Dedicated
Microphone fiend Rakim is back
by Ericka Blount Danois
Michael Wong Photography
In a time where everyone fashioned their own style, Rakim stood out—he was a former stickup kid with a cerebral and physical presence, a cloak of spiritual protection from the Five Percent Nation, and a jazz sensibility who rocked Dapper Dan customized Gucci leathers and hailed from the suburban hood of Wyandanch, Strong Island. At the time, Eric B., working as a mobile DJ for radio station WBLS, introduced him—fresh out of high school, heading to college—to Marley Marl and MC Shan, and all of a sudden college was forgotten and they were recording a LP.
“We heard ‘My Melody’ from the windows,” recalls Queensbridge resident Ricky Winns. “It was a rough cut. Marley was doing a remix of it. We thought it was funny. It was droning, dragging, mundane. We didn’t know who they were until after the fact.”
Winns wasn’t the only one laughing. “Me and Marley laughed at Rakim. We had never heard a sound like his before,” says Shan. “We would go on the other side of the wall laughing while he was rapping and come back out like we never laughed. We would have inducted him in the Juice Crew if we knew he was gonna be like that.”
The artwork on the debut single was prescient—a visual metaphor—a giant, freshly manicured hand was illustrated dropping pyramids in a nearly barren landscape. In 1987, when the uber-classic Paid in Full album dropped, Rakim had the last laugh with a flow that was aided by a mastery of literary tools like metaphorical imagery, internal rhyming, and personification. If those lyrical feats wouldn’t get an English teacher moist, then his voice wouldn’t disappoint—authoritative, but unaffected, urgent without being eager—and his laid-back delivery and flow was something that before only an instrument was known to produce.
“When I played ‘Eric B. Is President’ on KISS, they were like, ‘YO, RED, WHAT’S THAT?!’ It was all ooohs and ahhhs,” remembers DJ Red Alert about the single that came out on Harlem’s Zakia Records and featured multiple samples—including Fonda Rae’s “Over Like a Fat Rat” and James Brown’s “Funky President”—that sparked a firestorm about using unauthorized samples when the Godfather of Soul sued them.
