Luniz, “I Got 5 on It” [1995]
Though I was born in 1992, I heard Club Nouveau’s “Why You Treat Me So Bad” long before Tone Capone’s mutation. In fact, “So Bad” is one of the first songs I remember that wasn’t punctuated by an Oscar the Grouch ad-lib; in Winnipeg, our neighbors would play it so loudly it reverberated through the floors. Because of this, the element of the song that dominated my young brain was not the Halloween melody that Yukmouth and Numskull would navigate later—it was the paroxysmal drums that appeared only under the chorus, high-‘80s controlled violence that seemed more dangerous than the pop music I’d been exposed to was allowed to be. But “I Got 5 on It” dispenses with those, opting for something nearly as heavy but more subterranean; the result is that melody foregrounded, burned into the brain of anyone who’s ever bought a rap record made west of the Red River. Two notes: Yes, Operation Stackola over The Chronic; the definitive ranking of the verses on the remix is:
Shock G
Richie Rich
E-40
Dru Down
Numskull
Spice 1
Yukmouth
Scarface, “Smile” f/ 2Pac [1997]
The musical exchange between California and Texas was first the story of The Great Migration; later, briefly, it was because everyone wanted to sound like 2Pac. The beat on “Smile” seems to lie directly at that point of late-‘90s convergence: the “Funky Worm”-adjacent whine, the Gothic stakes slowed to unhurried swagger. Of course the organs beg the funereal associations; of course it knocks too hard to worry about that for the next four minutes.
Mac Dre, “Not My Job” [2004]
Despite the fact that it doesn’t establish or subvert the sonic architecture of the Bay—something he would do several times over—this Blackbyrds-sampling cut from The Genie of the Lamp is the best Mac Dre song. At first he writes like an alien (“The biggest thing since the TV invention”; “Start a war for nothing like G.W. Bush”), then like the most mollyed out man ever (he uses a half-dozen different voices and warns the boyfriend of his lover to “watch thyself”). Tone Capone should have gotten the Pulitzer for luring Dre into this illusion of placidity.
Mob Figaz, “Drama I Been Through”
In a beat whose textured maximalism presages the blown-out R&B flips Doughboyz Cashout would soon start producing in Detroit, here Tone Capone gives gloss and sheen to harrowing stories, making the struggles of The Jacka, Husalah, et al. seem both impossible to overcome and like inevitable triumphs.
The Click, “It’s All the Same” f/ WC and Baby
And finally, that collision of the intricate and the bludgeoning carried to its extreme end. Tone Capone was born in Berkeley and died in Las Vegas, a true interpreter of the American West: unbound by convention and shot through with ambition.