Decoded (31 page)

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 really 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.

Not Everyone Wakes Up Feeling Invincible. (1:40)

I sold it all from crack to opium,
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in third person
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/ I don’t wanna see ’em, so I’m rehearsin /
with my peoples how to g ’em
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, from a remote location /
in the BM, scopin the whole situation
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like, “Dayamm!” /
Metamorphic, as the dope turns to cream
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/
but one of these buyers got eyes like a Korean
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/ It’s difficult to read ’em, the windows to his soul / are half closed, I put the key in / Pulled off slow, hopin my people fleein
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/
Chink tried to knock the only link that tied me in
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/ Coppers was watchin us through nighttime binoculars / This time they got us on tape, exchangin dope for dollars / Make me wanna holler back at the crib in the sauna / Prayin my people bailed out like Time Warner /
Awaitin call, from his kin not the coroner
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/ Phone in my hand, nervous confined to a corner / Beads of sweat second thoughts on my mind /
How can I ease the stress and learn to live with these regrets
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/ This time … stress … givin this shit up . . . fuck / This is the number one rule for your set / In order to survive, gotta learn to live with regrets / On the rise to the top, many drop, don’t forget / In order to survive, gotta learn to live with regrets / This is the number one rule for your set / In order to survive, gotta learn to live with regrets / And through our travels we get separated, never forget / In order to survive, gotta learn to live with regrets / As sure as this Earth is turning souls burning /
in search of higher learning turning in every direction seeking direction
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/ My moms cryin cause her insides are dyin / her son tryin her patience, keep her heart racin /
A million beats a minute, I know I push you to your limit
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/ but it’s this game love, I’m caught up all in it / They make it so you can’t prevent it, never give it / you gotta take it, can’t fake it I keep it authentic /
My hand got this pistol shakin, cause I sense danger
¹⁴
/ like Camp Crystal Lake and / don’t wanna shoot him, but I got him trapped /
within this infrared dot, bout to hot him and hit rock bottom
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/ No answers to these trick questions, no time shit stressin / My life found I gotta live for the right now / Time waits for no man, can’t turn back the hands /
once it’s too late,
¹⁶
gotta learn to live with regrets / You used to hold me, told me that I was the best / Anything in this world I want I could possess /
All that made me want is all that I could get
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/ In order to survive, gotta learn to live with regrets … (when I was young) / I found myself reminiscin, remember this one /
when he was here he was crazy nice with his son
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/ I miss him, long as I’m livin he’s livin through memories / He’s there to kill all my suicidal tendencies /
In heaven lookin over me, or in hell, keepin it cozy
/
I’m comin
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life on these streets ain’t what it’s supposed to be / Remember Newton, mutual friend well me and him feudin /
On your life I tried to talk to him
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/ But you know niggaz, think they guns can stop four niggaz /
Frontin like they’re Big Willie but really owe niggaz / Hoe niggaz,
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this year I’m sho’ niggaz think I’m slippin /
I’m ’bout to send you a roommate, no bullshittin / for my hustle’s goin too well to hit him
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/ You was right niggaz want you to be miserable wit em / Anyway, I ain’t tryin to hear it, I think I’m touched /
this whole verse I been talkin to your spirit a little too much
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