Rakim

I started listening to legendary saxophonist John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things really closely, and when I got to the part where he plays two notes at once, I completely bugged out. I was dumbfounded because you can’t play two notes at the same time. I know how to play the sax and I can tell you that it was impossible. But I couldn’t deny what I heard. He defied gravity in the same way I remembered Bruce Lee had physically—but Coltrane did it musically.

I saw that being the best meant imagining the impossible and then doing it. 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? He became my musical North Star. Coltrane wouldn’t stay within the limitations of fours bars, he’d play past the end of the bar, so I tried to write lines that didn’t stop at the end of the bar.

From his example, I wrote lines like this in “Move the Crowd”: “Standing by the speaker, suddenly I had this / fever. Was it me or either summer madness.” When I said “this” and took a pause, the listener’s mind would fill with anticipation and a little tension because I’d ended the line without concluding the thought. Before me, MCs finished the thought at the end of a line. Coltrane showed me another way.

When I sat down to write my third song, “I Know You Got Soul,” I had the sample from Bobby Byrd’s “I Know You Got Soul” all looped up, and I was thinking a lot about the Godfather of Soul. I always believed that James Brown was the first rapper. The way he talked on his records with all that attitude and ego shaped the way a lot of performers approached the mic. The way he groaned and screamed and grunted showed me how to use every part of my voice to make myself stand out on a record.

He showed me that I could communicate without using words. Those instinctive guttural sounds can really get under people’s skin. I didn’t understand half of what James was saying. It sounded so good, I’d listen anyway, which made me think it was okay if every person in the audience didn’t totally understand everything I said, as long as those people were moved by the music and the rhythm.

I recorded all the verses on Paid in Full in either two or three passes. Never more than that. On all of those songs you hear me in a single recording. I rhymed the whole verse—straight through—like a real MC should.

One of the main reasons I never felt competition from other rappers was because I was only competing with myself, which also kept me pretty humble.

There are volumes of documentation and speculation surrounding the creation, true purpose, and powers of the Pyramids of Giza and the Great Pyramid in particular. I’ve probably read most of it.

Dre and I had a common friend, so he had heard a lot of stories about me and my crew and that is what he wanted me to rhyme about. It was tough to fault him for it initially. It was the content that had driven so many of the classic albums he produced and made him millions of dollars along the way. Now he had a chance to do it with one of the most highly praised lyricists in the game and it wasn’t a stretch for him to assume I had some of those types of stories in my bag. All he had to do was turn to the photo on the back cover of Paid In Full and see a posse that included “the real” 50 Cent, the man his new artist had taken his name from, and conclude where I came from wasn’t all gossip, hype, or folklore.

Dre wanted me to make a record about that, but I wasn’t going to do it. That wasn’t who I wanted to be. I knew that we could’ve made the illest gangsta album ever, and it would’ve been a huge seller, but I was a father of three in my forties. I needed to do more with the mic than tell street stories. I wanted to expand consciously. After almost three years in LA I still hadn’t gotten a beat from Dre that I was really excited about. I made fifteen songs with Aftermath Entertainment, and I used over $300,000 in studio time, but Dre and I had made nothing that I thought reflected who I was as an artist.

Dre was a perfectionist. Dre was busy. But I wondered if part of the impasse was that after so much success Dre couldn’t risk a failure and gangsta rap was always a sure thing for him. I told Dre I was leaving. He said, “Give me a little more time.” He wasn’t ready to quit. He even offered me $250,000 to stay, but I couldn’t do it. He understood and was really cool about it—he said I could keep the songs I’d made, and we shook hands.