“Who had the last verse you was always waitin’ for?”
Every time you heard an Onyx song, you knew it was coming.
Tag: DMX
Let us all bow our heads and take a moment to remember the hip-hop soundtrack.
Welcome back to the latest edition of Flashback Friday Flop, a weekly feature in which I examine a hip-hop album from years ago that was considered a flop, either critically or commercially or both, when it was released and see if it has gotten better – or worse – over time.
This week: The LOX’s Money, Power & Respect (1998)
Puff Daddy and Bad Boy dominated the music industry in 1997, releasing three albums that year – The Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death, Puffy’s own No Way Out, and Mase’s Harlem World – that combined to sell twenty-one million copies and gave birth to the Shiny Suit Era.
Originally, Murder Inc. was to be the name of a supergroup comprised of Jay-Z, DMX, and Ja Rule. All three were signed to Def Jam (through their own imprints of Roc-A-Fella, Ruff Ryders, and Murder Inc.) and had known one another for years. They appeared in each other’s videos, shouted out one another, and performed on the same stage during the Hard Knock Life tour.
In 1999, when all three were at – or very close to – the peak of their popularity, they appeared on the cover of XXL to announce the formation of Murder Inc. Some believe that the three could’ve become the greatest hip-hop group in history, but it never happened. As Ja Rule said, “We tried to deliver that album. It was a situation where egos all just played a part in its demise.”
We’ll most likely never get a Murder Inc. album so, just as I did with Detox, I have collected the tracks they did record together in various combinations.
Categories
Week in Review (November 20, 2015)
My daughter is only three, but I often worry about her.
“Class of nine-eight, my fellow graduates / Well-known savages”
– Nature, “Fire”
A seismic shift occurred in hip-hop in 1998.
Categories
Week in Review (October 30, 2015)
I’m stoked that Halloween is on a Saturday this year.
What began as a simple roundtable discussion with some up and coming rappers quickly turned into a cypher.
The Passion of Christopher Pierznik 