point being, that both Chuck D and KRS are held in high regard, as they should be, while 2pac is relegated to B-list status (maybe Christgau isn’t the best example to use, though), as far as some critics are concerned.
Chalk it up to a slew of bad publicists? I don’t know. I could go on for a while imagining the many ways 2pac could have improved his image. Was he just a product of a new and confluent emerging Major Label marketing plan? The one that noticed, thanks to the invention of SoundScan, that Hip-Hop was one of the leading markets in the U.S., and within a year reversing its position on the genre.
This is starting to sound like a lot of apologizing for Pac’s shortcoming’s. But let’s not forget that the irony about age is that we’re sometimes more open and idealistic when we’re younger, before the corruptibility of money and power, as evidenced on this album. (Note that the first track is, after all, titled “Panther Power”)
http://www.emusic.com/album/Tupac-Shakur-Beginnings-the-Lost-Tapes-1988-1991-MP3-Download/11406664.html
Jayson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drYmlNLl9gc , I dunno, that’s pretty funny.
Seeing Death Row Records debut here reminded me of strange comments I feel like I often hear about rap; i.e., that rap really began — or at least began its commercial and cultural rise — in the 90s, with stuff like Death Row Records. But that isn’t true, is it? I mean, Death Row was the subject of critical attention in the early 90s largely because it’s leader was a founding member of N.W.A., which was an 80s rap act. I remember growing up in the 80s and hearing about the East Coast/West Coast divide (Public Enemy vs. N.W.A., back then), and major rap breakout stars like Run DMC, Digital Underground (which, I think, included 2Pac), among others. Anyway, it seems to me that the 80s was the era when rap really broke open across the popular-culture.
For the most part, I don’t get much gangsta rap, aside from GhostFace (maybe the best album artist of the decade?). I much prefer the indie-rap on eMusic, especially the Stones Throw catalogue. Even the gangsta-type stuff in that genre is softer-edged, e.g., Lord Quas and Madvillian. And while I don’t like much instrumental post-rock, I really like a lot of instrumental hip-hop from this decade, e.g., J Dilla, some MF Doom. FWIW, I think I’ll look into downloading The Chronic, tho.
Apologies in advance for this VERY incoherent post. Just random thoughts from a scattered mind.
I wish there were some instrumental versions, some of the beats are bangin’ but the rhymes can be dated at best, annoying at worst.
A writer views a classic record through the prism of writing and concludes it’s the writing that makes it great. Shocking.
re: the rise of rap, I expose my NY roots, but it seems to me that the first widely commercial rap was “Rapper’s Delight,” a top 40 single for The Sugar Hill Gang in 1979…and part of the reason it was such a big hit (beyond the novelty) was because hip hop was already well under way. Grandmaster Flash had records that included scratching and samples by 1981, making especially fine use of a Blondie track.
The landmark recording for me was “The Message” in 1982 — a little on the nose for me, but still one of the great choruses: don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge/I’m trying hard not to lose my head.
Of course, the point of a lot of Death Row is that losing one’s head is the point. In other words, I’m with Christgau. (Great link, ilya. I hadn’t seen that before.)
At the same time, Grandmaster is to Dre as Chuck Berry is to The Sex Pistols. Absolutely the same genre as each other, and absolutely not. And in both cases, the rebellion becomes calcified much more quickly, and lasts much longer than the original thing. Look how quickly John Lydon moved past the Pistols, and how much of what’s happening today is kind of tediously similar.
Jayson’s exactly right that an awful lot of gangsterism is stuck. Chuck D called rap the CNN of the black community, but so much of it today feels more like Fox News to me. Plenty to say in the beginning, but now repeating the same thing so often that over time it becomes simply tiresome at best, and often simply wrong about what’s happening in the world. Listening to the originators no longer reminds me of their freshness as much as it reminds me of how annoying I find their idiotic think-they-ares — much more heinous than mere wannabes. Only smugness, with no aspirations to greatness at all.
I’m somewhere off to the side with Daniel. I like Public Enemy (I was born the same day as Chuck D!) and Wu Tang — both New Yorkers. I enjoy their new stuff too. I also feel like there’s plenty of fresh energy today from a lot of youngsters who don’t owe anything to either coast. I especially like some of the instrumental stuff at emu, and some of the more (and here I reveal my white roots) experimental things — Alias, Jel, Themselves, et al. Also will always be a huge, huge of turntablism and the clever sample.
But I’m genuinely glad that Death Row is here, and proud as proud can be that you pulled it off. And loving Joe’s post and the replies.
“A writer views a classic record through the prism of writing and concludes it’s the writing that makes it great. Shocking.”
You’re right, Barry…the writing on those records is so shitty, don’t know why anyone would focus on it.
Yeah, uh, not for nothing dude, but it’s subjective. The writing is part of what makes it great for me.
I’m late to say this, but by the way, Tim, Joe and I BOTH quoted this line to each other:
“Chuck D called rap the CNN of the black community, but so much of it today feels more like Fox News to me. Plenty to say in the beginning, but now repeating the same thing so often that over time it becomes simply tiresome at best, and often simply wrong about what’s happening in the world.”
Because it’s SO FUCKING GREAT. Amazing.
First off nice post. Im not sure if it has been addressed, but when using Explorer I can never get the entire post to load without refreshing many times. Maybe just my computer. Enjoy!