Eric B. & Rakim

G.O.Ds Network (Rebsevenrth)

Rakim’s legacy is simple: he furthered the language of the most language-centric genre by introducing—perfecting—the concept of ‘flow.’ He had speed, yes, but he also had impressive control of breath and his own voice so that the words came out of him like liquid, whereas the rhymes from other major rap acts arrived like little grenade blasts. And within Rakim’s verses were arcane multi-syllables, internal rhymes, alliteration and other such weapons came natural to him. One of his inspirations growing up was the jazz saxophone, and he wanted to bring Coltrane’s method of improvisation into rap, “I couldn’t do that with a horn, but I could do that with a mic. I started thinking about my flows and asking myself, What would Coltrane do?”

When I see Rakim brought up nowadays, it’s with the compliment “your favourite rapper’s rapper,” and listening to his performances on the microphone, you can often hear the seeds of future lyrical rappers like Black Thought, Eminem, Nas, Jay-Z, 2Pac, and Guru. But I also think it ultimately does Rakim a disservice to frame it this way, which is to say that the reason you should listen to Rakim is because he influenced your favourite rapper. No, the reason to listen to Rakim is because the music he made with Eric B. was very good. My one-sentence review of Eric B. & Rakim’s four-album discography is that it’s one of the cleanest 4-album runs of all time — the best 4 for 4 from New York since 1970, by my estimation! My hot take of their discography is that all four albums are all great, to the point that you could make a conceivable case for any of them as their best. Paid in Full alternates between the great songs and the filler to its advantage. Follow the Leader has their best songs, but they stack them at the front and it satisfies the least of the four as a front-to-back album. Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em has less filler than the previous two, but it’s also stiff at times. Don’t Sweat the Technique has even less filler, and features Rakim’s most varied performance on the microphone. It is, at times, intensely political; he was no longer the God Emcee, but trying to engage audiences on a deeper level. And then that was it: they both wanted to go solo, and there was legal issues, and the duo dissolved.

I like Paid in Full the least of the four, because the production is the most dated—very blocky drum programming—whereas the production on even the next one released just one year later is stunningly modern in parts while still being very of its time. The highlights are usually because of Rakim, and the lowlights are when he’s not there at all, particularly “Chinese Arithmetic” (should have went for broke and added some kung fu noises). It’s just fun listening to him rhyme “editor” with “et cetera” or the seven-seven-seven bit on “My Melody” that he thought of when he was only a teenager operating as Kid Wizard. Were I to pick just one album that kickstarted the golden age of hip-hop, it’d be this one instead of records like Beastie Boys’ License to Ill or Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell from the prior year (albums that I rank higher than this one, for the record) because those are crossover records with plenty of rock appeal whereas this one is hip-hop through and through.

Follow the Leader has their best songs at the start. The opener/title track surely ranks among rap’s best ever (“This is a lifetime mission, vision a prison / Aight, listen - in this journey you’re the journal, I’m the journalist / Am I eternal? Or an eternalist?”). And their beats are the best production that Rakim has ever rapped over. I think Massive Attack took notes on “Follow the Leader”’s momentum when they made “Unfinished Sympathy” while “Microphone Fiend” has the funkiest sleighbells since Miles Davis’ “Black Satin,” and “Lyrics of Fury” brings back the tempo with a trusty James Brown drum break and some heart-stopping screams. It’s a toss-up if this or N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton is more front-loaded. The second half starts off strong with the orchestral-turned-jazz beat of “Put Your Hands Together” but then makes clear there’s no gas in the tank to even try to match the first three songs. One point goes to “The R” as that high-pitched synth line during the chorus—a sample of The Blackbyrds’ “Rock Creek Park”—likely flicked a switch in Dr. Dre’s head: dial up the luxury and we have g-funk. There’s three instrumentals, of which only “Eric B. Never Scared” is worth checking out for the scratching and sampling but goes on for way too long; “Just a Beat” and “Beats for the Listeners” announce their filler intentions with their titles.

Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em starts off with its best song, with Rakim popping off the p-sound in one of my favourite performances from him: “I push a power that’s punishing, prepare to be a prisoner / Showing you that I have, powerful paragraphs / Followers become leaders, but without a path / Ya mentally paralyzed, crippled ya third eye.” I wonder how many times 2Pac absorbed this the song before he wrote “If I Die 2Nite.” The introduction of “Run for Cover” mixes drums with gunfire to stunning effect, and they mine a Herbie Hancock deep cut for the bass-line of “Untouchables,” my personal favourite bass-line to appear on any Rakim song. The album is flawed, even beyond the 5-minute instrumental and remix: “No Omega” is a deeply embarrassing performance from Rakim as he goes on and on about women, “I specialize in her, until she sees / Where I come from and why I came / I tame and train til she manifest my name / Fill her with life until she burst with energy”—gross, but wait, there’s more—“Then leave her restless, ‘cause a lot of women be / Trying to drain us, and leave us stripped dry” (Guru taking notes here).

Rakim’s performance on Don't Sweat the Technique makes me think of Big Boi later on Speakerboxxx, these artists stretching out and proving that they have more to them after we’ve known them for so long by getting political, so don’t judge that album by its lame cover or the opening track alone. Judge it instead for the didactic “Teach the Children” with its slowly changing beat (high-pinging piano —> little horn hook —> slippery guitar chords); judge it for when Rakim takes on the POV of a Muslim-American war veteran coming home from Iraq with PTSD on “Casualties of War” (“So I wait for terrorists to attack / Every time a truck backfires, I fire back”). The beats are funkier than they were last time, especially the bass-line sample of the title track. Alas, what’s holding the album back is that some of the mixing stops the drum loops from ever catching fire, a problem that first started on Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em but is particularly problematic here: just compare “Pass the Hand Grenade” to “Casualties of War.” One sounds like the successor to “Lyrics of Fury”; the other sounds like a demo from 1992. “Know the Ledge” was the single, and the only one that charted (a measly #96) which is insulting to think about: I know they didn’t have hooks in the traditional sense, but their music in these four albums was incredibly catchy despite the complexity of Rakim’s rhymes.

Eric B. doesn’t find his way into conversations of the best producer because there’s a lot of mystery around how much he actually did, with even Rakim alleging to produce some of the beats himself and Eric B. only adding scratching. Marley Marl claims to have produced two songs on Paid in Full—including the debut single—and Eric B.’s defense is that he “brought the music” but needed Marley Marl to “work the equipment,” hence the crediting of Marley Marl as the engineer. What’s worse is that Eric B. seems to have zero hand in producing the entirety of Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em, which was produced by Paul C and then his protégé Large Professor after Paul C was murdered, both uncredited. So you would think that Rakim thrived without Eric B., but that’s not what happened: he got boring. Neither The 18th Letter nor The Master are particularly interesting to think about, let alone write about even with occasional support from DJ Premier. Rakim’s fire is gone even if the flow isn’t, and the beats he selects don’t have the same thump as the ones that he produced or rapped over just a few years prior. They’re not bad records—although “Stay a While” is very 1997—but they do nothing to further his legacy, or even prove to new listeners at that time that he had one in the first place.

What I like about Rakim is that he chose not to embarrass himself for a dollar, which is far more integrity than most rappers have. At the start of the 2000s, Rakim signed onto Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment and started work on an album that never materialized, producing years of expectations of a rapper-producer combo for the ages but virtually no music (Rakim features here and there), and then Rakim unceremoniously parted ways soon after. “We had two different ideas of how the album was supposed to sound. Dre, at the time, his formula was gangsta rap. I was maturing at the time. I had grown up a little bit […] I was looking to try and do a dope album and make sure that your daughter could listen to it, my grandmother can listen to it,” Rakim explained, while Dr. Dre was pushing him to pretend to be a gangsta on every song.

Some people were gassed up to hear G.O.Ds Network (Reb7rth) as if they forgot The Seventh Seal existed, or that the stylized David Fincher title makes no sense (“Rebsevenrth”), especially with it being Rakim’s eighth album and all. My heart sank when I saw the track-list with its CGI features of multiple long-departed musicians like it was some D-tier Star Wars movie (truth be told, all Star Wars movies have been D-tier since 1983). “Modern technology is beautiful, the way you can send music to somebody, they can do what they need to do, send it back to you,” Rakim said to Rolling Stone. Well, sure, but isn’t it better when they’re in the same room as you and you can collaborate on the fly? At least that way, you wouldn’t have someone who died of COVID on one song, and then someone else going off about Pfizer and drinking ginger soup instead on the very next one. But it’s a failure of a Rakim album because the God Emcee barely registers: his voice now a sullen baritone.

Hip-hop has a long history of not caring about its elders, and proof is that this was unceremoniously self-released digitally: you’re telling me so many rappers were willing to hop on these songs, but they couldn’t get one label to bite? And while I don’t think the production is special by any means, I think the album at least tries to open up a new avenue for rap veterans to get into: production.