MO' META Blues Part 9

CHAPTER TWELVE

When was hip-hop's funeral?

I know exactly when it was, because I attended it-the second Source awards, in May of 1995. I mark that as a definite turning point of my life. Do You Want More?!!!??! was four months old, and we were nominated for Best Live Act.

The ceremony was held at the Paramount Theater at Madison Square Garden. As you came in, you could see that there was a kind of aesthetic apartheid at work. They sat the artistic rappers, the have-nots of hip-hop, on the far right side: Nas, Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang, Busta Rhymes, and us. In the center of the place you had the Death Row crew and all the nonNew York acts. On the far left of the place, you had the Bad Boy team. That room was like Apocalypse Now: The Hip-Hop Version. If you had sparked two rocks together the place would have exploded.

I saw Nas walk in, and he was wearing a Tommy Hilfiger s.h.i.+rt. I just stared at him. What a strange s.h.i.+rt, I thought. He must have taken that from the outlet rack. It was too big for his body. He later confirmed in an interview that he had had to borrow money from Steve Stout to buy it, but even without knowing that, I knew something was amiss.

And Nas was one of the two marquee names, potentially. That year was shaping up to be a battle between his Illmatic and Ready to Die, Biggie's current alb.u.m. Illmatic, released in April 1994, had been crowned king by many critics and given five microphones by the Source, considered a gold standard. Right on its heels was Biggie's-another alb.u.m that was a gold standard. But that's where the similarities end. One of those two records, Illmatic, was done in the naive old hip-hop style of just being a great alb.u.m from start to finish, with great production, great MCing, a sharp perspective, and so on. The other alb.u.m was done with an eye toward hit singles, and it succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. So both alb.u.ms were up for the same awards, and of course Biggie won them all. And for every award Biggie got I watched Nas just wilt in defeat, and that killed me inside. There was a look of shame and defeat. I remember turning to Tariq and saying, "He's never going to be the same. You just watch." That was the night Nas's Clark Kent turned into Superman, the night this mild-mannered observer realized he had to put on a suit and try to fly. But maybe he didn't have flying power in that way. When he released his next record, It Was Written, there was debate over whether he was following his own course or trying to be Biggie.

That was only the beginning that night. There was so much more divisiveness. Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre cursed out the audience. OutKast was booed mercilessly. (They later put that on the end of "Chonkyfire" on Aquemini: "We just want y'all to know the South's got something to say.") And then, most famously, Suge Knight called out Puffy: in his acceptance speech, he told artists that if they wanted to succeed without having to put their egomaniacal executive producer in every video, they should come over to Death Row Records. That's the incident that people say lit the powder keg on the East CoastWest Coast beef, but there was bad blood all over that room.

It spread and thickened. As the night went on, I saw how Nas looked, how he was internalizing this crus.h.i.+ng sense of defeat, how something that was supposed to be a community was being torn apart by infighting, ego, crosscurrents of jealousy. When Dre was announced as a nominee for producer of the year, people stood up in challenge, like they couldn't wait for him to win just so they could cause trouble. The room suddenly became even more menacing. At the moment John Singleton said "And the winner is..." I grabbed my date and ran. I heard them announce Dre as the winner, and there were thunderous boos, and Snoop said, "What, East Coast got no love for Dr. Dre?"

I was running out and at some point a man pressed a ca.s.sette into my hand. I looked and the name was familiar to me: it was a guy that a producer named Bob Power, who had worked with A Tribe Called Quest, had been talking about in the studio earlier that week: D'Angelo, with his debut alb.u.m, Brown Sugar. I had heard of D'Angelo around this studio or that, but dismissed him as one of those generic R&B guys the world didn't need more of. But there was a symbolism to it, my running from that room, that I couldn't discount. I felt like we were Lot and his wife fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, and I didn't turn around for that very reason. I felt like my life was in danger. I had been at the Source awards the first year, when Tupac unknowingly interrupted A Tribe Called Quest's acceptance speech for Best Alb.u.m. While they were coming to accept, Tupac started his performance. I saw the seeds of Afrika Islam from the Zulu Nation threatening Tupac. I didn't know if I wanted to come back. But I did, and it was much worse. I sensed there was going to be a brawl, that someone might get shot. In my mind I felt like I had just escaped the war, and so when someone pressed that Brown Sugar ca.s.sette into my hand, even though my first instinct was to throw it away, something made me decide to play it.

I heard so much in that D'Angelo record. It was like music that A Tribe Called Quest would make, but he was singing over it. That was still revolutionary. (The day that Mary J. Blige's "My Life" came out in 1994, we all just sat in the van scratching our heads. We had never heard anyone sing over samples before, and here she was, with Roy Ayers's "Everybody Loves the Suns.h.i.+ne" under her, making up a new vocal, new lyrics. We were so caught between rejecting it as untenable and accepting it as the vanguard.) Like any new development, there was lag time. It took a year for us to digest it and accept that R&B singers were trying to be hip-hop artists. There was nowhere left for them to go. I hated what contemporary R&B had become. It was trite. It was soulless. It had no authentic pa.s.sion. It was doing very little for me. And then I heard D'Angelo and my head was turned. It changed my life. Here was a singer who connected with me as deeply as the best hip-hop. It was that first alb.u.m, of course, but it was more than that: it was what I heard behind the alb.u.m, the sensibility that powered the songs, the ability to locate the heart of the best soul music. It was out of step with the times but in a way that made it seem like he was stepping into uncharted territory.

What made it even better-or worse, depending on how you look at it-is that I had pa.s.sed up a chance to work with him on the alb.u.m. About a year earlier, Bob Power had asked me to play on "s.h.i.+t, d.a.m.n, Motherf.u.c.ker." He was setting up a session with the ba.s.sist Ron Carter and wanted me to join them. It would have happened if Ron had agreed, but he had concerns about the t.i.tle and canceled, and when Bob called to see if I would play on another song, I begged off. I wasn't sure I was interested after all. It was R&B. It wasn't my thing. And I had even seen D'Angelo once when he had come by the studio to pick up a DAT (digital audio tape) from Bob while I was mixing "Mellow My Man." I sized him up and thought, eh, another corny R&B guy. I had no clue that he was going to be the second coming. When I finally heard the record I was kicking myself. I had the chance to make that connection and I pa.s.sed on it. Here was fate, giving me a second chance, revealing itself to me as I fled hip-hop's Sodom and Gomorrah.

I didn't meet D'Angelo right away. I took my time. We started our second Roots record. We gigged for money.

Sometime around the end of 1995, we were offered a series of concert dates in Florida that we were going to have to pa.s.s on because travel and lodging were too expensive. If we played the dates, it would be at a loss. Rich came up with the idea that we should take the Land Cruiser, just me and him and Tariq and Rahzel, stack the drums in the back, and drive straight through to Florida. That didn't make sense to me, to go down with a skeleton crew like that, but Rich explained that Rahzel and I were enough music. He wanted to concentrate on areas where we rarely perform. (Even now, we only go to Miami once every other year. For the Roots map, it's hardly even part of the United States; it was outreach.) And so off we went, with Rich driving eighteen hours straight. I think he took one break for maybe an hour. Other than that, it was him at the wheel, and him only-none of the rest of us were licensed. He somehow managed to do a hundred miles an hour in that car. Determination isn't even the right word. He was like an arrow on the road. That kind of thing kept me focused on the goal. In fact, I would learn later that this kind of thing was part of Rich's philosophy. He always felt that we did our best shows under pressure. Side note: to this day, he stands by his belief that the best show the Roots ever did was without me. That one was on Mother's Day 1995, and I had to give my sister away for her first wedding. We had booked a show at the 9:30 Club, and when I couldn't make it, they went on with Rahzel instead. If you ask Rich to list the top five Roots shows of all time, he'll usually put that at number one.11

But that whole time, in my mind, I was cooking up a plan to meet D'Angelo. It took me exactly eleven months. I was obsessed with trying to find a way to be down with this guy. I knew that I could really get a movement going if I could pair up with him. Musically, he was expressing exactly what I wanted to express, and I knew that he could help me collect all the crazy ideas that weren't finding a home with the Roots.

I finally got an audience with him on April 1, 1996, in Los Angeles. We were on tour with Goodie Mob and the Fugees. Goodie Mob was the opening act, a relatively new artist, but already there was a strange dynamic between us and the Fugees. They had played our signing party back in 1993, when they were still mostly an acoustic act. About two years later, we did a show at Clark College where they were our opening act, and we invited Lauryn Hill on stage with us. I heard that two-thirds of The Fugees were none too happy about this summit meeting. On the bus our roadie later told us, "Man, you should have seen the look on Pras's face when Lauryn started rhyming with you guys. He was mad as s.h.i.+t." But they watched that show and they learned a lesson: They learned the power of live karaoke. Jonathan Shecter, the editor of The Source, had first suggested the possibility in a conversation. He had told me that audiences liked our jazz inflections, and our virtuosity, but that what they really wanted was recreations of their favorite songs. "Why don't you take all the great break beats in hip-hop history and just redo them?" he said. "Do 'Top Billin'," then do Big Daddy Kane. Just do them. You'll notice a difference. You'll see." We did it, and there was a difference. People went crazy for it.

Soon enough, the Fugees were doing something similar. Actually, they took it a step further by playing on top of the records. We were the masters of live sonics, so we never had a DJ. We had to work hard to perfect our live sound. If you play on top of a record, you will fool people into thinking that you sound as good as that record. It's cheating.

When we went out on tour, there was a creative rivalry brewing. We got along with the group personally. I will always remember water fights with Lauryn Hill as a central part of my early touring experience. But creatively, we were maybe too close to them, or they were too close to us. They had watched us and learned certain tricks of the trade, and now they were doing them more slickly and more successfully than almost any other band. We were told we'd be co-headlining. We'd open some shows and they'd open others. We were about to agree to that. But then the radio started playing the s.h.i.+t out of "Killing Him Softly," and it was quickly obvious that they were the bigger group and they should be headlining. That was fine with me-in fact, I probably preferred it. I didn't want sloppy seconds. I wanted to go on first and establish the mood, make our point, and be done with it.

That strategy worked like a charm, and by the time we got to Los Angeles, we were a well-oiled machine. Somehow, I got word that D'Angelo was in the audience that night, and I realized that it was one of those make-or-break moments. I wanted him to know that he and I spoke the same musical language, that we could communicate telepathically via some African tribal s.h.i.+t. Back to the beginning, back to the drums. So that became the dilemma. Should I play to the band or play to a single person in the audience? I debated it before we went on, but by the time we hit the stage there was no choice. I was willing to throw our Los Angeles show for a loop. It was a calculated risk, but a big one nonetheless. It wasn't just an ordinary Los Angeles show. It was the weekend of the Soul Train Awards, a kind of unofficial coming-out party for the band. I faced the choice of sticking with what was tried and true or of venturing out into the unknown to try to capture the attention of one person. I chose the latter, much to the dismay of the rest of the band. Their eyebrows went up, like I was playing drunk or off rhythm or something. They weren't ready for me sounding like a skipped record. Then I would quote a Prince lick that wasn't in the song that I was playing, but that was in my head while I was thinking about the song I was playing. Again, it only confused the band. But it worked on D'Angelo. He came out of his seat and stood up for the rest of the show.

He came backstage and we started talking immediately. It was clear from the first minute that we were cut from the same cloth, that we were both obsessive fans of the same seventies soul, that we had both memorized every Prince arrangement, every Stevie Wonder outro, every twist and turn in every Curtis Mayfield and Bill Withers song. I saw it in him and he saw it in me. My plan had worked. I had hooked him. Within the month, we had started work on the last song for the second Roots record, Illadelph Halflife, "The Hypnotic," which flowed naturally into the first song of his next record, what would eventually become Voodoo. At the time, I didn't know that this dalliance would take up the next half-decade of my life, and that it would end up being one of the crowning achievements of my career. But I knew that it was a relations.h.i.+p that was different from my relations.h.i.+p with the Roots: not stronger, necessarily; not better; not more or less, but more intimate.

Meanwhile, we had our own record to make. Illadelph Halflife was considerably different than Do You Want More?!!!??!, partly because we had fully emerged onto the scene and now had an opportunity to reflect on what we saw. We didn't want to be as soft as we were on the earlier record, but we didn't want to surrender our thinking-man's perch either. We split the difference by making the music harder, and by making songs that sounded like they were based on samples, though in fact we were sampling ourselves. We kept a sense of jazz-Joshua Redman and Ca.s.sandra Wilson guested on "One s.h.i.+ne"-but also a sense of continuity. In fact, on some of the copies of the alb.u.m, tracks were numbered beginning with seventeen, which was our way of saying that it was a continuation of the work we had started on Organix and Do You Want More?!!!??!. It was a small gesture, and possibly more annoying than effective, but we wanted to push back a bit against the idea that records were simply products, or isolated snapshots that weren't connected, spiritually and even physically, to the alb.u.ms that came before and the alb.u.ms, as yet unmade, that would come afterward. We finished up in the summer of 1996 and got ready for our close-up, again.

If I managed to pull off a calculated risk to meet D'Angelo, and to stay cool while I was doing it, I was a little less composed one night in New York, when Q-Tip asked me and a girl I was seeing if we'd be interested in going to a club called Life. We went downtown and then downstairs, and there in the club, standing right in the middle of the room, was Prince. I couldn't believe it. I was shaking like the shakiest leaf. "I want you to meet this guy," Q-Tip said to Prince, pointing to me. "He's the baddest..."

Prince interrupted. "I know who he is," he said. "I love that video. It's so funny." It hardly mattered that he complimented the "What They Do" video. Prince knew who I was.

It was my turn to speak. That's what you do in polite company-when someone speaks to you, you speak back, right? But I was speechless. More to the point: I was making noise, but it wasn't exactly speech. It was a kind of gurgling noise, alternating with high-pitched squeals. Prince and Q-Tip were looking at each other. "I guess he's nervous," Tip said.

Words, finally, appeared in the gurgling. "Yeah," I said. "Just that... you are... knowing who I... be."

Q-Tip translated. "He's amazed that you know he's alive."

"Right," I said. "That you be knowing me. That I, I mean you, I mean. You know. That the thing is." At this point, Q-Tip shot me a glance. It was the look you give a guy in a plane when it's going down. Time to hit the silk. "I'm going to go," I said, and I went.

Out in the street, I was kicking myself in full view of my date. I kept telling her, "This is no good, no good at all. I blew it. It was a chance and I fumbled the ball. I need to run back. Should I run back? Tell me. Should I?" She was looking at me like I was crazy. About three blocks later I answered the question myself. I turned and ran back to the place and almost slid down the staircase. Prince and Q-Tip were still there with Lenny Kravitz, Kidada Jones, and a few other people. I burst in and all of them looked up. The bodyguards came off their stations for me. "No, wait," Prince said. "He's cool."

"Hey," I said. "I'm sorry about before. I didn't want to freak you out but it's really cool to meet my hero." The room got quieter. "And I just want to say..." Now the room was silent. I had the floor. I had my chance. What was I going to say in my first-and, for all I knew, only-opportunity to speak to the man I considered the most talented musician of his generation? As it turned out, it was this: " 'Dinner with Dolores' has the greatest ending in postmodern black rock history."

Q-Tip put his hand up to his forehead. No one said anything. Exit Ahmir.

Illadelphi Halflife came out in September 1996, just two weeks after Tupac Shakur was shot and killed in Las Vegas. Our hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, noted this like it was some kind of pa.s.sing of the torch: they called the record "The first major release of the postTupac Shakur era in rap," and said that we "reaffirm just how far-reaching (and how far removed from the gangsta stereotype) hip-hop can be." That's what we were trying to establish, though it was a little strange to see it linked to Tupac's killing, even as part of an argument about the options available to rap groups. Other reviews were equally positive: we got 3 stars from Rolling Stone (this was ok, I guess) and 4 mics from The Source (a personal bragging-right high for me). Selwyn Hinds gave us a nine out of ten in Spin, and said that it was an "artistic progression," and an "added confirmation of the Roots' place at hip-hop's vanguard" (near-perfect reviews were always the new black for me).

Within the group, there was excitement and pride, but there was also a reluctance to hope for too much to change. Given what had happened with the sales of Do You Want More?!!!??! I adjusted my expectations downward, and it's a good thing that I did. The second record repeated the performance of the first one-good critical reputation, modest commercial performance, nothing earth-shattering.

And there were reminders everywhere that we hadn't quite arrived, at least as celebrities. A few months after my embarra.s.sing run-in with Prince, I was scheduled to play a show with D'Angelo. This was my first time drumming for him, and it was for the round of concerts to celebrate Brown Sugar going platinum. When I played with the Roots, I dressed fairly casually, thrift-store cool, boho hip, like I had always dressed, but as D'Angelo's drummer, I was supposed to wear a suit. And so I went to get one. I was in the store, shopping, and a man with a clipboard approached me and introduced himself as a segment producer for a talk show. "It's David Letterman's show," he said. "Would you mind appearing in a skit?"

"What do I need to do?" I asked.

"Just play natural," he said. "But I need to ask you one question to make sure this will work out. What are your plans for the weekend?"

"Well," I said. "I have a show in Virginia tonight and then a Fas.h.i.+on Week event on Monday."

"Perfect," he said. He made a mark on his clipboard.

"Perfect for what?" I was still a little confused.

"We want you to go as Dave's proxy to the Emmy Awards," the man said. Letterman had done his disastrous hosting gig at the Oscars the year before, and as a gambit, or out of genuine frustration with the awards establishment, he was boycotting the Emmys. The plan was to send a pair of "freaks" as his representatives, and his segment producers were out and about in New York looking for freaks. The producer didn't want me because I was in the Roots. He had no idea who the Roots were: if it was a band or a sports team or a marketing agency. He wanted me because I was a peculiar-looking six-foot-two walking afro. I told the producer that I was a musician, or at least I thought that I did. But maybe he just thought that I needed to be back because I was attending a concert.

At any rate, we shot the segment. They flew me to the Emmy Awards. I walked the red carpet for the segment along with Letterman regular Leonard Tepper. We made quite the odd couple. It would be easy, and maybe predictable to say that I resented the experience because it didn't have anything to do with my real achievements in the band, but the fact was that I loved it. I have always relished living in the s.p.a.ce between being a big shot and being entirely anonymous. It's the pit and the pendulum.

Some years later, the band was invited on The Late Show with David Letterman to perform after the release of Things Fall Apart. When we showed up, Dave came over to me and said, "I see you still have the suit."

To this day, the video for "What They Do" remains most people's favorite Roots video, which strikes me as a little bit strange. Not that it's a bad video-far from it. It was directed by Charles Stone III, a Philly guy we've worked with over the course of our career, and who is probably better known as the "Wha.s.sup!" guy from the Bud Light commercials. He had directed a video for the heavy-metal band Tesla, our labelmates, that deconstructed the very idea of a video: every shot had a subt.i.tle explaining exactly what it was within the context of the broader video, the glamour shot, the shot where the models turn away. We decided to take it all a step further. A civil war was brewing in hip-hop; the tension between the haves and have-nots that I had sensed at the Source Awards was now at a fever pitch. And people were trying to locate us on that matrix: "Why are you guys so accessible when you're on BET? Shouldn't you have a mansion?" We wanted to make a humorous video showing that hip-hop music was a career, that was hard work. At the same time, Charles Stone wanted to throw a thumb at the stuff Hype Williams was doing, all those rap-video cliches that were prevalent at the time.

I liked the idea, but I was also skeptical. I had a severe disdain for our previous videos. We did one for "Clones," and even though people loved it, I thought we looked motley. We weren't styled. We didn't have star quality. We were like a rap version of Christopher Cross, capable of delivering great music but totally lost in the image department. And image was starting to become central to the genre, thanks in large part to the way that Puffy had taken The Chronic's vision and magnified it twentyfold for Biggie's Ready to Die. I didn't know our place in that world. I didn't mind representing true art but I would have liked it if we were a little more bipartisan, somehow representing both haves and have-nots. The "What They Do" video had a little glitz and glamour, although it was done satirically. Still, even when Charles screened the final cut, it didn't register to me that we were mocking Biggie's "One More Chance" video, as some people later charged.12

And yet, in retrospect, it seems obvious. There was no good way to isolate and critique the direction hip-hop was heading in without targeting the videos that Biggie was making with Puff and Hype Williams.

So there we were, in early March of 1997, in Paris for a show. The phone rang, and it was a reporter from The Source asking us if we would care to comment on these remarks that Biggie Smalls had just made about us. We weren't aware of any remarks, so he read them: "I had mad love for those guys. I'm the one who put them on to Brooklyn. My feelings were really hurt, man, because they were one of my favorite groups. I love Thought. He's one of my favorite MCs. Why'd he go and s.h.i.+t on me?" We didn't know what to do. We didn't want to act like a b.i.t.c.h and say we didn't mean it. What we were critiquing was obvious, and the satire was clear. But how could we communicate the nuance of the point, that although we didn't mean to personally offend Biggie, we were drawing battle lines that we thought were necessary-and, more than that-just?

Rich and I went into brain-trust mode and composed a manifesto where we tried to clearly articulate what was happening in hip-hop. We labored over it, tried to make every part of the argument do its job. It was long. It was righteous, maybe self-righteous in parts. It explained everything that anyone would ever want to know about art and commerce, about the way that conspicuous consumption was a kind of acid that ate away at the souls of its listeners. It took no prisoners but tried to be respectful about it. And, finally, it was ready to go.

I called for the fax number of The Source offices. This would have been Sunday morning in Paris, which meant that it was still Sat.u.r.day night in Los Angeles. "Fax?" the person at The Source said. His voice was bleary and sounded even further away than it was.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm writing in to respond to the comments Biggie made about our video."

"You didn't hear?"

"Hear what?" I said.

"He's dead."

I hung up the phone, my hand numb. I couldn't believe it. Dead? It was completely, 100 percent unreal to me. Hip-hop had deaths, just like any other part of the entertainment industry, just like any other part of society. Keith "Cowboy" Wiggins from the Furious Five had died in 1989 from drugs. MC Trouble had died in 1991 due to complications from a brain tumor. And, of course, there was Tupac's killing only six month before Biggie's. Were the two events connected? Had the tension I had seen at the Source Awards really become something this toxic and dangerous? The irony was that these events made the points in the manifesto even more relevant at the same time that it paralyzed me as to what I should do with it. It felt like the height of bad taste to send it to the magazine, and I felt personally horrible because the conflict with Biggie would now be unresolved forever. I decided to burn the manifesto. It was a ritualistic thing, a way of getting control and peace. Then I went walking through the Paris streets, trying to make sense of things.13