[Reclaimed Timber Music Subseries 10]

{A Synopsizer Record Review}.

At age fourteen I fully made the transition from contemporary Christian pop music to straight up gangsta rap. This would be 1994. I might pinpoint a shift taking place over one weekend on a church youth retreat where I was introduced by my new friend Scott, to the song “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” by Bone Thugs N Harmony.

The trek from CCM to violent, misogynistic synthesized G Funk may seem like a stretch to the layperson. It was mostly tied to the fear created by my church along with organizations like Focus on the Family grasping on to that fear that conservative Christian parents held. Mostly with a goal of exploiting it for revenue. The taboo nature of the genre along with the increasing BET and MTV play ushered it forth.

All of that plus the gateway of Christian rap. That’s right, 1990s Conservate Christian moms – you were right to question the Christian hip hop genre. Who would have known? A broken clock is right twice a day…

My mom subscribed to a circular put out by Focus on the Family called Parental Guidance. It was a monthly review of secular music and movies, intended to inform parents of lyrics and ideas being put out in the mainstream. The notion was to help parents avoid those albums and films ending up in their homes, playing a major role in affecting the youth, all the while adding income to Focus on the Family’s bottom line. A full, insular bubble of fear was the goal. I believe it still is to this day.

I would eagerly check the mail after school every week hoping to intercept the monthly issue of Parental Guidance so I could read about which albums were out there. To this day I can’t think of a more entertaining review outlet. Some lamoid conservative asshat doing the lord’s work by sitting down and listening to Snoop Doggy Dogg and Nirvana, attempting to fashion warnings to terrified parents. Is there anything better than that? God, I wish I still had those papers. They were so ironically valuable to me I kept them for years.

I remember reading about Bone’s EP Creepin’ on ah Come Up, which contains “Thuggish Ruggish Bone”, the song that more or less entered me into the full obsession of dark urban street themes. I mostly recall seeing the description of “Mr. Ouija” and the tropes of using a Ouija board to summon spirits. That and the closing instrumental track for “For the Love of Money” called “Moe Cheese” – just music over some lady faking an orgasm. Talk about a titillating review from a conservative 90s publication.

I, of course, after reading Parental Guidance, then knew exactly what the album was called, and I made my way to the mall and purchased it.

What I discovered with that EP was the barbershop quartet of hardcore gangsta rap. Krazy, Layzie, Bizzy, Wish (and to a lesser extent Flesh-n-Bone). Produced mostly by DJ Yella from NWA, and featuring Eazy E with a comically absurd, slow verse that really didn’t compliment the speed of Bone’s talent, I found an obsession.

Eazy E died that year of complications from AIDS. I’m probably wrong here, but the spirit of my memory at the time was that no one in my highschool during my freshmen year even knew who Eazy E was. Save for one cat, Joel Garza.

The following year Bone’s full-length LP came out:

E. 1999 Eternal – A portmanteau of East 99^th Street & St. Clair, Cleveland, and the year 1999 which would be predicted as the apocalyptic end of the world. Either that or it was just a reference to the potential Y2K tragedy. Either way, a soundscape set to a Northeastern Ohio dystopia.

What I found on this record was an insane catalogue of incredibly crafted, grim poetry set to horror themed music spun by DJ U-Neek – a producer paired by Eazy E himself before passing over to the Crossroads. Taking notes from West Coast G-Funk, U-Neek strung ear candy synthesizer melodies between gunshot samples and twisted harmonies sung over rap verses that were in essence bedtime lullabies themselves.

Ghoulish minor keys and occult imagery, flickering past like a grindhouse film in a grimy theatre. The songs were void of emotion. No songs about sex. No songs about love, other than a few poems of adoration toward weed. Mostly the bloody rampage and ritualistic calling of spirits from the grave. I mean… what must’ve happened to these guys at a young age? I don’t know.

Execution Double-Nine Style. Steadily Sendin’ that Body Underground

The first verse of the album on the song “Da Introduction” is Bizzy Bone after a backmasked taste of evil, in clocklike precision hovering over haunted samples of some sort of rainstorm thunder. Krayzie kicks in with a synth sitar and eerie piano keys surrounded by his signature cadence and delivery. Layzie wraps up the raps fully setting the tone for this epically nuanced compiling of murderous sonnets of internal rage.

“E 1999” has heavy hints of pinball machine sounding wizardry pulled from the brain of DJ U-Neek. Every time I hear it, I’m cast back to Alladin’s Castle, plucking away at buttons on the Addams Family game, sending the steel ball bearing through dark backglass and bumpers, over dim lights. The digital 8-bit Simon’s Quest melody in this track encapsulates the unease of that stainless steel sphere potentially dropping past Castlevania into the gutter moat.

The production on “Crept and We Came” is hijacked directly from an abandoned playground on the frigid Lake Erie coastline after the streetlights came on. A swing blowing in the cold wind, hushed, swiping along the aluminum bar. Quick drums which I equate to perhaps bongos fabricate a backbeat to the smoothness. A melody whistle glides the listener through the song in a follow up tune to “Creepin’ on ah Come up” from the original EP.

Stalkin’ (gat fools), walkin’ jack moves

I actually just now googled the lyrics after thirty years of not knowing what they were saying, and thirty years after the fact, I still don’t get what they were saying.

…

Better in Hell than in a Cell

“Down ’71 (The Getaway)” is just impeccable horror movie storytelling. There’s no other way to describe it. Doom and gloom on a cinematic scale to the key of Natural Born Killers. It starts with Bizzy Bone and Layzie Bone being sentenced to death by electric chair. The next thing you know, you’re in a flashback to where they’re blowing a cop’s head off while on the run from po po.

After popping two slugs in another cop, Bizzy and Layzie are caught up. While in the clink, from what I can tell from between the twisted prose and various vocal registries, Krayzie and Wish show up dressed as priests with grenades hidden in a hollowed-out Bible. They blow up the prison cell doors, and I think Bizzy runs out and is conveniently handed a double Glock (which I’m fairly certain is actually just two Glocks).

Either way a bloodbath ensues with cops and Bone spraying rounds at each other as they try to make their way back out of the prison. There was a fire fight [in Wilem Defoe articulation]. Alarms are pulled, and bullets are blasted from tec-nines and something else that I can only describe as a bazooka. Explosions and mayhem all wrapped up in Mr. Leatherface’s demonic harmonics.

At some point they’re in a getaway car, probably driven by Wish Bone, and they run straight to a roadblock full of armed police. They swerve and reverse, pop the trunk and Flesh-n-Bone jumps out with two chrome plated Berettas, firing rounds at the coppers on some never-taken-alive shit.

Yep this is what I was listening to at age fifteen.

I jumped outta the car, had to jump over the hood, ’cause I’m headed straight for the woods

In the end they wait at the hideout and get fried, before they make an escape from Cleveland at midnight.

…

I heard a podcast interview with the guy who did the album art for E. 1999 Eternal. It was really funny to me because he had never met Bone. He just got commissioned to create the artwork. Bone didn’t know anything about what he had derived and set forth. He hid messages under the CD tray:

Believe in the last days. Don’t give props to the devil.

I think he just thought it looked dark. The back of the album was all skulls. Bone was like, “Whatever. It works. Let’s go with it.”

…

“Eternal” and “Mr. Bill Collector” both incorporate an appropriated Asian influence to the hearse-drawn gloomy backing track. “Budsmokers Only” and “Buddha Lovaz” are the aforementioned prose penned to marijuana.

“Me Killa” was a straight up acappella soul harmonization. Five guys standing around a burning barrel of trash in the Clevland slums, just singing about killing you. The only percussion was some jive turkey snapping his fingers.

I had to put a slug up in that chest, should have worn that vest, talkin’ shit I only had to put that ass to rest

Crossroad or The Crossroads

“Crossroad” was a song on E. 1999 Eternal that was a tribute to their friend Wally who had passed. I listened to and memorized that track just like all the other tracks on that album for a full year. The next thing I knew, in 1996 there was an alternate version out there on the radio waves that was not really a remix as much as it was simply a different song – “The Crossroads”. I of course bought the cassingle. All of a sudden I noticed on future pressings of the CD, they had completely replaced the original version of the song with the remake. ⁽¹⁾

I will admit the remake does top the OG version. But man, they shouldn’t have replaced it like that. The original was such a great piece of work, they should have figured something else out, in my opinion.

Was it Uncle Charles, ya’ll, or Uncle Joe Joe. I still do not know.

…

“First of the Month” has always been the least-good track to me. But it’s still good. Of course that was the first radio single. I had no clue forever what that the first of the month was a tribute to the day they got their welfare checks. No idea.

“Land of tha Heartless”, “Die Die Die”, and “No Shorts, No Losses” are all individually bleak. Violent devotion to killing police while wearing khakis. Suckaz catchin’ slugs from sawed off shotguns. Consequences go from worse to worst once they hit ‘em with a Ouija curse.

…

Mo’ Murda

“Mo’ Murda, Mo’ Murda, that’s what he just said” [i.e.; that’s what Quija said] – a malapropism by my friend Popcorn.

This one is yet another tribute to killing people. Requests to Mr. Ouija in the future foretelling of their own demise by murder. Forecasts of misfortune. There’s a hidden diss toward Death Row Records on the very tail of the feud between Eazy E and Dr. Dre. Passed down to Bone and Tha Dogg Pound for no real reason other than loyalty and a pre-2Pac-deathwish.

A lot of the beef turned toward actual rapping modes and it was then geared toward Chicago K-Town styles and accusations of being ripped off by Twista, Do or Die, Crucial Conflict and Psycho Drama. Twista once told Bone that they were going to see Eazy E soon.

The temporal snare breakdown is wonky but it works so well between the slowed down vocal samples in this track. DJ U-Neek took some chances and made some strides. It all worked out in a true masterpiece.  

Shotz to The Double Glock

This closing track of begrimed death and bitterness fits the closeout of a record full of pessimism and killing. An album where the brightest track is an homage to food stamps. “Shotz to The Double Glock” features Poetic Hustlaz, who would be prominently displayed in the Mo Thugs Family Scriptures compilation the next year.

A snare hit sampled from a hollow point slug repeatedly tapping against a closed casket pinewood coffin.

Never get in tha mix with a Clair Player – Ya liable to get ya wig split, and dumped in a ditch, bitch

A closeout reference to the gameshow Press Your Luck in terms of a life-ending “Whammy”. A cold piano line from “Carol of the Bells” circulates beneath the soft but violent reckoning. A finale of a chorus of Bone Thugs from every walk of Cleveland life chanting in unison –

Pop pop, givin’ em shots to the double glock glock

Pop pop, givin’ em shots to the double glock glock

ad infinitum

…

⁽¹⁾ I remember at age sixteen hearing “Hay” by Crucial Conflict somewhere in passing and thinking that they were Bone with yet another version of this song. But it wasn’t.

Bone has some various songs on movie soundtracks like the song “Dayz of Our Lives ” from Set it Off, and ”Everyday Thang” from The Show.

If it were me… I’d have added those two songs plus the “The Crossroads” remake on to “The Art of War” along with “Mo Murda” (with a title change) from the Mo Thugs Family Scriptures album. I’d cut literally half of the songs off from “The Art of War”. It could have been a fifteen-song masterpiece instead of the watered-down double disc thing they were trying to do.