Symbol cheating like an unscrupulous Scrabble player, $cottLaRock remains the first name in Long Island Rap. Say what you will about board game night.
If Love Could Kill, it would. (Would.) Imagine the body count. It would rap under the name Mass Grave. Peace to YoungBeenDead. It would say something dramatic before doing the deed. "If I can't have you, no one will!" And then, my friend, you die. It would assassinate, denoting the stature of its victim. It would slam the door behind it.
Two Rakim weeks ago, I covered Rakim's Rap City appearance, on which he promoted his clothing company, UBX. About that: UBX stood for Urban Expedition. Rather than an independent clothing brand owned by Rakim, UBX was a label created by I.C. Isaacs & Company, Inc., a jeans and sportwear company founded in 1913. From then until the 1980s, the company primarily sold riding wear for the horse racing industry. In the 1980s, they were purchased by investors, started selling general men's and women's apparel, and made their way into J.C. Penney department stores. It was around this time that they also acquired Boss. By 1996, Boss become their best-selling line, accounting for more than 70% of annual sales. The acquisitions continued piling up, and in September 1999, I.C. Isaacs & Company announced the launch of UBX, an overt attempt to cash in on the streetwear trend that helped fuel Boss' rise. Or, as CEO Robert Arno put it, "The launch of Urban Expedition gives us the opportunity to capitalize on what we do best, providing style-conscious customers with cutting-edge fashions. By offering up-scale streetwear collections under a fresh new brand, we have an opportunity to capture a share of the audience who appreciates fashion-forward urban styling." The company hired Rakim to promote the line and even threw a party with Universal Records in November 1999 at NYC’s Metronome Restaurant & Lounge to celebrate the UBX launch along with the release of The Master. Also on the night's agenda: a preview of the Nelson George documentary A Great Day In Hip-Hop.
The only problem was that I.C. Isaacs was already running into financial trouble, had been since going public a couple years prior. UBX was discontinued in 2001. By 2011, I.C. Isaacs had completely divested from manufacturing and changed its name to Passport Brands Inc.
Above: a selection of vintage UBX jackets, shirts and jeans floating around the resale market in recent years. Still unlocated: the Funkmaster Flex Great Day In Hip-Hop mix, a snippet of which accompanied the Rakim promo CD single handed out as an invite to The Master/UBX launch party.
Art of Noise were big in New York in the 1980s. How big? Getting played in clubs big, no doubt. But also pre-record-deal Public Enemy rapping over their songs big, Harry Allen doing spoken word sermons over their songs big. Did those WBAU airings make their way across the pond back then? Rakim definitely did. See: the UK-smash Coldcut remix to "Paid in Full." From there, Coldcut starts Ninja Tune. Ninja Tune begets trip-hop. And when Art of Noise return from a nine-year hiatus with Lol Creme (yes, that Lol Creme) in tow for high-concept comeback album The Seduction of Claude Debussy, it's Rakim, they ping to provide lead vocals on lead single "Metaforce."
Rakim had previously collaborated with Art Of Noise producer Trevor Horn on 1998's "Buffalo Gals (Back to School)," a reworking of Malcom McLaren and the World Famous Supreme Team's 1983 classic, and it's there that today's brief oral history lesson begins.
Trevor Horn: "He remembered all the early hip-hop stuff I’d done with Malcolm McLaren like ‘Hobo Scratch’ but told me his favourite track was ‘Moments In Love.’"
Ann Dudley: "As soon as Rakim came up with the immortal rhyme 'Aerodynamic in the Evening Air' we knew that we had it!"
Paul Morley: "We just sent Rakim some information, thinking it wouldn't mean much to him, and he did this fabulous rap, throwing things out of context all over the shop."
Dudley: "He was very interested in it – the whole idea of what we were doing."
Morley: "We sent him this big raft of stuff about Charles Baudelaire, who’s one of my favorite poets. It was kind of interesting because one of the thrills of the whole thing was that he totally got inside the spirit of the record and didn’t lop anything on top of it that came from his world. [He] went inside what we were trying to do with the record and gave it something that then inspired us to cover other areas as well. It was a fabulous thing that he did. There’s some great images in there."
Dudley: "It seemed like Rakim represented the modern poet, the poet at the end of the 20th century, rapping about Charles Baudelaire, the poet at the end of the 19th century, and I've never heard those sort of rhymes in a rap."
Morley: "It was a wonderful moment. It’s like 'Splatter my wisdom in a design,' is a great way to describe painting. We were absolutely thrilled."
Imagine you're Marley Marl. Eric B. has brought to your home studio an unknown 17-year-old Long Islander calling himself Rakim. The kid doesn't sound like any rapper you've ever heard. He's not putting much energy into this, won't get up from the couch. Shan comes in and has the same reaction. Matter of fact, the kid's like an anti-Shan. "Just let me finish doing what I'm doing," he says. So you do. And well, it's something. You don't know what, but something. The kid leaves, and you play it on the radio, and the lines blow up. Who was that? What was that? And now you get it. And you proceed to replay and remix it over and over for no less than a year.
"Friends," Jody Watley's hit single with Eric B. & Rakim, is known as the first R&B-rap crossover to achieve commercial success. To my ears, the song skates the lines between those genres and house music. Indeed, like most of Watley's hits, it landed on the Dance charts. The song's video, directed by Jim Sonzero, captures its broad appeal. "The video notably blends b-boys, drag queens, and a variety of party people in unity for a good time capturing a slice of New York nightlife at the time," Watley says. "Fabulous and street in its realness without pandering, being contrived or sending a negative message, certain stereotypes or coonery. Proud."
Years after Eric B. and Rakim disbanded, the God MC would again collaborate with Watley for the remix to "Off the Hook," the lead single from her 1998 album Flower. The producer of that remix is D-Dot, another name that should be familiar to hip-hop heads, if for very different reasons. By the time "Off the Hook" released, practically every successful R&B album had at least one rap collaboration and vice versa. If "Friends" started the trend, Bad Boy Records' Deric "D-Dot" Angelettie helped to make it the formula for crossover success. While "Off the Hook" might not be as remembered in hip-hop circles, it still managed to hit number-one on the Dance charts. And it also provided Rakim the opportunity to reflect on his prior collaboration with Watley. "At the time, we didn't even realize what was going on," he told MTV News. "I wasn't sure our people was gonna accept it, everybody feeling me like one of the hardcore artists. But then ... it blew up."
One more deep cut while we're on the topic of Jody Watley: Those familiar with her full body of work know that she first rose to stardom as a member of Shalamar. The funk group has been sampled by all manner of rap producers. Whether Eric B. & Rakim ever made use of their records, I can't say. However, I can say that Hempstead rapper True Mathematics' 1988 single "For the Lover in You" is essentially a rap version of Shalamar's 1980 track "This Is for the Lover In You," and in a final cherry-on-top-kind-of moment for this post, it's produced by none other than Hank Shocklee, Carl Ryder, and Eric Sadler. Hit the playlist below for all the above and then some.
Today is Rakim's 56th birthday. And falling on Sunday this year, it's the beginning of Long Island Rap's 10th (!) annual Rakim week. It's also, I gather, a day of some consequence in football. Below, Rakim, Ed Lover, and former Giants linebacker Carl Banks talk about Rakim's high school football years and the Starter brand among other topics, plus more football-affiliated Rakim content: the "Rice Returns" webisode for All-Pro Football 2K8 and the DJ Z-Trip-produced remix to "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em" from the game's soundtrack.
In the mid-1980s, before adopting the name Rakim, William "Pops" Griffin rapped as Kid Wizard in two groups. First there was the Almighty 5 MCs and then there was the Love Brothers. Just who was in each group is difficult to pin down as accounts vary (see "Rakim: The Early Years"), but one name that has popped up in relation to both is G-Stro. One day on a whim I looked him up and found his Instagram and YouTube profiles. Both accounts contain tracks that appear to have been recorded in the past few years. The tracks vary from verse-length demos to complete songs, but all of them showcase a voice that is truly one of a kind. G-Stro's writing and delivery have clearly been honed over decades of personal attention. Sadly, three of them may have been spent in Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Regardless, G-Stro is out now and rapping on a level to do his early rhyming partner proud, an original elite master class.
And as an added bonus, he's doing so over music composed by his peers, fellow Wyandanch legends DJ Kaos and Nate Tinsley. Stream several choice selections below then connect with G-Stro on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok for more.
Presentism is a dead-end street. If Rakim first dropped today, would he go platinum or homeless? We like to think he'd find his way to the masses like Jay Electronica finding his way to Jus Blaze and then Hot 97, but let's not forget that Jay Electronica was homeless and is yet to go Platinum. But if Rakim were to first drop today, go homeless, and get even more obsessive over about his craft as a result, I like to think he'd be cool with Mak Strange. Every day might be a struggle. He might not ever turn a dollar from rapping. But he would still be the greatest rapper of all time. Every song here is at least three and a half years old. They've aged better than the public consciousness, and that's actually saying a lot in my opinion.
When purple haze dropped in New York, it so impressed, overnight every "kind" strain was branded "haze." This was a time of lower THC counts and less variety. Haze delivered an entirely different experience, so desirable it shifted consumer expectations. Nowadays (big lawn maintenance vibes), there are no fewer than 615 cataloged hazes, and Cam'ron's Purple Haze is to millennial rap fans what Hendrix's "Purple Haze" was to boomer rock fans. Purple flower put a generation through college, so don't talk to me about purple drink. K.Sole's Purple N Passion [PNP] dropped within the first few weeks of another big P, like only fogs can overshadow clouds.
I found Gudda Vell by stumbling across the video for his song, "Indigo (Here We Go)," possibly because it featured cuts by DJ Stitches. From there, I back-tracked my way to Champion Season, a mixtape from the early days of this website. December 4, 2015 was the advertised release date. The songs were posted individually to Soundcloud some seven years ago. I found them in March 2023. "Real Talk," the first I played, concluded with the voice of Gil Scott-Heron. Though the accompanying art featured a track list, the songs weren't compiled together on the platform as an album or playlist so I grouped them as such. The mixtape largely concerns Gudda's return from a five-year bid.
"Using that 'Fonda Rae' bass line and putting it with 'Funky President' was impossible because the tempos did not match up," says Marley Marl in a video reconstructing how he produced the beat for Eric B. & Rakim's "Eric B. Is President." "Well to combat that problem, I needed to pull out my CZ-101 so I could replay it." But what if it weren't impossible?! What if one could line up any two samples regardless of their tempos and somehow stretch one or both of them to match? Of course, that's not only possible today, but done regularly through the time stretching feature that's a staple of modern production technology.
Fortunately, Marley Marl is still around, mixing records live on the radio, and able to take advantage of said technology. So, on an episode of Golden Era Radio, he was able to make the impossible possible. "I guess that's what 'Eric B. Is President' would've sound like if I had the technology like I got today," Marley said after recreating the record on air using the original samples along with Rakim's acapella. "That's why I could do that, blend those together, but back then there wasn't time stretching and all the amazing things we're using these days in technology, so that's how it would've sound if I'd had that technology in my pocket."
You know I already had this on hand back in August when I posted Mickey Knox's mix of lost Roc Marciano joints with links out to his Biz and De La tapes. There are plenty of rarities on here, some lesser heard than others, but one of the main attractions is Knox's mix itself: the transitions, scratches, all that good stuff. That being said, I will give Mickey extra credit for including at least one Rakim feature I had absolutely never heard or heard of in my life, that is, his appearance on "The Paragraph Chemist" by Norwegian DJ and producer The White Shadow of Norway, off that artist's 2013 album, Nightmare Concert. You know what they say. You learn something new every day (especially when you listen to Rakim daily).
In 1996, Shaquille O'Neal released his third rap album, You Can't Stop the Reign. Say what you will about Shaq's rap career; the album included a song with Rakim. And while Ra is technically the featured artist on "Game of Death," he essentially runs point, turning in not just a 16, but also a second eight-bar verse as well as the song's hook. Basketball-reference-laced "Punisher"-era bars abound — e.g., "Thoughts of torture terrify your team in the tournament" — as Rakim and Shaq execute a hip-hop tribute to Bruce Lee and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's famous fight from the 1978 film of the same title. Ironically, if not self-referentially, Rakim also used a basketball metaphor nine years later in his last lines on a song called "Game of Life." The track, also featuring Ice-T and Chilly Mac, appeared on the soundtrack of 2005 documentary Slippin': Ten Years with the Bloods. The film was co-produced by pioneering MC Kurtis Blow; hence Rakim's line, "First let me bust another verse for my man Kurtis Blow."
Bonus materials: Rakim's song "Welcome to the NBA" from the videogame NBA 07 (now retroactively included in LIRR's Rakim Soundtrack Work playlist) and a clip of Bobbito Garcia recalling a pickup game with Rakim and his friends from Long Island.
In 1988, a house music label by the name of T.K.L.S.T. Production issued an unofficial white label featuring a Michael Jackson "Megamix" of several of his biggest songs. Bootlegs like this were not uncommon in the record club days of the 1980s. They'd sometimes include mashups and remixes, which often went uncredited as was the case here. Flip this 45-RPM record over and you'll find a track innocuously titled "M.J. Rap." But don't let that misnomer fool you, as this is not Michael Jackson rapping. In fact, it's one of the most perfect blends ever committed to wax: a mix of Eric B. & Rakim's 1987 single "I Know You Got Soul" and Michael Jackson's 1982 Grammy Award-winning hit, "Billie Jean." How perfectly do these songs align? So much so that eight years later, in 1996, another house music label called Cluedo? Records put out another version of the blend, with the much more descriptive title, "Billie Jean Knows You've Got Soul." While both are absolute body movers, there is a notable difference between the two. Where the first track slows the "Billie Jean" instrumental to match Rakim's vocals, the second instead speeds them up to keep pace with the music. Additionally, the first record was put out by a U.S. label while the second comes from the U.K. As for the DJs behind these blends, your guess is as good as mine. Regardless, both blends are well worth a spin and available via the following YouTube streams thanks to some generous record owners.
Mark the 45 King's first Rakim remix was made for Kool DJ Red Alert, seen above with a young Rakim.
Rakim's birthday is this Saturday. Rakim week starts now.
If you've listened to Funkmaster Flex much over the past year, there's a decent chance you heard him accompanied on air by the inimitable Kool DJ Red Alert, and if you heard one of those broadcasts there's an even better chance you heard Mark the 45 King's previously unreleased "I Know You Got Soul" remix played on Hot 97 ... in 2022. The track, previously played on Red Alert's Kiss FM more than three decades ago, was practically in Flex's regular rotation last year — a beautiful thing.
This got me thinking about the 45 King's other Rakim remixes, of which I knew there were at least a couple. Mark was behind the boards for the extended remixes of Eric B & Rakim's "Microphone Fiend" and "The R" off Follow the Leader, and it's even possible he had a(n uncredited) hand in the original versions as well. Additionally, he produced the club mix of "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em," previously shared on this site in the first post of the first ever Rakim week. Then there was a white label release in 2000 for the remix of a song called "Feelin' You," which as far as I can tell was never otherwise released, thereby making the remix the original mix commercially speaking. Of course, before the last of those remixes dropped, the 45 King produced "How I Get Down" off The Master.
That makes no fewer than six 45 King-produced Rakim tracks, a nice EP's worth of music from two of the most transformational hip-hop artists of all time. (Let's not forget 45 King produced "Hard Knock Life" and "Stan" in addition to what's essentially a full discography of once-obscure now-familiar breakbeats.) If that sounds like the basis for a great playlist, then you're in luck as that's exactly what I've put together below.
July 15, 2022 marked the 21-year anniversary of the death of Anthony Ian "Poetic" Berkeley. Before passing, he wrote and recorded no less than four verses about his battle with cancer. Two were done as features. One of those, from Last Emperor's "One Life," is fairly well known and has been rightly recognized for Poetic's vivid depiction of the night he was hospitalized from what would turn out to be colon cancer, his diagnosis the next day, and subsequent fight to survive. However, this is actually the second of the two features to be released.
The first dropped two years earlier, in 2001 (possibly before Poetic passed, but don't quote me on that). This verse appears on the song, "Angel Cries," by Canadian rapper Steve "Liquid" Hawley from his album, Better Days. Poetic actually co-produced much of this project — the photo accompanying this post shows him mixing it — which is an interesting story unto itself that I hope to delve into at some point in another post. But for now, let's run these back to back.
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Paralyzed on the bathroom floor by pain
Last month I endured but now I can't ignore
Feels like railroad spikes being stuck in my liver
Am I dying? Eyes crying, body starting to shiver
Crawl upstairs from the basement calling my sister
"Dawn, help me, I ain't feeling to healthy"
Stomach walls burning, head spinning and turning
Waiting for the EMS three-ten in the morning
Rush me to emergency screaming like a newborn
The pain's too strong maybe my soul's trying to move on
He hooked me to the I.V., put me through some x-rays
Gave me Demerol to kill the pain, that was the next phase
Early the next day in the hospital room
Moms and pops in the room, three or four docs in the room
"Test results suggest your colon and your liver
is so cancerous you got three months left"
Me and death is playing chess ever since then
My strength is the Most High, my fam and close friends
The Last Emp and Set Free blessed me with a verse
Staying healthy comes first, look at me, things could be worse
Hey yo, I'm standing on the Earth surface looking up
Reviewing my purpose in a world so corrupt
I look to the heavenly force with ebony thoughts
Cancer distorting, my whole chemistry's off
I'm mentally caught in the highs and lows
Of despising those guessing when my eyes'll close
Laying in the hospital room, feeling the gloom
They'll be wheeling me off to the O.R. soon
My family and friends all gather up in the lobby
They probably praying for me when surgeons open my body
My niece gave me a kiss with a tear in her eyes
I hate it when the angel cries
Listening to and looking at the two verses side-by-side, at first it almost seems as if they could have both been from the same song. Upon closer review, though, the verses differ significantly in time-setting and tone. Whereas "One Life" has Poetic recounting his diagnosis and determination to fight on, "Angel Cries" takes place entirely within that fight. A devastating counterpoint to the almost uplifting ending of Poetic's posthumously released "One Life" verse, the "Angel Cries" verse illustrates his mental, physical and spiritual struggle with certain death. It's a significantly shorter verse, only 12 bars to the 20 on "One Life," and with each rhyme more concise as if reflecting his limited time left.
The poignant beauty of these verses is their unsparingly honest detail of someone so alive transitioning from the world of the living. Lyrics don't get much sadder than this, but that they could be written at all is about as powerful of a reminder of the enduring strength of art and human potential as one may ever encounter. The "hardness" of these verses is in Poetic's steely resolve, h/His will to survive two and a half years after the doctors gave him three months.
Poetic's other two known cancer-related verses are harder in the more traditional sense, that is, heavier-handed, bloody knuckled with no punches pulled. As such, they're also harder to listen to than "One Life" and "Angel Cries." On "Burn Baby Burn," from Gravediggaz' Nightmare in A-Minor (also from 2001), Poetic aka Grym Reaper positions death as the central character in his final horror story.
From the first day that I burst through the skin
Of a virgin, I was cursed by sin
A mammal of the sea, pop's name John Samuel Berkeley
Out of his nuts came me
True indeed I had soul even as a tadpole
Grabbed hold of an egg just to have a mole
Grew up surrounded by darkness and blood
Swimming in the cut like Noah in the flood
Eh-eh-eh-ah drama, devils attacked me inside my momma
This caused trauma
While I was growing up she was throwing up, it got worse
That's how I met the doc and the nurse
They took an X-Ray, kept it to the next day
To figure out the best way to possess me
Trapped in a pool of impurity
Without security, nearly ruined me
No immunity to the curse yet
I saw the earth sweat as poppa prayed on the church step
In the place where they worship
As the nurse crept I got mad nervous
Pain builds my character, deranged cancer cells
Begin to damage my shell, tissues begin to swell
The human pin cushion, needles begin pushing
Through my melanin cover, blood begins gushing
Hunger pains fed through my veins
Trying to maintain body and brain under strain
Belly being drained from my nose through a catheter
To maintain my stamina game is high caliber
Flashback my dossier files, before the hospital
Flocks would pay their piles of cheddar to see me rock my style
Got lots of smiles from man, woman and child
A Gravedigga here running wild like the Nile
Ghetto X-File: The Horrorcore Bringers
City morgue singers, new rap era beginners
Four years out of seven I remember touring
And this year I'm measuring my urine
Note how Poetic seamlessly adapts the tale of his fight with cancer to the tropes of the horrorcore style he pioneered. In a song dripping with all the gory details of a body-horror flick, Poetic saves the most grim detail for his last bar. It's a tragically ironic ending: Grym Reaper, a character spawned from the bloody politics of the music industry, works so hard to get his music heard that it kills him.
Sometimes somebody says freestyle and means live performance of an existing verse/song possibly over a different beat than the recorded version. See yesterday's post, "Rakim - Rap City Interview & Freestyle." But then sometimes somebody says freestyle and means otherwise undocumented maybe improvised performance, and when that performance is by Rakim, your ears damn well better perk up like they have radar antennae attached.
This is that: a little heard freestyle by Rakim. Another YouTube post dates it to 1998, which sounds about right. The 2nd beat Rakim annihilates was produced by Erick Sermon from the infamous LL Cool J posse cut "4,3,2,1," which I somehow for the first time just realized is almost exactly the same beat as Def Squad's "Full Cooperation" (also produced by Sermon). If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you don't know what the 1stbeat is, how did you find me
This concludes the 8th (!) annual Rakim week. If you dug it, check out prior years' Rakim weeks as well as DJ Ran's YouTube, where you'll find more cypher sessions featuring other gifted MCs. Finally, happy belated birthday to the greatest rapper of all time, the God MC Rakim, and peace to anyone reading this.
Here we have Rakim's appearance on Rap City Tha Basement. This was probably sometime in late 1999, as Ra was promoting his second solo album, The Master, which dropped in November of that year. In addition to plugging clothing company UBX (more on them later), Ra performs the DJ Premier-produced "When I Be On The Mic" and later kick his first verse from "It's a Must." Timeless!
Rakim and J.PERIOD rang in 2021 with a very special installment of the latter's live mixtape series. Very special not just because it was the God MC Edition but because it was a three-parter, including a DJ set and a mini-documentary directed by Julia Liu in addition to a blazing live performance with speaking appearances by DJ Jazzy Jeff and Busta Rhymes. Total run time: 1 hour, 5 minutes and 18 seconds. Watch all three and stream/download the audio below.
Symbol cheating like an unscrupulous Scrabble player, $cottLaRock remains the first name in Long Island Rap. Say what you will about board game night. 
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