Dirty Boyz The Art Of Storytelling
Telly Rugs
He shrugged again. I wanted to shake him; immediately, I was ashamed of myself. He needed me to help him. He had no reason to satiate my morbid curiosity, but something about his silence angered me. I wanted him to be a friendly and enchanting little boy, not this sullen and dirty kid who ate his rice and chicken slowly, savoring each mouthful, and belched after finishing his glass of Coca-Cola. I had nothing to give him for dessert, but I knew that the ice cream shop on the avenue would be open; in summer, it stayed open until after midnight. I asked him if he wanted to go and he said yes, with a smile that changed his face completely. He had small teeth; one of them, a lower tooth, was about to fall out.
The body appeared a week after they vanished. When I came home from work, with my feet swollen from the heat, dreaming about the coolness of my house with its high ceilings and large rooms that not even the most hellish summer heat could spoil completely, I found the block in a frenzy, with three patrol cars in the middle of the street and crime-scene tape holding back a crowd. I recognized Lala easily, with her white-heeled shoes and golden bun; she was so nervous that she had forgotten to put the fake eyelashes on her left eye.
By midnight, no one had claimed the body. It was also known that the boy had been tortured: the torso was covered with cigarette burns. A sexual assault was suspected, and was confirmed around two in the morning, when a preliminary report from the forensics experts was leaked.
That night I got home late because, after work, I went to a birthday party for a coworker. It was one of the last nights of summer. I returned on the bus and got out before it reached my stop so that I could walk around the neighborhood by myself. I felt like I knew how to handle myself again. If you know how to handle yourself, Constitucin is pretty easy. I was smoking. Then I saw her.
The mother of the dirty kid tried to burn me with the lighter, the thin hand moving the flame near my hair. The bitch wanted to burn me. I squeezed her wrist so hard that the lighter fell on the sidewalk. She stopped resisting.
The addicted kid tore herself out of my hands and began to run, slowly: she was half choking. But when she reached the middle of the block, just where the main street lamp illuminated her, she turned around. She was laughing and the light revealed her bleeding gums.
Mariana Enriquez was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1973. She has a degree in Journalism and Social Communication from Universidad Nacional de La Plata, and she is the editor of Radar, the arts and culture supplement for Pagina/12. She has published two novels, Bajar es lo peor and Cmo desaparecer completamente, a collection of short stories, Los peligros de fumar en la cama, a novella, Chicos que vuelven, and a collection of travel narratives.
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The mark of a good rapper is the ability to string words together into captivating rhymes, but the mark of a great one is the ability to weave those rhymes into stunning narratives that grip and maintain the listener's attention through the end of the song. As hip-hop has matured as an art form, writers have come along who have taken the craft to new heights with their storytelling talents. Suddenly what started out as giddy toasting over party music had evolved into something closer in spirit to the gifted griots of African history.
This is a list of the greatest storytelling raps in hip-hop history, from cautionary tales of lost souls on the road to ruin to locker room grade cataloguing of bedroom exploits to autobiographical yarns from over-sharing MCs sorting out their personal problems though the music, and of course, complex stick-em-up stories full of more blood and betrayal than Al Pacino's Scarface. What did we miss? What shouldn't be on the list? What should've ranked higher or lower? Shout at us in the comments. But for now, check out The 50 Best Storytelling Rap Songs.
Ghostface and Raekwon usually come out looking like unkillable badasses when they tell stories, but "The M.G.M." off Wu-Tang Clan's 1997 album Wu-Tang Forever finds the dynamic duo easing off the death and disorder and kicking something more lighthearted. "The M.G.M." is just Ghost and Rae people watching at a Julio Cesar Chavez fight at the MGM Grand, trading color commentary and offering razor-sharp observations about what's going on outside of the ring.
Mac Dre's "Morals and Standards" begins with a parental advisory warning: put the kids to bed cause shit is about to get real. He wasn't lying; he catches a drug possession charge in the first verse and ends up in lock-up, where he becomes fast friends with his cellmate Edgar. He seems like a halfway decent guy until he gets out and takes it upon himself to track down Mac's family and usurp his role as husband and father. The jig is immediately up when Mac gets out on parole and immediately comes to reclaim his place, murdering Ed in cold blood for stepping out of his station.
To be the first lady of the Ruff Ryder crew, a rap collective that counted loudmouth brawlers like DMX and Drag-On among its ranks, Eve had to be hard. But the best moment on her 1999 debut album Let There Be Eve...Ruff Ryders' First Lady, is the revenge tale, "Love Is Blind." Here, Eve drops her tough girl veneer and opens up about the hurt she experiences watching a friend deal with an abusive boyfriend. Eve goes to bat for her girl, gruffly telling the boyfriend, "I don't even know you, but I'd kill you myself" and launching into a scathing invective before cocking her handgun and blowing him away.
"Pocket Full of Stones (Remix)" from the Menace II Society soundtrack is Bun B and Pimp C telling stories about doing anything in your means to get by. The titular "pocket full of stones" refers to crack rocks, which Bun and Pimp start selling to always-thirsty fiends faster than they can re-up. Business gets good fast, and the duo go from slinging the product on corners by themselves to a complex and booming drug operation. But everything crumbles in the last verse when Bun loses control, kills a police officer, and serves his time on the murder charge just to find himself back out on the streets at square one.
Label: Suave House RecordsWith its perfect, scene-setting Mission Impossible sample, "Armed Robbery," is a classic example of Dirty-South storytelling. Packed with rapid-fire details, 8Ball ultimately pulls off the caper, as the song turns from gritty realism to escapist fantasy. He makes it to the hills of Jamaica and buys palace "with a hundred rooms", but not before being struck in the head by a Fed's billy club. It would later inspire a sequel, on their 1999 reunion album In Our Lifetime, Vol. 1 with their friends Gillie da Kid, Toni Hickman, and Thorough of South Circle coming along for the ride.
Eric B. and Rakim's 1990 album Let The Rhythm Hit Em didn't reach the resounding commercial success that its predecessors Paid in Full and Follow the Leader did, but its not without its moments of greatness. One of these is "Mahogany," a slick love song that finds Rakim describing his appeal to a woman through a series of clever nutritional metaphors ("Each moment's a mineral, poetry's protein/ verse is a vitamin, effects like codeine") that manage to relay the intensity of the pair's growing attraction without mawkishly providing details about the sex. The closest Rakim gets to laying it all out for the listener is the smirking satisfaction of the coy closing line, where he notes that, "it wasn't the Perignon that made her collapse over me."
Too $hort has been raising eyebrows with his lyrical content since the first Reagan administration. "Blow Job Betty," off 1986's appropriately titled Raw, Uncut & X-Rated EP is the story of his relationship with a girl (the aforementioned Betty, naturally) whose enthusiasm for giving oral sex actually matches his drive to receive it. The two tumble into a series of escapades that ends in an orgasm that somehow kills her. It's a tall tale with a flagrant disregard for science as well as decency, but well-enough became a major piece of the very bedrock West Coast rap was built on.
The final song on EPMD's landmark 1988 debut Strictly Business is "Jane," a quick rap about a girl who pissed Erick Sermon off a few years earlier. Erick meets a girl named Jane who wants to hook up, but she'll only go out with him if he brings a friend for her friend. Erick drags Parrish out on a double date. Finally alone with Jane at the end of the night, Erick shows her what he thinks is the night of her life, but he awakes to a note that suggests the sex was wack. It doesn't really seem like the kind of story you'd want to make public, but EPMD had a thing for weirdly self-deprecating story songs typified by subsequent songs like "Who's Booty" and the series of sequels that "Jane" inspired.
The Coup's 1994 album Genocide & Juice mixed the razor-sharp wit and political acumen of groups like Public Enemy with production closer in spirit to the g-funk movement that had taken over the West Coast at the time. Album cut "Fat Cats, Bigga Fish" finds group leader Boots Riley broke, miserable, and desperate for a come-up. He spots a mark that looks like a cash cow and attacks, coming away with a boatload of money and credit cards. Newly rich and running in circles with the upper echelon, he quickly becomes aware of the sneaky political wheeling and dealing that creates the inner city poverty he'd suffered through his life as he overhears his city's mayor putting together a plot to flip low income housing into expensive condominiums. It's then that he realizes that for all his skill at hustling, he's just another mark too.
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