There was a time in the mid-2000s when my hip-hop listening centred on three groups almost exclusively: Jurassic 5, Blackalicious, and People Under the Stairs.
As I saw it, the hip hop of my childhood – focused on sampling and DIY production – had given way to glitzier production and lyrics without a whole lot of depth. If hip hop was the “new rock n roll,” it had entered its 1980s hair band phase: flashy videos, commercial success, and completely hollow on the inside.
In retrospect, that was an overly harsh assessment, and I had clearly gotten a far-too-early head start on my cranky old man “back in my day” phase. There are plenty of other acts from that time that I listen to a lot now.
But I maintain that those three acts, who all came out of the west coast and whose music holds up much better than most of their contemporaries, are the absolute holy trinity of 2000s hip hop.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The precision of the rapping. Nothing against MCs who sit back on the beat a little, but I’ve always been drawn towards rappers who can hit those sixteenth notes with metronomic accuracy.
2. An advantage of spending so much of the song hitting the sixteenth notes so precisely is that when you alter the rhyme scheme even a little bit, the effect is that much greater. It happens here in the chorus, when the regularity of the rhyme scheme is disrupted by the off-beat internal rhyme of “When the stress hits my brain it’s like acid raindrops / Mary Jane is the only thang that makes the pain stop.”
3. The sample is at the core of this song’s vibe. It comes from David T. Walker’s 1971 cover of “Lay Lady Lay” and it is one of the most blissed-out loops from this era of hip hop.
Recommended listening activity:
Popping your collar, wearing ice, drinking Criss…is there something I missed?