Decoded (29 page)

It still took me a while to let it go, even as things were getting darker for me on the streets. I was doing well in that world, but the irony is that the more success you have in the life, the deeper the costs become and the clearer it becomes that you can’t keep doing it. That it’s killing you and hurting everyone you know. One of the ways the streets kept ahold on me was that I lived the independence of that life. One of the benefits of me and my crew working out of town was that I never had to be under the thumb of one of the big Brooklyn bosses. We were like pioneers on the frontier, staking out new territory where we could run things ourselves. I didn’t want to give that up to become someone’s contracted employee. I’d been on my own since I was a kid. But when I could really see myself not just rapping but being part of a partnership that would run the whole show, I knew I was ready to take that step.

So in 1994, Dame, Biggs, and I pooled our resources to form Roc-A-Fella Records. Tone came up with the name, which was aspirational and confrontational.

The first record we made was the single “I Can’t Get With That.” We recorded it in Clark Kent’s basement studio, and my man Abdul Malik Abbott shot the video for five thousand dollars. The song was a showcase for my variety of flows: fast rhyming, slow rhyming, stacked, spare. The video was pretty basic, but our only goal was to get it in on Ralph McDaniels’ Video Music Box, a New York institution that aired on a local UHF station. We pressed up our own vinyl. B-High made champagne baskets and sent them to DJs. We made sure that the mix-tape DJs—like Ron G, S&S, and Kid Capri—had it. We sent the record to mainstream stations, too, although getting it played on the big stations was a long shot.

We didn’t know the business yet, but we knew how to hustle. Like a lot of underground crews on a mission, we were on some real trunk-of-the-car shit. The difference with us was that we didn’t want to get stalled at low-level hustling. We had a plan. We did more than talk about it, we wrote it down. Coming up with a business plan was the first thing the three of us did. We made short and long-term projections, we kept it realistic, but the key thing is that we wrote it down, which is as important as visualization in realizing success.

The early Roc team was kids like Lenny Santiago, Biggs’s little brother Hip-Hop, Gee Roberson, and other soldiers—all of whom have gone on to tremendous success in the industry. Back then they’d go to record stores—this is when New York record stores like Fat Beats and the spot on 125th and Broadway still sold singles on consignment. They’d drop the single off and come back every couple of days to collect half the proceeds of what had been sold. They’d show up and collect 150 dollars, an amount that would’ve been toll money in a former life. Ty, B-High, and I were right in there, too, in the stores, politicking with retailers, and personally building relationships with DJs. It was do or die.

I RAP AND I’M REAL, I’M ONE OF THE FEW HERE

“In My Lifetime” was the first song that really connected all the dots for me. It featured a distinctive flow, but subtly. It wasn’t a song
about
flow. It was a song about the Life. It wasn’t a brand-new subject—a million other rappers had already talked about selling drugs—but I knew niggas knew the difference.

I know the phrase
keeping it real
has been killed to the point where it doesn’t even mean anything anymore in rap but to me it’s essential. The realness comes from how an MC shapes whatever their experience is into a rhyme. It’s in the logic the lyrics follow, the emotional truth that supports it, the human motivations the MC fills in, and the commitment to getting even the smallest details right. That’s probably true for all stories, whether they’re in books or movies or songs. When I first watched
Menace II Society,
I had no idea whether or not the Hughes brothers had lived the life they described—or, to be honest, if anyone did—but when I saw the opening scene, I immediately believed the story was real. It was because of the details, the way the smoke filled that red-lit room, the little pistol homeboy’s dad whipped out, Marvin Gaye soul spinning on the turntable. The look on the kid’s face when his pop started blazing. You can’t fake that kind of emotional truth. You might say, “Well, it
was
a fictional story, and those weren’t real people, they were actors.” But the film was executed in a way that made it real—everybody, the writers, the actors, the set designers, tapped into something true.

Big’s records were like that. They could be about the most outrageous things—hijacking a subway, pulling off an armed heist, robbing one of the New York Knicks—but he’d ground them in details that made them feel completely real, even when you knew he was just fucking with you. Like he begins his song “Warning” with completely humble, relatable details—
now I’m yawning, wipe the cold out my eye
—so that from the beginning you trust him. But then he builds it, takes you along step by step, till you don’t even realize when you’ve left reality and entered a ferocious fantasy of threats and revenge—
c4 to your door no beef no more, nigga.
And even there, he doesn’t just say, I’ll blow up your house. He specifies the explosive by its technical name. He gets the details right—the homey ones and the fantastical ones—and gets the emotion right, too, which is that familiar feeling of
I can’t believe this shit, but I really wish a nigga would.
We’ve all been there at some point, although probably without the dynamite. It all stays real, whether he’s kind of shaking his head in sad disbelief in the chorus—
damn, niggas want to stick me for my papers
—or on some next-level violent braggadocio—
got the rottweilers by the door, and I feed ’em gunpowder.
And then you get to the end and he suddenly catches himself in the middle of his crazy, escalating threats and becomes regular-guy Big again:
Hold on, I hear somebody coming.
Which starts the story again.

When Big got into it with Tupac, some hip-hop journalists were like,
Hey, isn’t this the same nigga who said c4 at your door? Why hasn’t he planted a bomb in Pac’s house yet?
which is just the kind of dumb shit that rap always gets subjected to. Not to say there wasn’t real beef there, lethal beef, maybe, but
Entertainment Weekly
isn’t outraged that Matt Damon isn’t really assassinating rogue CIA agents between movies. It goes to show that even when he was narrating a fantasy with all the crazy, blood-rushing violence of a Tarantino flick packed into three minutes, Big was real enough that some people thought he was just describing a day in his life.

Even some of our greatest MCs sometimes strayed away from their own emotional truth. You’ll hear a conscious MC do an ignorant joint and you’ll feel a little sick because it’s so wrong. Or a classic party starter like MC Hammer suddenly becomes a gangsta and you go,
Really? Please don’t. You don’t have to!
When I was the CEO at Def Jam, one of my initial signings was the Roots. When I sat down with ?uestlove to talk about their new album, I told him, “Don’t try to give me a hot radio single. That’s not who you are. Worry about making a great album, from the first cut to the last, a great Roots album.” You can’t fake whatever the current trend is if it’s not you, because it might work for a second, but it’s a house of sand.

I remember in the 1980s, when rock music started losing ground, which created a lane for hip-hop to become the dominant pop music. Once MTV launched, rock started to change. Style started trumping substance, which culminated in the rise of the big hair bands. There were probably some great hair bands—I wouldn’t really know—but I do know that most of them were terrible; even they’ll admit that now. And what’s worse is that the thing that made rock great, its rawness, whether it was Little Richard screaming at the top of his lungs or the Clash smashing their guitars, disappeared in all that hairspray. It was pure decadence. It crippled rock for a long time. I wasn’t mad, because rap was more than ready to step in.

A couple years ago when Auto-Tune started to really blow up in black music, I got the sinking feeling that I’d seen this story before. There were people who used Auto-Tune technology cleverly, to make great pop music, the kind of music that gives you a sudden sugar high and then disappears without a trace. Kanye made a great, original Auto-Tune album,
808s & Heartbreak,
which was entirely his own sound. Kanye’s a genuine talent, so he did it right. But then rappers across the board started fucking with it. It was disturbing. It felt almost like a conspiracy. Instead of aspiring to explore their humanity—their brains and hearts and guts—these rappers were aspiring to
sound like machines.
And it worked for some rappers; they made quick money with it. But they were cashing in at the expense of a whole culture that had been built over two decades by people like Rakim and Kane, by legends like Big and Tupac. And in the end, these Auto-Tune rappers were going to fuck up everybody’s money; I also saw developments in indie rock that made me think they were ready to take rap’s mantle, because they were experimenting with different paths to that same authentic, raw place that rap used to inhabit.

So I recorded a song called “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune).” It wasn’t because I was trying to destroy the career of anyone in particular. I wanted to kill Auto-Tune like Kurt Cobain killed the hair bands. It’s not a game. Musical genres have been known to die, mostly because they lose their signature and their vitality, and let other genres steal their fire. Where’s disco? Where’s the blues, for that matter?

What’s hip-hop’s greatness? It’s a cliché, but its greatness is that it keeps it real, in the most complicated sense of reality. And that realness lives in the voice of the MC. That will never change.

IN MY LIFETIME, NIGGA, THAT WAS ME FIRST

To get “In My Lifetime” out there, we negotiated a single deal with Payday that guaranteed wider distribution than we’d been able to get on our own. Once we secured that deal, we rented an office in the financial district, on John Street, around the corner from the World Trade Center. In our minds, we were staying close to the money, to Wall Street. Our girls, who to this day still work with me on some level, were holding us down. Tiny, funny-ass Chaka Pilgrim, who’s like my little sister, was in the office, complaining about the mice and the dirty watercoolers. Dara and Omoyole McIntosh started our fan club, Fan Fam, before we even had any fans. Our office felt more like an apartment, with a big-screen TV, a leather couch, and dice games jumping off in the corner. We didn’t have desks, computers, air-conditioning, or any of the shit we really needed; we had a business plan, but we were still wild, rough around the edges. When Chaka and Omye would go to leave the office at noon, Ty and I would be like, “Where ya’ll going?” and Chaka’s smart ass would be like, “Hello? We’re going to lunch—ever heard of it? People with real jobs in offices go on them.” I started ordering food in, like, “Sit your little ass down.”

There was so much love back then; everyone who started out with the Roc believed in us and wanted to see us win.

When we went to Payday to promote the song they gave us a box of flyers. Can you imagine that shit? Their budget could fit on a Kinko’s receipt. Shit was so laughable. Some cats would’ve been derailed by lack of support from their label, but we had that plan. So we just hired Abdul Malik Abbott again and got on a plane to St. Thomas to shoot our own video for the song.

We shot “In My Lifetime” in the Caribbean, when other rappers were making videos at Coney Island (no disrespect to Nice & Smooth). We were filming on boats while dudes were dancing in alleys. The video wasn’t aspirational. This was really the life we were living, before we’d even released a single. We’d always had pool parties, but this one was even more of a celebration. When I looked on the monitor and saw Ty-Ty and B-High having the time of their lives, I knew it’s because they’re proud that was doing the music thing, and doing it right.

The next record I did was “Dead Presidents.” It was a strong single and we knew it, and we wanted it to pop in the biggest rap radio market, New York, which meant we had to get spins from Funkmaster Flex at Hot 97. Flex had become New York’s hottest hip-hop DJ, with prime-time airspace on Hot 97 on the weekends and a huge Sunday night gig at the Tunnel, a megaclub in Manhattan. We tried everything we could do to get Flex to play “Dead Presidents,” but this nigga was not seeing us. Irv Gotti, who I’ve known since I was in London with Jaz, was working with artists like Mic Geronimo. He had Flex’s ear and just stalked him until he finally broke the record. Irv also met DJ Clue at a gas station and gave him the single like it was a drug deal or something. It was the first time we got an “add” on the radio. That was a major. Irv also gave us a great piece of advice. He told us “Dead Presidents” was a great record but too hard for a hit. He said the record on the flip side, “Ain’t No Nigga,” was the one that was going to get played in the clubs and on radio. He was right.

Still, on the strength of the heat from “Dead Presidents,” Dame and I were in a position to finally negotiate a distribution deal that could support a national album release, which we did with Priority, an indie label. We had a small window of opportunity from the time Flex started playing it, in the beginning of 1996. I figured I had until that summer to complete an entire album, about three to four months from studio to packaged product with a marketing plan, and then we would be in a position to launch the label proper.