Hip-Hop from the Nine-Trey
Plus, a few comments on Sir Ibu and Divine Force, and a homage to Andy Rourke of The Smiths.
On March 28, I published “The 125 Best Rap Singles of 1993” on Humthrush.com. As I explained a month ago in my notes on “The 20 Best Rap Singles of 1979,” it’s part of a planned series to collate the top rap singles year-by-year.
This month, my 1993 list has generated a surprising amount of traffic given my usual, halting attempts at promotion. I figure the burgeoning interest warrants a look at how I construct these lists.
First, why 125 singles? Well, why not? These lists are an attempt to document a given year in the genre. Going beyond the usual amount simply helps me tell a deeper story. But that doesn’t mean I include everything of note.
The process goes through multiple tiers. First, I put all of the favorites into a spreadsheet — The Pharcyde’s “Passin’ Me By,” Souls of Mischief’s “‘93 Til Infinity,” etc. I double-check these against the essential 1999 book Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists, and its lists of “Hip-Hop’s Greatest Singles by Year,” which spans 40 songs for every year between 1979 and 1998. Then I scour Discogs for anything that looks interesting. This results in about 200-250 songs to sort through, including 50-75 keepers.
Next, I listen to the 120-150 songs in the remainder pile to figure out which ones I should use in the main list, which ones to exclude entirely, and which ones go in the “maybe” pile. The latter category comes in handy as I begin fact-checking all of the dates with Billboard charts, Wikipedia, etc. As I eliminate a handful of keepers because they were released before or after 1993, I create space for a few tracks on the bubble.
The idea behind sticking to a “Singles” concept instead of simply figuring out when a song was released is to determine its actual impact on the public. A good example is RBL Posse’s “Don’t Give Me No Bammer.” The song was originally included on the San Francisco group’s 1992 debut, A Lesson to Be Learned. However, after “Bammer” became a local sensation, In-a-Minute Records released it as a single and video in early 1993.
Another example is N-Tyce’s “Hush Hush Tip.” As shown in Discogs, the 12-inch single is copyrighted 1993. However, I learned through an old issue of CMJ New Music Report that the single began receiving “adds” to radio charts in January 1994. As a result, I kept it off my list.
FYI, “Hush Hush Tip” earned buzz for its Method Man chorus just as he blew up with Wu-Tang Clan’s “Method Man” and “C.R.E.A.M.” N-Tyce later joined the Wu universe as a member of the highly underrated all-female crew Deadly Venoms. (Note how famed Ralph Lauren model Tyson Beckford appears in the video below.)
Then there’s A Tribe Called Quest’s “Electric Relaxation (Relax Yourself Girl).” I remember it was an immediate standout when their third album, Midnight Marauders, dropped November 1993. But the album’s first single was “Award Tour”; the single and video for “Electric Relaxation” didn’t hit until the winter of 1994.
However, I struggled over whether to include Nas’ “It Ain’t Hard to Tell.” Bobbito & Stretch Armstrong famously premiered the song during their WKCR-FM radio show on October 1993. The single wasn’t officially released until January 1994. But it obviously made a major impact well before BET Rap City and Yo! MTV Raps began airing the video. I opted to save it for the 1994 list.
When it comes to judgement calls like “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” I use the formula of official version > promo version > video. That doesn’t always capture when a song first reached public consciousness, though. Sometime in 1993, Mic Geronimo released “Shit’s Real” on his own label, Mic Geronimo Records. But the song didn’t become a rap hit until Blunt Recordings signed him and re-released it in 1994. I decided to use the 1993 date.
Then there’s Wu-Tang Clan’s “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’,” which was only made available via promo 12-inch. It seems indulgent to include yet another song from Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), but I couldn’t help myself. Plus, it inspired an incredible chess-themed video that got heavy airplay.
A handful of songs on these Best Of lists were not available as official/retail singles or promo 12-inches, yet were made into videos. Inexplicably, that includes Freestyle Fellowship’s “Innercity Boundaries,” an album cut from Innercity Griots that finds the Crenshaw quartet at their most accessible. (Another example is Ice Cube’s “Dead Homiez.”)
Finally, I tried to recognize a handful of songs that don’t fit neatly into the hip-hop paradigm, but utilized rap stylings in ways that are important and arguably filtered back into the genre, such as Beck’s “Loser.” I did the same for the 1992 list and Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name.”
Ultimately, this list is subjective. While it has historical underpinnings, it captures the songs I appreciate. For example, I didn’t like Fugees’ debut single, “Boof Baf.” It sounds hopelessly antic. I don’t think the New Jersey group came into their own until 1994 and the “Nappy Heads (Remix),” better known as the “Mona Lisa” remix.
Another 1993 hit that I didn’t care for was Common Sense’s “Soul by the Pound.” However, I used his debut single, “Take It E-Z,” on my 1992 list.
And the less said about Tim Dog, the better. His “I Get Wrecked” with KRS-One was a decent-sized rap hit, but I never cared for his clunky, meatheaded flow.
By contrast, I loved Brand Nubian’s “Allah U Akbar.” But as a single, it feels second-class in comparison to the controversial 1992 classic, “Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down.” The “Allah U Akbar” clip is a memorably militant vision of a postal worker (get it?) training to become a Travis Bickle-styled assassin.
Another song I liked that didn’t make the cut was Erick Sermon and Keith Murray’s “Hostile.” It wasn’t released as a single, but it inspired a decent video treatment.
I generally use most of Ego Trip’s 40 Greatest Singles by Year. One exception was Trends of Culture’s “Off and On (Freestylin’ Remix).” The group, to quote my Humthrush post on 1993, were a prime example of how “Too many Das EFX and Naughty by Nature knockoffs turned video shows like Rap City, Yo! MTV Raps, and Video Music Box into a blur of ‘wickety-wickety’ Timberland-wearing knuckleheads.” I think the Ego Trip crew liked “Off and On” because it has a nice guest verse from Lord Finesse, who’s an old head favorite (no shots).
Finally, there were a handful of important artists whose 1993 singles don’t reflect the quality of their work. K-Rino is a major Texas act whose debut Stories from the Black Book turns up on a lot of internet best-of lists. But his “Cartoon Orgie” single is a bit gimmicky.
The same goes with Ant Banks. The Bay Area rapper/producer’s Sittin’ on Somethin’ Phat works better as a whole than on the basis of one-off singles like “Late Nite.”
Sir Ibu and Divine Force
Last week, I had an interesting Twitter discussion with historian/radio host/rapper Kevin Beacham about Sir Ibu, the lead rapper in late 80s group Divine Force. They’re remembered for the 1987 12-inch “Holy War (Live).” Several members of Wu-Tang Clan, including Ghostface Killah and GZA, have cited them as an influence.
In addition to “Holy War,” Sir Ibu released an excellent solo 12-inch, 1989’s “The Peacemaker.” Note Ibu’s bars about Larry Davis: "Larry Davis, he knew what time it is/He didn't let them kill him so he went fugitive/On the run with a gun, now he's locked up/But he's alive and well and not boxed up." The late Davis became a Black folk hero after he survived a shootout with law enforcement in 1986.
Divine Force is one of those groups that students of rap’s golden age hold in high regard yet only receive fleeting mention in most histories of the genre. Beacham wrote a great post about Divine Force for Rhymesayers’s Fifth Element blog in 2012. Robbie Etelson also published a lengthy interview with Ibu on Unkut.com in 2014.
Beacham makes reference to an interview in the September 1988 issue of Right On! magazine. A screenshot of that article isn’t available in his post anymore, so I reposted it below.
In 2021, S. H. Fernando, Jr. wrote about Divine Force in From the Streets of Shaolin: The Wu-Tang Saga. The context is that the group’s manager, Melvin “Melquan” Key, later became manager of The Genius.
Less admirably, I first heard “Holy War (Live)” when the Ego Trip team included it in their 2000 Rawkus compilation, Ego Trip’s The Big Playback. In my review for Platform.net, I dismissed the song as “derivative.” After my write-up was published, I heard from my editor that the Ego Trip crew were dissing me. It didn’t really bother me. Rightly or wrongly, you have to be bullheaded sometimes in order to sustain confidence as a writer.
A note on Platform Networks: the now-extinct site was built with Adobe Flash Player, a notoriously unstable computer software program, and is all but unavailable on the Internet Archive. This lowly printout is the only evidence I have of my published review’s existence.
Today, it’s clear that I didn’t know enough about hip-hop yet to fully appreciate Divine Force and Ego Trip’s achievements. This is why I try to be charitable about some of the less-informed fans I encounter on social media and elsewhere. I’ll never forget that I used to be that dumbass who thought he knew all the angles. Hell, maybe I still am.
Andy Rourke of The Smiths
Finally, I’d like to pay brief tribute to Andy Rourke, who passed away at the age of 59 on May 19. The Smiths had a major impact on my teenage life, particularly during my freshman and sophomore years in high school. The quartet’s names — Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Rourke, and Mike Joyce — loomed as large in my mind as any boy band or The Beatles. I knew their music so intimately that I could sit silently on a bus for hours, quietly replaying their songs in mind. And Rourke’s bass playing was magnificently present, whether on “Accept Yourself” or, more famously, “How Soon Is Now?” Here’s the isolated bass and drums for that song (h/t Derek Walmsley).
Unfortunately, I didn’t discover The Smiths until after they broke up. I’ll never forget sitting in the Sam Brannan Middle School locker room in 1986, and seeing the guy with the locker next to mine walk in wearing a Smiths T-shirt. His older brother took him to the Greek Theater in Berkeley to see what would become their final US tour. I didn’t catch the bug until over two years later, when a friend of mine turned me on to The Queen Is Dead. I saw Morrissey perform twice, in 1991 and 1992.
In 2004, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Rourke and Joyce for Miami New Times. The occasion was a DJ tour with Manchester singer-songwriter Vinny Peculiar. I wasn’t allowed to ask about Morrissey — this was shortly after the duo’s triumphant lawsuit over Smiths royalties — but I remember that Joyce couldn’t help but get a crack in at the mercurial singer. Maybe I’ll transcribe the interview someday.