Decoded (23 page)

I
’ve never been good at sitting still, and even when I’m sitting still, my mind is racing. I’ve built my life around my own restlessness in a lot of ways. School was always easy for me; I never once remember feeling challenged. I have a photographic memory, so if I glanced at something once, I could recall it for a test. I was reading on a twelfth-grade level in the sixth, I could do math in my head, but I had no interest in sitting in a classroom all day. When I was hustling, I wasn’t the kid who worked his home corner, in eyeshot of his own bedroom window. I stayed on the road.

I love New York more than probably anything else in the world, but I’m thankful that I got away at a young age to see some of the world outside of Marcy. It opened my perspective on a lot of things, including my taste in music. People in other parts of the country think New Yorkers are snobs about hip-hop and defensive about their position as the birthplace of the art. That’s unfair, but being outside of the city so much definitely helped me avoid having any kind of narrow sense of what rap music could sound like.

For instance, the famous East Coast–West Coast beef in hip-hop in the 1990s was based on a lot of things: personal animosities, unsolved shootings, disrespect at awards shows, women, and other assorted bullshit. But as far as I was concerned, one thing it wasn’t about was the quality of the music. I was spending a lot of time in Washington, D.C., and Maryland when West Coast hip-hop, led by NWA and then Cube, Dre, and Snoop, started to sweep the entire country. I was a Brooklyn MC to the bone—I wasn’t trying to pretend otherwise. But I also got why people loved NWA. I started listening to all kinds of rappers from all over the country, including the Southern rappers and West Coast MCs like Too Short, whose lazy-seeming flows were the opposite of my fast-rapping style at the time and completely contrary to what most New York MCs were doing. I loved the variety that was developing outside of the world of New York hip-hop and absorbed elements of all of it, which helped me enrich my own style.

When you step outside of school and have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I’ve never been a purely linear thinker. You can see it in my rhymes. My mind is always jumping around, restless, making connections, mixing and matching ideas, rather than marching in a straight line. That’s why I’m always stressing focus. My thoughts chase each other from room to room in my head if I let them, so sometimes I have to slow myself down. I’ve never been one to write perfect little short stories in my rhymes, like some other MCs. It’s not out of a sense of preference, just that the rhymes come to me in a different way, as a series of connecting verbal ideas, rather than full-fledged stories.

But that’s a good match for the way I’ve always approached life. I’ve always believed in motion and action, in following connections wherever they take me, and in not getting entrenched. My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps and links than simple steady movement, or worse, stagnation. It’s allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I’m supposed to be doing next. Stories have ups and downs and moments of development followed by moments of climax; the storyteller has to keep it all together, which is an incredible skill. But poetry is all climax, every word and line pops with the same energy as the whole; even the spaces between the words can feel charged with potential energy. It fits my style to rhyme with high stakes riding on every word and to fill every pause with pressure and possibility. And maybe I just have ADD, but I also like my rhymes to stay loose enough to follow whatever ideas hijack my train of thought, just like I like my mind to stay loose enough to absorb everything around me.

YOU WANT WAR THEN IT’S WAR’S GONNA BE

I was in a London club when I first heard Panjabi MC’s “Mundian To Bach Ke.” It wasn’t like anything else playing. The bass line was propulsive and familiar, but it took me a second to realize it was from the theme song of
Knight Rider,
a bass line Busta Rhymes had also recently used. On top of the crazy, driving bass line were fluttering drums and this urgent, high-pitched, rhythmic strumming, which came, as it turns out, from a tumbi, a traditional South Asian instrument. I didn’t know all that when I heard it in the club. All I knew was it was something totally fresh. It felt like world music in the best sense, like a bunch of sounds from different parts of the globe joined up like an all-star team. People in the club heard it and went crazy. I did, too.

I tracked down the artist and called the next day to see if I could do a remix of the song. It was 2003, early in the Iraq invasion, early enough that people in America still mostly supported the war. Bush had flown onto the aircraft carrier with the big MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner and people
were thinking it was an easy win for Team America. But I’d been traveling all over the world and knew that there was a different perception outside of the United States. Whatever sympathy we had after 9/11 was vanishing. I was able to pick up on some of the arguments that weren’t being made on American television. I was one of the people who thought 9/11 was an opportunity to rethink our character as a nation. With the war in Iraq it felt like we were squandering a window of goodwill. It wasn’t just that it was a war; as Barack Obama said, it was clearly a dumb war.

When I started working on my remix of “Mundian To Bach Ke”—we called it “Beware of the Boys,” which was the Punjabi title translated into English—I wanted to make it a party song, which was the mind-set I was in when I first heard it. But the international feeling of the track—which some people thought was Arabic—moved me into a different direction. So I dropped in a line against the Iraq War. That got me thinking about the recent history of America in the Middle East, so I added something about the Iran-Contra scandal in the eighties—which brought me back to that whole era of big drug kingpins and my own life back then, copping and selling just like Ollie North. I compared Osama Bin Laden to Ronald Reagan in their indifference to the destruction each of them brought to the city I lived in.

I was wading into deeper waters with every connection. So I stopped myself and took it back to the club: But for now mami turn it around and let your boy play.

As soon as the beat drop / We got the streets locked / Overseas at Panjabi MC and the ROC / I came to see the mamis in the spot / On the count of three, drop your body like its hot / One Young / Two you / Want to, three / Young Hov’s a snake charmer / Move your body lika snake mama /
Make me wanna put tha snake on ya
¹
/ I’m on my 8th summer /
still hot
/
Young’s the 8th wonder
/
All I do is get bread
²
/ Yeah, I take wonder / I take one of ya chics straight from under ya arm pit / The black Brad Pitt / I mack till 6 in the AM /
All day I’m P-I-M-P
³
/ I am simply /
Attached to tha track
⁴
like SMPTE
⁵
/ It’s sinfully good young Hov infinitely hood / [
Chorus
]
/
R.O.C. and ya don’t stop / Panjabi MC and ya don’t stop / Nigga NYC and ya don’t stop / It’s the ROC, it’s the ROC / R.O.C. and we don’t stop / Panjabi MC and we don’t stop / It’s your boy Jay-Z and we don’t stop / Nigga, ROC and we won’t stop / Ma, I ain’t gotta tell ya / But it’s your boy Hov from the U.S. /
You just lay down slow
⁶
/ Catch your boy mingling in England meddling in the Netherlands / Checkin in daily under aliases / We rebellious we back home / screamin leave Iraq alone / But all my soldiers in the field /
I will wish you safe return
⁷
/
But only love kills war, when will they learn?
⁸
/ It’s international Hov, been havin the flow / Before bin Laden got Manhattan to blow, /
Before Ronald Reagan got Manhattan to blow,
⁹
/ Before I was cabbin it there back before / raw we had it all day, Papi in the hallway, cop one on consignment / to give you more yay / Yeah, but that’s another story /
But for now, mami,
¹⁰
turn it around and let the boy play.

Roc-A-Fella records / The imperial Skateboard P / Great Hova / Y’all already know what it is (Oh shit!) / C’mon! / Yeah / So what if you flip a couple words / I could triple that in birds / open your mind you see the circus in the sky /
I’m Ringling brothers Barnum and Bailey with the pies
¹
/ No matter how you slice it I’m your motherfucking guy / Just like a b-boy with 360 waves /
Do the same with the pot, still come back beige
²
/ Whether right or south paw, whether powdered or jar / Whip it around, it still comes back hard. / So easily do I w-h-i-p /
My repetition with wrists will bring you kilo bitches
³
/ I got creole C.O. bitches for my niggas who slipped, became prisoners / Treats taped to the visitors / You already know what the business is /
Unnecessary commissary,
⁴
boy we live this shit / Niggas wanna bring the eighties back /
It’s OK with me, that’s where they made me at
⁵
/ Except I don’t write on the wall /
I write my name in the history books, hustling in the hall (hustling in the hall)
⁶
/ Nah, I don’t spin on my head / I spin work in the pots so I can spend my bread / [
Chorus: Pharrell
] And I’m getting it, I’m getting it / I ain’t talking about it, I’m living it / I’m getting it, straight getting it / Ge-ge-ge-get get get it boy / [
Jay-Z
]
(Don’t waste you time fighting the life stay your course, and you’ll understand)
⁷
/ Get it boy / It’s ’87 state of mind that I’m in (mind that I’m in) /
In my prime, so for that time, I’m Rakim (I’m Rakim)
⁸
/ If it wasn’t for the crime that I was in / But I wouldn’t be the guy whose rhymes it is that I’m in (that I’m in) / No pain, no profit, P I repeat if you show me where the pot is (pot is) / Cherry M3s with the top back (top back) / Red and green G’s all on my hat / North beach leathers, matching Gucci sweater / Gucci sneaks on to keep my outfit together / Whatever, hundred for the diamond chain / Can’t you tell that I came from the dope game / Blame Reagan for making me into a monster / Blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra / I ran contraband that they sponsored /
Before this rhyming stuff we was in concert
⁹
/ [
Chorus: Pharrell
]
Push (push) money over broads, you got it, fuck Bush
¹⁰
/ Chef (chef), guess what I cooked / Baked a lot of bread and kept it off the books / Rockstar, look, way before the bars my picture was getting took /
Feds, they like wack rappers, try as they may, couldn’t get me on the hook
¹¹
/ D.A. wanna indict me / Cause fishscales in my veins like a pisces / The Pyrex pot, rolled up my sleeves / Turn one into two like a Siamese /
Twin when it end, I’ma stand as a man never dying on my knees
¹²
/ Last of a dying breed, so let the champagne pop / I partied for a while now I’m back to the block