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But the Lox, and Jada in particular, were better prepared for last week’s Verzuz, more engaged, and at times downright vicious. reached higher commercial heights-they seemingly ruled New York after 9/11-and have been memed to hell and back as relics of early–21st century rap.
#The lox we are the streets itunes iplus full
Last week, a full two decades after “We Gonna Make It” dropped, Jada took over the W at Madison Square Garden during the Lox’s Verzuz battle with Dipset. “‘Sound anything like Kiss? Then sign right here!’” “I’m the reason niggas got deals the last few years,” Jada raps toward the song’s end. But there’s only so much time for craft-he’s settling scores. (There’s even “You know dead rappers get better promotion,” a quip that, given Jada’s close relationship with Big, is in its way even more audacious than Jay’s “ And if I ain’t better than Big, I’m the closest one” from the same year.) Jada is, as always, an inimitable vocalist, like if you put gravel and Giuliani-era law enforcement in a blender hear the way “crack your back” and “manufacture crack” are made to sound purely percussive. The third verse is where you hear cracks in his composure, his frustrations with enemies in New York and in the record industry bleeding through. This is a necessity-Jada’s supposed to become the star-but it also serves the song. While “Make It” is staked largely on the chemistry between the two rappers, Styles P disappears for the song’s third verse. It is, like the best Lox music, both absurd and not, its cocaine measured on “the scales that they weigh the whales with” and its motivational maxims totally sincere. But the first two verses of “Make It” find Jada and P trading bars like always: about prototype Bugattis, about Cayman vacations, about the way Jada’s stash spot has the sort of security measures usually reserved for Scooby-Doo villain lairs (“My bathtub lift up, my walls do a 360 …”). “We Gonna Make It” was the lead single from Kiss Tha Game Goodbye, the album that was supposed to isolate Jada as the breakout solo act from the Lox, the Yonkers, New York, trio he’d founded with his childhood friends Styles P and Sheek Louch. From that point, the song never stands still-it has the breathless momentum of the fleeing friend Jada instructs, at the end of its first verse, to pass him a dirty gun. The first three words hit with the kick drums. You’ll find people who argue for either Pac’s opening ad-lib or the beginning of his verse proper on “ Hit ’Em Up” there are those who might take Chuck D’s “I got a letter from the government, the other day” from “ Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” or even Pimp C’s “The game’s fucked up, I ain’t got no friends” from “ Akickdoe!” There are throw pillows embroidered with “ It was all a dream.” But the most unforgettable opening of a rap song ever committed to wax is on that Alchemist-produced song, Jadakiss’s “ We Gonna Make It”: How Clipse and the Neptunes Made a Classic With ‘Lord Willin’’ Kanye West Resurrected a Retired Rap Group. And yet this is one of those rare, serpentine industry tales where the beat ends up exactly where it should. There are innumerable versions of this story, where the beat eventually gets buried deep on an album by a rapper who has it foisted on them by an A&R, or another producer gets to the same sample while everyone is waiting around, shuffling buyout agreements. But when that LP got held up during the Priority-Capitol merger, Alchemist moved on-this led to a much-publicized feud between the two that was later papered over. (When the beat got passed to Millennium Thug, the producer backed out.) Ras Kass, who was working on what would have been his third album, the famously shelved Van Gogh, actually recorded to it. There was the session where he actually tracked it for Nas, who was then working on the QB’s Finest compilation, and led Alchemist to believe it would be one of his solo songs on that record. There was the time at Baseline when he played it for Jay-Z. But when Preemo gave the beat his highest compliment-“Yeah, I can rap to this”-Alchemist knew it was time to shop it. So when DJ Premier dropped by to hear what the younger producer was working on, Alchemist wasn’t sure how the legend would react. He didn’t think his flip was perfect: The handclaps he’d added weren’t exactly right. A little over 20 years ago, Alchemist, the Beverly Hills–bred producer who at that point was best known for his work with Dilated Peoples and Mobb Deep, began chopping up the break that comes three and a half minutes into a Samuel Jonathan Johnson song from 1978.