Rap Joint Lagos

In 1995, Havoc and Prodigy were trying to rebound from their disappointing debut album. They went into the studio and came out with a project that not only redefined their careers, it breathed life into the borough they called home. By Paul Thompson By the time he was 29, Herbie Hancock was already one of the best piano players on earth. This was 1969; the Chicago native had just left Miles Davis’s second Great Quintet—or rather, he’d been fired while holed up in a Rio de Janeiro hotel room, honeymooning and food-poisoned—and satisfied his contract with Blue Note. He was seven albums into a solo career and had played in countless sessions with the most celebrated jazz musicians of the era. It would be a few years before he’d bend critics’ brains with HeadHunters; in the meantime Hancock scored cigarette commercials, Standard Oil spots, and a movie. In November of that year, NBC aired Bill Cosby’s animated special Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert, complete with songs by Hancock. Those would be collected and expanded for his first release on Warner, an album called Fat Albert Rotunda. Most of Rotunda is bright and breezy, fitting for a cartoon. The lone exception is the first song on the B-side, a subdued cut called “Jessica.” In its middle, “Jessica” is supremely laid-back—a glut of horns and some light keys like the ones you might hear right before the bar closes, tranquil and happy enough. But the song starts with an eerie piano theme that doesn’t recur until it shatters the mood around the three-minute mark, a bad dream biting at your heels. “Jessica” is far from the most famous song on Rotunda—it’s not the one Quincy Jones would later cover or the one Pac would flip when he was living in Oakland—and Rotunda is far from the most famous Herbie Hancock record. But it stuck around in record crates from Chicago to Rio to Queens. Skip to 1994. Though still teenagers, Albert Johnson and Kejuan Muchita—who rapped under the names Prodigy and Havoc, respectively, in a group called Mobb Deep—had reached a dead end. They were a few months removed from an album, Juvenile Hell, that sounded rote and tonally confused. Their friends didn’t play it, and when they signed autographs at record stores, employees piped in music by a different rapper from Queens. There were certainly no Cosby specials. Their record company had dropped them, and they were looking for a new deal, but wasn’t everybody? Havoc began producing out of necessity, and he was digging for records to sample. Prodigy’s grandfather Budd Johnson had been a world-famous jazz musician, and he gave his grandson an extensive LP collection to go with the recording equipment his grandmother, one of the original Cotton Club dancers, purchased for her home in Hempstead, on Long Island. But that’s not where they found Fat Albert Rotunda. “That was actually from my father’s record collection,” Havoc says today. “He used to DJ in the house, spin records for him and his friends.” So Havoc, alone at his mother’s place in the Queensbridge housing projects, took Rotunda, then just “Jessica,” then just that haunted piano, and finally a few choice notes, pitching and morphing them into a Satanic metronome. Spotting samples is one of the great hip-hop pastimes, but it would be decades before a message board user cracked this particular code. Record nerds had tried and failed for years to find the source of that bass line, mostly because they were looking for a bass line. Havoc did away with everything else: the muddy calm in the middle of “Jessica,” the Technicolor of Rotunda writ large. He was left with a spare part as sharp as the scythes from their last album cover. There was a moment, sitting there alone in his mother’s apartment, when he felt dissatisfied, and almost erased the beat in progress. But friends trickled in from outside to hear what he was working on and convinced him to keep it. “Shook Ones, Pt. II” is one of the most unmistakable songs in the rap canon. From its dedication (“To all the killers and the hundred-dollar billers … to real niggas who ain’t got no feelings”), to that siren (sampled from a song by Quincy Jones, whom Prodigy’s grandfather taught to read music), to the fact that the hi-hats are actually sampled sounds of a housing-project stove flickering awake, it has the texture of an aluminum bat hitting skull. Welcome to The Infamous. It also marked the breakthrough for one of the greatest writers the genre would ever see. Prodigy rapped coldly and unsparingly. His introduction on “Shook Ones”—“You heard of us / Official Queensbridge murderers”—gives way to this neat little rhetorical trick. After threatening to stab you in the brain with your fractured nose bone, he quips: “You all alone in these streets, cousin,” which sounds like a direct threat, only to be stretched out into a maxim (“Every man for theyself …”). He raps about rival crews for a few bars, then circles around, again, to the second person. “I can see it inside your face / You’re in the wrong place.” This push-and-pull continues throughout P’s verse, the “you” in his bars ping-ponging from the abstract to the chillingly specific. Its very end comes with a warning. “Take these words home and think it through Or the next rhyme I write might be about you.” When P was an infant, he was diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia, a disorder in which red blood cells, misshapen like crescent moons, trigger excruciatingly painful attacks in patients. As a child, Prodigy tried to manage the disease by sitting in sunbeams on the school bus. “I’d be in the hospital all my life, near my deathbed,” he said in a 2015 interview. “Feeling like I ain’t gonna make it. When Havoc would make these dark-ass beats, that’s exactly how I felt inside.” And so, after a handful of false starts, Mobb Deep finally dug

My initial impression of Eminem is that of another white rapper, Vanilla Ice, who was quite a hit but faded away as quickly as his fame came. A rapper whose success was largely credited to his racial identity. This changed after the release of the Marshall Mathers LP and I watched his interview on TV. He was asked why he was cursing out Britney Spears, Christian Aguilera, N’Sync and other white pop stars. His answer was blunt, shocking but fascinating: “I just don’t like them”. Why don’t you like them: “they are herbs”. Haba!! Wahala dey!! The Marshall Mathers LP has been included in several lists of the greatest albums of all time and is widely regarded as Eminem’s best album. Commercially, no rap album has ever had a more lucrative first-week as this Album. It became the fastest-selling studio album by any solo artist in American music history – a record that went unrivalled for 15 years, until Adele released 25 in 2015. It has sold 35 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time and certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Eminem has been hailed as one of the holy trinity of biggest-selling rappers, the other two being 2Pac and Biggie of course. Though the holy trinity are not the only rappers certified diamond. Others include MC Hammer, Outcast, Kid Rock, Beastie Boys and Nelly. The Album was nominated for Album of the Year and won Best Rap Album at the 2001 Grammy Awards. While “The Real Slim Shady” won Best Solo Rap Performance. Rolling Stones, amongst other publications, named it the best album of 2000. Interestingly, it’s the third studio album by American rapper Eminem, released on May 23, 2000, by Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records. The album was produced mostly by Dr. Dre and Eminem, along with The 45 King, the Bass Brothers, and Mel-Man. Recorded over a two-month period in several studios around Detroit, the album features more introspective lyricism, including Eminem’s thoughts on his rise from rags to riches, the criticism of his music, and his estrangement from his family and wife. A transgressive work, it incorporates horrorcore and hardcore hip hop, while also featuring satirical songs. Featured appearances include Dido, RBX, Sticky Fingaz, Bizarre, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, Nate Dogg, and D12. The first track, “Kill You”, discusses the controversy that surrounded the rapper’s first album, nightmares of “ladies’ screams”, and being raised by a single mother. In the song, Eminem also talks of raping his mother, and “notes the irony of magazines trumpeting his mother-raping self on their covers’.” The six-and-a-half minute long “Stan” samples Dido’s “Thank You” and tells the story of an exchange between the rapper and an obsessive fan, where the character berates Eminem for not responding to his letters, which later turns to the fan committing suicide with his pregnant wife. This was hip-hop narrative at its finest and it allowed the rapper to portray not Eminem, not Slim Shady, but Marshall Mathers: a rare voice of reason. Not many artists could pull off three in-character verses then pivot back to their usual persona for a 4th character. The song became a cultural phenomenon. Ultimately, the word ‘stan’ was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2017 as both a noun and verb to describe “an extremely or excessively enthusiastic and devoted fan”. I’m not sure any other rapper has been able to pull off this achievement of adding to the dictionary. On “Who Knew”, the rapper addresses criticism regarding glorification of violence in his lyrics, pointing out perceived hypocrisy in American society. According to Gabriel Alvarez of Complex, Eminem’s response ranges oscillates from “smart-ass (‘Oh, you want me to watch my mouth, how?/Take my fuckin’ eyeballs out and turn ’em around?’) to smart (‘Ain’t they got the same moms and dads who got mad when I asked if they liked violence?/And told me that my tape taught ’em to swear/What about the makeup you allow your 12-year-old daughter to wear?’).” “The Way I Am” is a meditation on the pressure to maintain his fame, and his fear of being “pigeon-holed into some poppy sensation/to cop me rotation at rock ‘n’ roll stations”. He also laments the negative media attention received by controversial public figures such as himself and Marilyn Manson in the wake of shootings, including the Columbine High School massacre and the West Side Middle School shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The rapper criticizes the media for focusing on tragedies such as school shootings while ignoring inner-city violence that occurs on a daily basis.[33] “The Real Slim Shady” pokes fun at pop culture icons such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Will Smith. On “Bitch Please II” with Dr. Dre, Snoop and Xhibit Em showed his ability in company of some of the best in the game. I struggled to pick the best verse between Snoop’s and Em’s but eventually settled for the latter. I must note Snoop’s condescension in his verse “Me and my cousin Eminem, the great white American hope”. He recently capped the lyrics on a recent show that Em’ race is the reason why he is famous. I disagree. Eminem is just simply good at his craft. The more you dive into the album – especially all these years later – the more you realise that with ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’ Eminem became rap’s first troll before the internet became the troll breeding ground it is today. In between the lyrical jabs aimed at pop stars, actors, politicians and members of his own family, there was refuge for the disenfranchised youth. Eminem’s rage and fury, filtered through his experiences of a deeply troubled childhood, offered a way for damaged teens to vent, knowing that they weren’t the only ones suffering. This is why many continue to have a complicated relationship with the album to this day. It’s reality rap at its best. While the album was hugely controversial and criticized, It propelled Eminem to the

My initial impression of Eminem is that of another white rapper, Vanilla Ice, who was quite a hit but faded away as quickly as his fame came. A rapper whose success was largely credited to his racial identity. By DJ Daggash This changed after the release of the Marshall Mathers LP and I watched his interview on TV. He was asked why he was cursing out Britney Spears, Christian Aguilera, N’Sync and other white pop stars. His answer was blunt, shocking but fascinating: “I just don’t like them”. Why don’t you like them: “they are herbs”. Haba!! Wahala dey!! The Marshall Mathers LP has been included in several lists of the greatest albums of all time and is widely regarded as Eminem’s best album. Commercially, no rap album has ever had a more lucrative first-week as this Album. It became the fastest-selling studio album by any solo artist in American music history – a record that went unrivalled for 15 years, until Adele released 25 in 2015. It has sold 35 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time and certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Eminem has been hailed as one of the holy trinity of biggest-selling rappers, the other two being 2Pac and Biggie of course. Though the holy trinity are not the only rappers certified diamond. Others include MC Hammer, Outcast, Kid Rock, Beastie Boys and Nelly. The Album was nominated for Album of the Year and won Best Rap Album at the 2001 Grammy Awards. While “The Real Slim Shady” won Best Solo Rap Performance. Rolling Stones, amongst other publications, named it the best album of 2000. Interestingly, it’s the third studio album by American rapper Eminem, released on May 23, 2000, by Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records. The album was produced mostly by Dr. Dre and Eminem, along with The 45 King, the Bass Brothers, and Mel-Man. Recorded over a two-month period in several studios around Detroit, the album features more introspective lyricism, including Eminem’s thoughts on his rise from rags to riches, the criticism of his music, and his estrangement from his family and wife. A transgressive work, it incorporates horrorcore and hardcore hip hop, while also featuring satirical songs. Featured appearances include Dido, RBX, Sticky Fingaz, Bizarre, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, Nate Dogg, and D12. The first track, “Kill You”, discusses the controversy that surrounded the rapper’s first album, nightmares of “ladies’ screams”, and being raised by a single mother. In the song, Eminem also talks of raping his mother, and “notes the irony of magazines trumpeting his mother-raping self on their covers’.” The six-and-a-half minute long “Stan” samples Dido’s “Thank You” and tells the story of an exchange between the rapper and an obsessive fan, where the character berates Eminem for not responding to his letters, which later turns to the fan committing suicide with his pregnant wife. This was hip-hop narrative at its finest and it allowed the rapper to portray not Eminem, not Slim Shady, but Marshall Mathers: a rare voice of reason. Not many artists could pull off three in-character verses then pivot back to their usual persona for a 4th character. The song became a cultural phenomenon. Ultimately, the word ‘stan’ was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2017 as both a noun and verb to describe “an extremely or excessively enthusiastic and devoted fan”. I’m not sure any other rapper has been able to pull off this achievement of adding to the dictionary. On “Who Knew”, the rapper addresses criticism regarding glorification of violence in his lyrics, pointing out perceived hypocrisy in American society. According to Gabriel Alvarez of Complex, Eminem’s response ranges oscillates from “smart-ass (‘Oh, you want me to watch my mouth, how?/Take my fuckin’ eyeballs out and turn ’em around?’) to smart (‘Ain’t they got the same moms and dads who got mad when I asked if they liked violence?/And told me that my tape taught ’em to swear/What about the makeup you allow your 12-year-old daughter to wear?’).” “The Way I Am” is a meditation on the pressure to maintain his fame, and his fear of being “pigeon-holed into some poppy sensation/to cop me rotation at rock ‘n’ roll stations”. He also laments the negative media attention received by controversial public figures such as himself and Marilyn Manson in the wake of shootings, including the Columbine High School massacre and the West Side Middle School shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The rapper criticizes the media for focusing on tragedies such as school shootings while ignoring inner-city violence that occurs on a daily basis.[33] “The Real Slim Shady” pokes fun at pop culture icons such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Will Smith. On “Bitch Please II” with Dr. Dre, Snoop and Xhibit Em showed his ability in company of some of the best in the game. I struggled to pick the best verse between Snoop’s and Em’s but eventually settled for the latter. I must note Snoop’s condescension in his verse “Me and my cousin Eminem, the great white American hope”. He recently capped the lyrics on a recent show that Em’ race is the reason why he is famous. I disagree. Eminem is just simply good at his craft. The more you dive into the album – especially all these years later – the more you realise that with ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’ Eminem became rap’s first troll before the internet became the troll breeding ground it is today. In between the lyrical jabs aimed at pop stars, actors, politicians and members of his own family, there was refuge for the disenfranchised youth. Eminem’s rage and fury, filtered through his experiences of a deeply troubled childhood, offered a way for damaged teens to vent, knowing that they weren’t the only ones suffering. This is why many continue to have a complicated relationship with the album to this day. It’s reality rap at its best. While the album was hugely controversial and criticized, It propelled

Hip-hop began in New York City in the 1970s, driven largely by African Americans, Latino Americans, and Caribbean Americans in the streets of the Bronx. The formalization as a movement beyond music was set forth by Afrika Bambaataa, founder of the hip-hop collective Zulu Nation. He outlined four core principles of hip-hop: rapping, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti. These core principles are the defining forces in the music and cultural street style of hip-hop. Currently, and arguably, the four core principles have been increased to six with the inclusion of fashion and art into the hip-hop culture.  According to Jean Petit Jean, in his ‘Short History of Hip-Hop,’ writers have often, conveniently, credited the origin of hip-hop to a holy trinity of founders: Afrika Bambaataa, Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell, and Joseph “Grandmaster Flash” Sadler. However, hip-hop has a strong West African influence and lineage. Its lineage may be traced to the Griots in Senegal, who have engaged in spoken-word storytelling for ages. Also, there is a strong influence from Fela’s music, which Afrika Bambaataa discovered on a trip to Africa. Subsequently, he would play music he found in Africa, particularly Fela and King Sunny Ade, at his shows. It can be inferred that he discovered Fela’s music in Lagos, being the Afrobeat Legend’s base. Others with a claim to the foundation of hip-hop include Brooklyn’s Grandmaster Flash, the disco group the Fatback Band, jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron, smooth-talking mid-century radio personalities like Frankie Crocker and Jocko Henderson, tap dancing James Brown, swaggering boxer & rhymester Muhammad Ali, and jazz legend Louis Armstrong. Rap was not officially recorded till 1979. The genre grew behind the scenes through block parties in much of the 70s, where DJs played percussive breaks of popular songs using two turntables; and then EmCees would rap in a chanting vocal style, over the DJ beats. The first track to gain mainstream popularity was “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang. The 1980s were a real breakout point for hip-hop. Kurtis Blow dropped the single “The Breaks” in 1980, and the track became the first rap song certified gold. In the years following, many acts would release genre-defining hits, including 1982’s “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock.” Also notable is the socially conscious statement, “It’s Like That,” by Run-DMC. Audiences and artists alike would embrace the core principles defined by Bambaataa, with minority groups fully embodying the culture in urban centers through the music, breakdancing, and graffiti in the streets. The fluid intersection between hip-hop and the streets meant that makeshift parties and music spontaneously erupted, and people began using their bodies to make beats, giving birth to beatboxing, where people use their lips, tongues, and voices and other parts of their bodies to make beats to rap and dance to. Heavily mirroring the streets in which it emerged, hip-hop soon left the realm of purely party jams as artists began infusing stories from the violence in the streets in their rap, giving birth to gangsta rap. Featuring hardcore lyrics on drugs, violence, misogyny, and the harsh lives of ghetto youth, music by artists like Ice-T in the East Coast and NWA in the West Coast changed the tone of rap as their songs spread across the United States. With the rise of gangsta rap, early female pioneers, Queen Latifah, Monie, Salt-N-Pepa, began to lose appeal as labels favored their more aggressive male counterparts, whose music had more demand. The decline in female hip-hop artists has continued in hip-hop well into today as female MCs still struggle to start and build a career in the industry. During the early 80s, although popular, hip-hop didn’t have commercial success, as it was largely ignored by the music establishment. But with the breakout success of gangsta rap, music industry executives took notice, creating a formula to amplify the glorification of the fast life: violence, sex, drugs, and of course, money, money, money. The 90s saw a new breed of rap artists emerge who embraced this formula to widespread appeal. Pioneers like Jay Z, Dr. Dre, Puff Daddy, and Andre Harrell capitalized on the new direction to build successful music empires around their craft and various associated acts. Throughout the 90s, artists like Notorious B.I.G., Nas, Tupac, Snoop Dogg, were bringing in millions of dollars for themselves and their record labels in record sales, sold-out concerts, and endorsement deals, paving the way for the genre across the States and globally. And the appeal of rap artists began to cross over from music into other areas of entertainment. 2Pac in ‘Juice,’ Will Smith in ‘The Fresh Prince,’ LL Cool J in ‘In the House,’ DMX in ‘Cradle to the Grave’ and ‘Romeo Must Die,’ Eminem in ‘8 Mile.’ The list is endless, from cameos to starring roles, rappers have since the 90s crossed over from the rap game to the film business. Since the early 2000s, hip-hop has become a multifaceted and diverse genre intersecting with various mainstream and underground cultures to create a larger-than-life lifestyle that lives beyond the music and shapes global culture. Some artists, however, still continue to fly the flag of “Retro hip-hop.” Some new, like Kendrick Lamar, J Cole, Logic, to name a few, create music with a heavy focus on lyricism, and old heads like Jay Z, Eminem, and Nas, have released new music in this decade. Nas recently released 6 albums in 2-3 years with ‘King’s Disease I-III’ and ‘Magic 1-3.’ Many purists do not consider the style of hip-hop music that dominates the airwaves today hip-hop, with some arguing that the new wave lacks the style and substance of hip-hop’s origins. Whatever side you’re on, no one can deny the influence that retro hip-hop has had on all of today’s rap culture and all culture globally. Lagos & Hip-Hop The hip-hop scene in Lagos began in the late 1970s and early 1980s when American rap music started to gain popularity among the youth. The song ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by