Epmd Business As Usual

[Nerio Cintron]

Wherewere you in '92? A lot of us were cultivating a longstanding relationship with Ed Lover and Dr. Dre (Who's the Man Dre, not The Wash Dre) and maybe have spent at least a half hour of the past decade wondering how K-Solo and/or Keith Murray keeps busy these days. As long as EPMD can draw breath, they'll likely be welcome on any number of nostalgia tours, but if We Mean Business is the first you've heard of the Long Island duo's latest iteration of grown-man business, you've got company-- the record didn't even land inside the Billboard 200. Still, We Mean Business is a surprisingly enjoyable reminder of the potency of a group often overshadowed by their more name-dropped contemporaries.

Needless to say, subject matter mostly boils down to EPMD being living legends and these young rapsters need to show them some goddamn respect. And really, We Mean Business' greatest achievement is how it manages to do such without Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith sounding bitter or out of touch-- pretty much impossible since the record is constructed as a self-contained 1990s simulacrum. Despite the presence of 9th Wonder (who could probably learn a thing from Erick Sermon about how to make a snare knock), these are the same sorts of beats you'd hear on a pre-millennium Def Squad project, right down to what feels like the 12th song they've done called "Roc-Da-Spot" (down to the same sample of Biggie's "Unbelievable"). Usually, when beats are called "round," it's on some edgeless backpacker shit, but Sermon knows how to play the back without turning into wallpaper, still spitting out tracks resembling Super Balls, dense, rubbery and altogether fun.

The guests regularly outshine the hosts, but each has a variation on the sort of rugged, gruff flow that doesn't leave Erick or Parrish gasping. Redman shows to clown up "Yo", Raekwon and Method Man are still in great form on their respective drops, and Keith Murray answers the question raised earlier by indicating he's spent years trying to make sure "wanksta" and "a homo shanked ya" rhyme just right. Even the one notable contemporary feature comes from Skyzoo, the kind of guy who so far has made inroads only with the most virulent "bring New York back" crowd.

Not much has changed about the group dynamic either-- while Parrish has the more technically impressive flow, E somehow gets the memorable lines, although it works in both ways. It's like his lisp has actually progressed with age (he boasts that he's the reason kids slow flow these days), but it can result in fully intelligible groaners like "don't get me mad and make me Barack O-bomb-ya." But whatever the two are going on about, for better or worse, it's as impenetrable as Company Flow for just about anyone under the age of 25: EPMD namedrops, amongst others, Dominique Dawes, W.C., Andre Rison, Kung-Fu Hustle, Mekhi Phifer, and then revives the stick-up kid catchphrase "run your jewels" as a hook with a typically cantankerous KRS-One.

Obviously, with such a low-risk, modest-reward format and almost non-existent commercial prospects, EPMD really had no chance of creating something that could knock Strictly Business out the box-- in large part because something like "Yo" will never get a video treatment in the manner "Headbanger" or "Crossover" did. Still, We Mean Business actually bears more in common with recent mixtape-style releases like Prodigy's Return of the Mac or Clipse's Road to Til the Casket Drops without reaching the musical heights of the former or the lyrical heights of the latter-- the breakdown of the usual promotion cycle to acknowledge the increasingly niche-targeted appeal of non-superstar rappers. I can't imagine EPMD meant for this to go beyond an already established fanbase of intensely dedicated listeners, but then again, "the customer's always right"... well, that's just good business sense.

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I think the problem with EPMD is that they weren\u2019t a distinct voice, or even made up of distinct voices (as in, I have trouble telling the two apart). Even in the microcosm of 1988, the year their debut dropped, they had to contend with Big Daddy Kane and Eric B. & Rakim defining and then perfecting speed and flow on Long Live the Kane and Follow the Leader, N.W.A.\u2019s Straight Outta Compton, Public Enemy\u2019s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and Slick Rick\u2019s The Great Adventures Of Slick Rick. (Lot of classics\u2026 and then that Slick Rick album.)

As rappers, Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith aren\u2019t comparable to Kane or Rakim on the microphone, nor do they exude a \u2018force of nature\u2019 akin to Ice Cube or Chuck D. And they embarrass themselves when they try to tell a story in a verse. Moreover, as the years went on, both were prone to corny one-liners: \u201CNo missions impossible ask Tom Cruise,\u201D \u201CI transform like Spawn,\u201D \u201CI take action, like film crews.\u201D (Typically speaking, if Erick Sermon is setting up a simile, you bet your ass it\u2019s gonna land with a thud.) So in the void of anything particularly commanding about either of them, they just rode the groove with a slow flow and were hip-hop\u2019s friendlist group until they were outclassed by De La Soul and they stopped being so friendly.

Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith were both born in 1968, which makes them 19 at the time they were making Strictly Business, and despite their youth and despite a lack of technical know-how (at the time of making debut single \u201CIt\u2019s My Thing,\u201D Sermon admitted in an interview that he had no idea what a sampler or a producer was; \u201C[w]e didn't know what a producer was. We thought everyone on the radio made their own records. We thought every record you heard on the radio was made by that artist\u201D), they learned quick and made an incredible-sounding and fresh record. I also respect that Sermon made a point not to rely on the usual time-tested funk/soul samples (\u201CWhile the world was sampling James Brown, we was over here venturing out on something that was other. We sampled some other type of shit\u201D), even if that only basically amounts to one Eric Clapton sample on this record, it still yielded them a great hook even if they had to paid for it later. Still, the Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin samples go a long way.

The album is front-loaded, sure, although hip-hop historians will like the fact that DJ Premier took the drums off \u201CYou\u2019re a Customer\u201D for \u201CMass Appeal\u201D and MF DOOM nabbed a single line from the deadly-dull closer \u201CJane\u201D for \u201CHoe Cakes\u201D (\u201CJane\u201D even has a skit about how the record was about to end but then they wanted to make a song about some ex which ended up being a thread throughout each of their albums moving forward). That said, \u201CThe Steve Martin\u201D is the best song on the second side and not to be missed, a hooky little thing thanks to the indelible Otis Redding horn sample. As for the other two songs there, \u201CGet Off the Bandwagon\u201D is the only song here which has \u2018aged poorly\u2019 thanks to its electro beat that probably didn\u2019t even sound good in 1988, and then \u201CD.J. K La Boss\u201D lets the scratcher with the same name go at it for 4 minutes (enthralling for the first few times you hear it).

Unfinished Business (1989) is a sophomore slump, which I attribute to the fact that there seems to be less fire beneath their feet now that they\u2019ve made it. Hey, it happens to rappers. And while they got a surprisingly large amount of mileage for the business puns in their album titles (this album, Business as Usual and Back in Business being their best titles for the context they came in), they perhaps also inadvertently revealed an unwillingness to break away from what became a formula.

As mentioned, 1989 saw breakthroughs in sampling elsewhere in the east coast but EPMD are content to churn out another Strictly Business. Okay, yes, there is something new in \u201CYou Had Too Much to Drink,\u201D but that\u2019s also the worst track on the album, a weird mix of house keyboard chords and rap-rock blistering guitar but with a Good Message (don\u2019t drink and drive). Elsewhere, Smith continues his AIDS streak (weird line, I know) on \u201CWho\u2019s Booty\u201D: \u201CI had to cover my nose, not to ruin the mood / Because I knew I wasn't fishing but I smelled seafood / Smelled like shrimp or lobster, or tuna of the sea / And it wasn't worth catching the A to I to D to the S oh yes / The S is for safe sex,\u201D which is just unfortunate all around. (Shame because the parts that lead up to it about how he\u2019s the microphone doctor are funny.) The only truly great song of the bunch is \u201CPlease Listen To My Demo\u201D with its eerie sample and humbling storytelling (as opposed to storytelling about women), and they get a point for sampling David Bowie for the closer.

Sermon\u2019s beats on Business as Usual (1990) are denser; there\u2019s more to sink your teeth into, but it also marks the beginning of EPMD\u2019s far less interesting turn towards being \u2018hard\u2019 above all else; the titles of the opening salvo go like this: \u201CI\u2019m Mad,\u201D \u201CHardcore,\u201D \u201CRampage,\u201D \u201CManslaughter,\u201D and all this culminates in the fifth song, where they beat and rape a trans person for the simple fact that they were a trans person. EPMD will have a lot of bad songs moving forward, but it\u2019s hard to think of any that are as morally repulsive as \u201CJane 3.\u201D Hard to think of any song as morally repulsive. (Worth noting is that they also compare themselves to Bruce Jenner while doing all this.) In this context, do I feel sorry that RZA took the sample for \u201CBrother not a Jock\u201D and turned it into a better beat for \u201CDaytona 500?\u201D Fuck no.

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