For Those About To Rock

'Lifestylez' shows Big L's gift of gab two decades later

Lamont "Big L" Coleman makes an L shape with his hands. Lifestylez ov da Poor and Dangerous, the one album released during his short life, turns 20 years old March 28. (Courtesy photo)

A pretty good case exists to say 1995 was the greatest year in hip-hop history.

The mid-1990s are filthy with classic releases, but the plethora of essential slabs from ’95 leaves it a cut above: GZA/Genius’ Liquid Swords, Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Lynx, Goodie Mob’s Soul Food, Smif-N-Wessun’s Dah Shinin’, 2pac’s Me Against the World, The Pharcyde’s Labcabincalifornia, Old Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers, The Roots’ Do You Want More?!!!??!, KRS-One’s self-titled LP, Vallejo’s own E-40’s In a Major Way and, as friend would say, it goes on like this.

Also among this hot slate from '95 is Lifestylez ov da Poor and Dangerous, the debut and lone LP released during the lifetime of Lamont “Big L” Coleman. Coleman was fatally shot nine times Feb. 15, 1999, in New York City in what may be a case of mistaken identity. Columbia Records released the album 20 years ago today.

A second album, The Big Picture, which included Big L’s highest-charting hit, “Flamboyant,” was recorded prior to his death, but released in 2000. Several other posthumous albums have followed since 2010.

Perhaps what Lifestylez demonstrates best was Coleman’s gift for language. While couching the 1990s East Coast-West Coast feud as flow vs. beats is reductive, it goes a long way to explaining why the likes of 2pac, Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg (as he was then known) focused on immaculate production while rappers such as The Notorious B.I.G., Nas and Big L emerged from an NYC scene that was a hotbed for hip-hop.

Coleman was a 20-year-old when Columbia Records issued Lifestylez in March 1995, but like his New York brethren, Big L showed a gift for language that defied his age.

A Harlem native, Big L channeled its grisly realities into his rhymes, much like Nasty Nas did a year earlier with Illmatic and Queensbridge. Although not his exclusive province, Big L helped mold the “horrorcore” style of absurdly violent rap that Eminem would popularize just a few years later. That’s a sound that can still be found today in the likes of shock rapper Tyler, the Creator.

L unleashes one of his most diabolical couplets in this style on “Danger Zone”:

I jumped out the Lincoln, left him stinkin’
Put his brains in the street, now you can see what he was just thinkin’
I’m chokin’ enemies ’til they start turning pale
Satan said I’m learning well, Big L’s gonna burn in hell

Coleman played to those dark impulses and fantasies, building himself as a drug-slinging, violent Lothario of the streets in Big L. “I’m known for snatchin' purses and bombin' churches,” he spits on “Da Graveyard,” which includes a cameo appearance from a young Jay Z.

One of L’s most famous lines — “I’m so ahead of my time, my parents haven’t met yet” — comes from an unforgettable freestyle session with Jay Z in 1995.

While Coleman’s flow was fantastic, it’s also a record that, at this moment, feels strangely contemporary. It’s a jazzy album, which feels like a good thing to be one week after Kendrick Lamar’s funky, jazz-influenced To Pimp a Butterfly topped the charts and reinvigorated that sound last week.

While Lifestylez endures as one of the many great albums from the fabled mid-1990s hip-hop boom, its legacy tends to be overshadowed by records which sold better or, tragically, Big L’s contemporaries who also died before their time such as Eazy-E, Big Pun, Biggie and Pac.

For my part, I’m going to remember Big L today by putting it on — spinning Lifestylez’s opener “Put it On” and letting it go from there, that is.

"Put it On"

2Pac interview weakens Kendrick Lamar's new LP

Kendrick Lamar performs in 2012 at Hove Festival in Tromøy, Norway. Lamar released his third album, To Pimp a Butterfly, earlier this week. (Courtesy photo/Tom Øverlie)

Kendrick Lamar’s widely anticipated third LP, To Pimp a Butterfly, landed earlier this week less like the winged creature in its title and more like a blue whale.

Lamar set the Spotify record for first-day streams with 9.6 million track listens and then broke it again Tuesday with 9.8 million.

Yet it's what happens in the closing six minutes of the record that may have surprised audiences the most. As “Mortal Man” fades from hip-hop into a poetry recital, Lamar is revealed to be chatting with the late, legendary rapper Tupac Shakur.

It also serves to weaken To Pimp a Butterfly (right), which is an otherwise refreshing amalgam of jazz, soul, funk and West Coast hip-hop.

The album’s closing minutes are a dialogue between K-Dot and 2Pac, fabricated from a 1994 interview with Swedish radio station P3. Lamar’s questions are edited around Pac’s answers, giving the appearance the two talk about success and what it means to be a black man in America.

Having splayed out his teen years and redemption through hip-hop and spirituality in 2012's bildungsroman good kid, m.A.A.d city, Lamar finds himself in Butterfly reflecting on the world as an adult who has left the mad city and seen the country. His fears, concerns, angers and joys on his third LP are viewed through the prism of the nation rather than the urban setting.

This time, it isn’t about Lamar's home of Compton, but America.

2Pac tells Lamar that hitting 30 is a threshold when society takes “the heart and soul out of a man, out of a black man, in this country and you don’t want to fight no more.”

Shakur even seems to be referencing things he couldn't possibly know. It’s hard to feel as though he isn’t describing the current racial climate in America when he talks about the poor eating the rich. When he speaks of a rebellion, of blacks growing “tired of grabbing s--- out the stores” to get attention, it calls to mind the reaction last year after the Michael Brown slaying in Ferguson, Missouri.

To put it another way, Pac tells Kendrick you can only push people so far before they react violently.

Lamar finishes by reciting for Pac a poem that ostensibly supplied the album’s title, but when he asks Tupac’s opinion, he gets no reply. Lamar calls Pac’s name thrice before the album abruptly stops.

Including 2Pac in the closing minutes is a timely inclusion considering Me Against the World, one of Pac’s most celebrated albums, turned 20 years old Saturday. The fact his words still resonate and still ring true two decades later is a sad commentary.

It’s a powerful interview, yet it’s inclusion weakens Butterfly, especially as its parting thoughts. My first reaction was that it bore an uncanny similarity to “An Attempt to Tip the Scales,” a nauseating track from Bright Eyes’ 2000 album Fevers and Mirrors.

Bright Eyes' track gives the appearance of an interview with the band’s singer/songwriter Conor Oberst. In the phony dialogue, Oberst puts it all in the street, detailing the record’s recurring themes and why he chose them. It spoon feeds audiences that know how to feed themselves.

Similarly, the 2Pac interview is a heavy-handed way to ram home the themes of Butterfly. It's meant to make sure listeners "got it," but it reads as insulting. It’s tedious and self-indulgent to use the record to explain itself.

My face contorts with revulsion at the mention of “An Attempt to Tip the Scales.” I’ll allow that there’s more creativity and poignancy to the “Mortal Man” interview, but the conclusion is the same, with both artists telling people how to interpret their albums.

All art, once it’s put on Spotify, hung on the wall of the Louvre, sold for e-readers on Amazon or however it's revealed, faces the same ultimate moment of truth: Once it leaves the artist’s hands, its meaning doesn’t belong solely to its creator anymore.

So although it's amusing, Lamar does his listeners a disservice by talking down to them on Butterfly, an otherwise bold, creative album that made its point just fine without fabricating an interview with a hip-hop legend.

Kendrick Lamar's "Mortal Man" (NSFW). The interview with 2Pac begins around 6:25:

Bright Eyes' "An Attempt to Tip the Scales." Interview portion begins around 2:30: