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Ice Cube and Flavor Flav collaborate to talk about the main thing men think about when it comes to relations with the ladies. This was one of the last songs recorded for the album as Flavor Flav was apparently hard to find during the recording of *Amerikkka’s Most Wanted.

Cube talked about how he finally got Flav on the track:

We caught him one day, he was coming in to talk to Hank and Eric on his way to the airport. So I was like, “Flav, what’s up?! You said you was gonna jump on my shit!” So we put the track up and he was running late, so we knew we’d only have one take. When we messed up at the end, we just kept movin’. I had my lyrics written out, and his on there was just a rhyme that he had in his head.

Hank Shocklee added:

Here’s one thing that nobody seems to understand about Flav—he’s the hype guy, not a main artist. He can come up with something lyrically, but it’ll take him so long. Unless you force him, he’s not going to come to the table with something. That’s why it took him so long to get on that track with Cube. You don’t even understand how long it took us to even get the intros to Public Enemy songs!

Sir Jinx added:

Flavor came in for that after they was on tour. At the time, Flav and Griff weren’t getting along and Griff would be in the studio a lot, so that might be why Flavor wasn’t there too much. Flavor was really explosive as a talent, and he’s still like that. He was great to work with, he’s a musical genius.

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Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti led big bands like “Koolas Lobitos”, “Africa 70” and “Egypt 80”

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Curtis Mayfield’s civil-rights anthem gets flipped to make a song about selling cocaine

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  1. 2Pac (1996)

  2. The Notorious B.I.G. (1997)

  3. Fat Pat (1998)

  4. Big L (1999)

Keeping with the trend, Mos doesn’t want to be #5 in 5 years. (This song came out in 1999, so the next year would be 2000.)

It’s also worth noting that in the first verse he said “forthcoming”, and not the actual number. In this line he is compensating for it by saying 4 twice.

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Mos endorses the theory, publicized by journalist Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance, that SoCal kingpin ‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross (wow, that guy has two rapper names) received his coke from right-wing Nicaraguan revolutionaries connected with the CIA

Mos sees this as the African American community being targeted. The government deigned to supply Freeway Ricky Ross in particular with so much crack because they intended it to be sold to black people in large amounts

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When Mos wrote this song in 1999, he was likely anticipating that either Eris or the mysterious Planet X would become the 10th. However, we have actually lost a planet since then rather than gained one, as the former 9th planet (Pluto) was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.

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‘I don’t give money to homeless guys’ is kind of a weird boast, but whatevs. (Harlem’s Rucker Park, by the way, is better known as the site of the basketball courts where guys like Earl ‘The Goat’ Manigault and Stephon Marbury got their start)

He is saying he wouldn’t part with his money foolishly, as he knows how hard it is to make. He wouldn’t hand it over to a homeless guy until he knows he can make it back.

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This is the introduction of emcee Big Bank Hank, who was the friend and manager of Grandmaster Caz of the legendary Cold Crush Brothers.

When Big Bank Hank took this couplet from the rhyme book of Grandmaster Caz (who was also known as Casanova Fly within his crew), Hank ignorantly and hastily blurted out that rhyme that he didn’t even bother to notice that he was using Caz’s name in what people imply to be “his” rhyme.

Grandmaster Caz talks about it in further detail here:

(As you can hear in the video, he is rapping along to what he rapped before decades ago… before Rapper’s Delight came out.)

This is probably the most obvious and significant snippet of evidence that Big Bank Hank was what people in hip-hop call a biter (someone who copies, follows, etc.) for this particular song.

One of the lessons that the rap game didn’t teach you in (what is considered to be) “the song that first popularized hip-hop” is to give the other artist/emcee some respect (i.e. “Shout out to…”).

Cite Your Sources

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Everlast responded to “I Remember” with “Whitey’s Revenge”.

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The reference to A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Bonita Applebum’ makes a nice segue into Tip’s verse

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