On Picking Up the Phone

Matthew Ritchie traces the romance of a bygone era through Slum Village, the Pharcyde, and a flexible stainless-steel cord.

Art by DJ Short

I dream of the version of myself who looks cool taking a phone call. That suave type of effortlessness, a little lean in my stance that would cause an onlooker to think, “That’s a guy who knows how to talk on the phone.” Maybe it’s a desire rooted in a bygone era, when leaning at a payphone or coiling the wire of a landline was an easy signifier for attractiveness, but damnit, I still think it translates. (It also makes me think about how inherently uncool the modern smartphone has made communicating. Every person who you stroll by having a public FaceTime or phone calls looks like they should be stuffed into a locker on principle.) Part of me does suspect that the version that I’m dreaming of is out of reach, that I just don’t have it in me to give off the devil-may-care facade through the sound waves.

While I love talking on the phone, and I want to do it as often as I can with the people I cherish, I don’t really take it all that lightly. I wish that I could, that it’s as simple as dialing a few numbers, but alas I cannot. The people I love have a certain number of precious moments in a day, week, month, or year, and for them to use any portion of that motherlode speaking with me is a gift. That doesn’t mean that each conversation has to be earth-shattering or revelatory—I’d hazard a guess that 99 percent of them amount to the normal talks we’d have in person. But the calls are underscored with the latent pressure to convey that I love them once again, that I am thankful for them picking up the phone, that there’s nothing else I’d rather do at this moment than talk to you, that I’d give anything to hear their voice again after the call drops. I cannot in good faith say that this line of thinking is effortless. Even the smallest gestures of love on the phone cannot be concealed with a calm, cool, and collected tone.

For all the posturing that happens in rap, my favorite genre of song is when the best emcees in the world get romantic and wistful. Call it selfish, I guess. These songs don’t have to be soft, or overly saccharine to hit. But a level of earnestness about the ones they love or who love them is an attractive slant for a rapper, embarking on the basic poetics that inform my interest in that brand of writing. Everything turns into a love poem, a love song, a love letter, when written with you in mind, no matter the beat of the drum underneath.

The best acolytes for these emotions have always been the Pharcyde, with the ‘90s Los Angeles group avoiding the trap of sappy and simping when regretting missed connections on “Passin’ Me By” and “She Said,” adding a comedic tinge to their unluckiness with love. These tracks never felt rushed, or like Slimkid3, Bootie Brown, or Fatlip were embarrassed about the realities of their lovestruck bars. They crawled along with an easy swagger, sometimes letting themselves loose with crooning and humming, always remaining true to what they felt. The late Stack Bundles opens up the brilliant “I Loved You,” the sprawling, heartbreak ballad that describes a relationship that’s gone completely sour, with a haunting admission that rattles in my head for hours after the track is done playing: “I loved you more than life …” It’s a track that embodies the idea that misery is company, allowing yourself to get consumed by the morose nature of his recollections. What is clear is that Stack didn’t regret a single second that he allowed himself to love, no matter the result. Sometimes it’s enough to lay bare the confusion and stress from relationship drama, like when Crime Mob rants over the swirling Friends of Distinction sample on “Circles.” There are no punches pulled here. They are skillful admissions made at the end of their wits, spit with simplicity and veracity when there’s nothing left to give.

A month ago, after not hitting my phone for a couple weeks, a dear friend sent me a grainy video from an unspecified Chicago venue, with a caption that simply said “Nigga.” Clicking on it while it was pouring rivers from the sky, distorting the screen with droplets, showed a 30-second video of Slum Village performing “Call Me” in front of a sea of nodding heads. It took me a second to realize what was going on in the clip. The moment it snapped into focus (metaphorically of course), a smile snuck onto my face that stayed for the entire walk home. No soaked shows and drenched hair could dampen the sensation sparked by the return of a warm memory that was thought to be forgotten. A reunion that was unexpected, the type of randomness that the sentimental call happy accidents, that the needlessly ornate call serendipitous, a return of beauty that extends past the time limits of the video.

I don’t want to boil down Slum Village’s impact to just their soothing romanticism, because I think that’d be a disservice to their evolution as an ever-changing outfit. The three-man weave of rappers Baatin and T3 and producer J Dilla felt like they rose from the depths of the earth when they emerged into the public sphere during the late 1990s. Before Slum Village’s “official” debut, Dilla racked up production credits with De La Soul, The Pharcyde, and A Tribe Called Quest, almost predetermining the soulful (and often morose) path that would travel down. With the genre splintering across the country into artistic enclaves characterized by gangster rap, horrorcore, and conscious bars, Slum Village burrowed deeper into their neighborhood to create music that teemed with tactile sensations from a DAT machine, sounding more and more like live-streamed digital diaries. With chemistry and understanding forged in high school and Detroit’s Black Conant Gardens’ streets, Baatin and T3’s relaxed delivery, intentional and measured, over the earliest iterations of Dilla’s brilliant compositions fit like perfect puzzle pieces. Backpacks instantly materialized on your torso when you pressed play on the crew’s first tape in 1997, Fan-Tas-Tic vol. 1, with Dilla’s crate-digging giving the pairing a wide breadth to raise and lower intensity a whim, moving between understated boom-bap and melodic rap with ease.

Fan-Tas-Tic vol. 2 dropped at the turn of the century and almost arrived as a sensory countermeasure to Y2K anxieties. With predictions that the internet’s house of cards would come crashing down at the turn of the millennium, whacked out survivalists and apocalyptic cults began to hole up and turn away from the rest of the world, cutting off connections and stockpiling resources. Religious fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists wholeheartedly preached that the social order, the way we talked and interacted, would be uprooted beyond repair. Slum Village elected to be a soothing antidote as the digital age rapidly approached, and called upon all their connections across the country to create a more familial affair, inviting Q-Tip, D’Angelo, Busta Rhymes, Kurupt, Pete Rock, and Jazzy Jeff into the fold. Dilla gave further evidence of his genius and a preview of his future solo achievement on Donuts, somehow creating sparse landscapes that held archaic samples that had been chopped and layered. T3 and Baatin’s raps felt more and more like high school cyphers in dingy basements, bouncing off each other in the negative space Dilla created. In the next breath, they could soften the tone and deliver sweet nothings tinged with horniness over tempered drum beats—a necessary duality if I’ve ever seen it.

Even as solo careers were launched and Slum Village’s lineup changed—Dilla left in 2001, Elzhi arrived in 2002, and Baatin departed in 2003—the collective’s core tenets remained. There’s something magnetic about the way that T3 and co. kept the lights on as the credits fluctuated, as the familiar faces molted, always maintaining the tenderness and lightness that made Slum Village so alluring. The ship, against all odds, would keep running for when Dilla and Baatin would intermittently return before their passings. This is the era of Slum Village that I fell in love with before I even knew where they were from, or about the carved out space of lyrical rap that they occupied. Without the vocabulary to explain it, it was still easy to feel the impact of a track like “Selfish,” washed over by the sampled piano keys of Aretha Franklin’s “Call Me” and the plain-spoken macking by T3, Elzhi, and Kanye West. I often hung onto the idea that closes Elzhi’s verse, where he blisters through the phrase, “I wish my arms was long enough to hug you all at the same time,” wondering on the greediness of his desire, and jealous of the enormity of his heart and arms to hold it all in.

Above all, I was drawn to how much I would see the word “love” in the Slum Village’s discography, as simple as it is. Even when, upon playing the track, their definition and display of the emotion didn’t line up with my early concepts, it was clear that love was the motivation for each line. Even today, that’s more than enough for me to get behind.

That ethos was part of the reason the “Call Me” clip beamed onto my phone brought light to a dark and stormy evening. Of all of Slum Village’s love-tinged songs, “Call Me” is my favorite. From the T3 and Elzhi-era 2005 release Slum Village, the B.R. Gunna-produced track chugs along with a relieving simplicity. (B.R. Gunna was made up of the Detroit pair Young R.J. and Black Milk, who picked up a slew of credits on the preceding Detroit Deli record. Young R.J. is now an official member of the group with T3.) A crisp drumbeat barely gets going before Dwele opens the door with his hook, sweetly explaining the track’s theses in two succinct lines: “All that I want is to show you love/All I got to do is find the time.” Everything becomes very clear when it’s established that love is the reason for picking up the phone, and putting one foot in front of the other in your direction. All the other concerns seem to fall into place very quickly.

There’s a quirk in T3’s voice that lives on in my head. He almost recreates a record-scratch effect, stuttering every couple of lines in his verse, sometimes more frequently, hanging up on words like “call,” “sorry,” and “sexy.” The choice conveys a nervousness and sincerity that feels like an anomaly compared to the countless suave bars on Slum Village’s previous romantic tracks. Here, T3’s heartfelt stance is his superpower, turning his verse into a tender love letter that could be bound by leather and string—I feel a special kinship to the way that he admits halfway through that his lover has got him stuttering, while actually stumbling through the word itself. No distance is too grand a barrier for the love that T3 has for the object of his desires, he’ll keep running through ink and paper to pen verses dedicated to her for as long as he can manage it. Even when they’re apart, the imagination fills in the gaps, sustaining the love for just long enough, until the moment one of them picks up the phone, or when they’re back into each other’s arms again.

Elzhi’s verse runs in stylistic opposition to T3’s rosy quips, narratively rooted in the past with winding bars about the ups and downs of his relationship. He cuts through the fluff, and opens his verse with the phrase, “We brought each other pain …” What I like here is how Elzhi’s focus oscillates between good and bad memories from line to line, mirroring the way a clear mind keeps score of an entire relationship arc. Blowout verbal fights rub up against celebrating the life of their first-born child, interrupted by intrusive thoughts on their sexual chemistry before finally wondering about the effect lifespan of their relationship. Elzhi lives within the concrete, building a dramatic stage play in 16 bars or less.

The throughline in Elzhi’s soliloquy—and in the entire song—is how the fact that feelings remain despite all the obstacles is a sign of legitimate hope. After all the stress of being apart, or the angst felt in conflict, all the pair really want is to talk to the woman that they love. It’s a remedy unlike any other, soothing all anxieties and sickness. Take his final lines: “Mad on the phone, can’t hang up, but I’m hung up on you/When you call,” he raps, where you can imagine his frown melting when his love’s caller ID pops up for a brief moment, getting a second of respite from his anger when her voice reaches his eardrum.

Maybe the point is that you aren’t meant to look cool when talking on the phone with the person that you love. It’s normal to teem with anticipation and positive anxiety when you look forward to every moment that you get to interact with them. There’s a full backstory worth of memory that comes with every call, every text, every letter (good and bad); giving the moment of communication a planetary weight. Ease and effortless delivery is an effective Trojan Horse for the barrage of love and care that arrives underneath—a strategy that T3 and Elzhi understood to be an exact science. There’s no need to betray the truth of how much love I have for you with feigned apathy, why not let you know how much my love for you is the reason for my next move.

There was a time when my parents were separated by 16-hour flights and multiple oceans for years at a time. A situational distancing beyond anyone’s control. Every day (or night, depending on what side of the call you’re on), they would find a time to sit on the phone, call for however long or short they needed to, and talk about everything big and small. The calls would end with a promise to return tomorrow, a shared demand to “call me,” a strict routine fueled by love and dedication. A brief interaction that grew beyond its time limits, something that we hope happens every time we’re connected to the ones that we love over the phone.