This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
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DAYS AFTER THE RAPPER Tupac Shakur died from gunshot wounds last month, a music video was released showing what seemed like a premonition of his death: a vision of his own murder and ascension to a juke-jointlike heaven, replete with a pearly white piano and Miles Davis as Gabriel. The 25-year-old rapper in the video, however, was not so much creating something original as he was following other performers in an emerging subgenre of hip-hop music. Call it requiem rap.
The term is not likely to turn up as a label for a separate CD bin in record stores. But it may be an apt description of a growing number of rap and rap-inspired songs that have at their core the topic of violent and premature death and the grief that follows. These days even the most casual listeners of contemporary urban music have gotten an earful of these tearful tunes.
For instance, within minutes of Mr. Shakur's death on Sept. 13, six days after he was wounded in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, hip-hop songs about death thumped across the airwaves, like funeral rites with a beat, as urban radio stations nationwide crammed their play lists with the music. Among the raps were some by Mr. Shakur himself, a self-styled gangster, or G, whose work is full of woeful odes to the premature deaths of America's young black men.
'How many brothers fell victims to streets/ Rest in peace, young niggah/ There's a heaven for a G/ Be a lie if I told you that I never thought of death' rings out the refrain to Mr. Shakur's midtempo 'Life Goes On.' Similar sentiments are heard on 'I Ain't Mad at Cha,' also taken from Mr. Shakur's quintuple-platinum CD, 'All Eyez on Me,' which was released early this year.
The latest CD by the Geto Boys, a Houston-based rap group, called 'The Resurrection' has lyrics that proclaim: 'And every morning I wake up I'm kinda glad to be alive/ 'Cause thousands of my homeboys died/ And very few died of old age/ In most cases the incident covered up the whole page.' The CD booklet also features a photograph of the group's three members lying, eyes shut, in open coffins.
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The most stunning and financially successful example of these hip-hop eulogy songs is this year's 'Tha Crossroads,' by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, the Cleveland-based rap and rhythm-and-blues group. This sensitive, sweetly expressed song about earthly loss and eternal judgment has sold two million copies. It soared to No. 1 on the singles chart two weeks after it was released in April, the fastest climb since the Beatles' 'Can't Buy Me Love' became No. 1 in 1964, according to the rap group's label, Relativity Records.
OTHERS HAVE ALSO LENT their voices to the genre. Snoop Doggy Dogg's 'Murder Was the Case' depicts him at his deathbed, struggling with the forces of good and evil within him. Lost Boyz' 'Renee' recalls the pain of losing a girlfriend as a result of a random shooting. And the megahit 'One Sweet Day,' by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, is a tribute to a lover who is 'shining down on me from heaven.'
'It's mourning music,' said Charlotte Hunter, a former publicity agent for Public Enemy and L. L. Cool J. It was she, in fact, who coined the term requiem rap. 'The hip-hop generation, much like any other generation, has its sorrow,' Ms. Hunter said. 'But for them, Mr. Death is always looming.'
Through much of the 1990's, inner-city teen-agers and young adults have been confronted with staggering death rates among their families, friends and neighbors, the causes ranging from infant mortality to AIDS to substance abuse to homicide. As a result, some elementary-school-age children plan what they will wear to their funerals; their older siblings mark their dead on memorial walls painted by graffiti artists and grow increasingly listless about their futures.
Out of this sense of oppressive mortality that many in the hip-hop generation say they face daily has come a soundtrack for their fatalism and their struggle to openly express their pain. Rap has long used death, or at least the threat of it, as a source of narrative tension. But like the fictional deaths of nameless gangsters mowed down in movies, death in early hard-core rap lyrics was frequently devoid of an examination of its real-life consequences.
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The breakthrough came three years ago with the release of 'Gangster Lean,' a rap-styled ballad -- and the only hit -- by the group D.R.S. The song was one of the first in the era of gangsta rap to shift its lyrical focus from the deadly spectacle of urban gunplay to its sorrowful aftermath.
'These kids are wrestling with forms of social evil that they see abundant in their own communities,' said Michael Eric Dyson, who is the author of 'Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture' and a Baptist minister. He explained that inner-city youth, imbued with a 'refined sense of justice,' were openly questioning why so many of them suffer; this concern, he said, is being reflected in the music.
FOR EXAMPLE, HE NOTED, THE rapper Ice Cube wondered aloud in his 1990 song -- one of the first of its type -- 'Dead Homies' why it took a funeral to give many black people their only opportunity to ride in a limousine.
Much like the biblical prophets of old, Mr. Dyson said, the voices of the hip-hop generation are searching for answers to the fundamental questions of life and death and redemption. In the process, he said, rap artists who insist upon lyrically spotlighting premature death are challenging the central illusion of popular culture: eternal youth.
'So much of pop culture is about delaying death's inevitability,' he said. The hip-hop generation's aggressive examination of death, often turning to religious language and symbols, is, he added, 'becoming the rhetorical cord that binds generations divided by differences of belief and cultural expression.'
At 33, Ms. Hunter is older than the rappers she once promoted, but she can attest to the music's ability to reach across generations. She said that when word came to her that her mother, who had been ill, had died, she was at her home in Brooklyn listening to 'Tha Crossroads.' Later, when she saw the video of the song, Ms. Hunter recalled: 'I was moved to tears. It is so touching.'
The video opens with a young man's funeral and a gospel choir singing, 'Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep' and then dissolves into a series of scenes that begin with joy and end with the shadow of death. In the video, the Grim Reaper is stylishly refashioned as a hulking black man with a shaved head who wears dark glasses and a full-length, black leather coat. He stalks the neighborhood -- from the maternity ward to a game of checkers being played by an old man and his young nephew on a front porch -- collecting souls.
1st Of Tha Month Lyrics
Near the video's conclusion, a long trail of souls climb a mountaintop to eternity. Electronically inserted into the procession is the image of Eazy-E, the 31-year-old rapper and mentor to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony who died last year of complications from AIDS.
Spoken in a haunting falsetto, the group raps: 'Can somebody, anybody tell me why we die? We die?/ I don't wanna die.'
'Crossroads' as written by and Robert/clapton Johnson....
I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.
I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.
Asked the Lord above for mercy, 'Save me if you please.'
I went down to the crossroads, tried to flag a ride.
I went down to the crossroads, tried to flag a ride.
Nobody seemed to know me, everybody passed me by.
I'm going down to Rosedale, take my rider by my side.
I'm going down to Rosedale, take my rider by my side.
You can still barrel house, baby, on the riverside.
You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown.
You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown.
And I'm standing at the crossroads, believe I'm sinking down.
I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.
Asked the Lord above for mercy, 'Save me if you please.'
I went down to the crossroads, tried to flag a ride.
I went down to the crossroads, tried to flag a ride.
Nobody seemed to know me, everybody passed me by.
I'm going down to Rosedale, take my rider by my side.
I'm going down to Rosedale, take my rider by my side.
You can still barrel house, baby, on the riverside.
You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown.
You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown.
And I'm standing at the crossroads, believe I'm sinking down.
Lyrics submitted by PJ10, edited by HomerNoodleman
'Crossroads' as written by Robert Johnson Eric Patrick Clapton
Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, THE BICYCLE MUSIC COMPANY
Lyrics powered by LyricFind
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This is part of Complex's The 1996 Project: Looking Back at the Year Hip-Hop Embraced Success.
It was at a—*groan*—crossroads in their career when Bone Thugs-n-Harmony released their most famous song.
But let’s rewind a bit. My initial recollection of Bone is from the summer of 1994, when “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” first landed on the Box, the long-gone video channel that allowed people to call a 1-900 number to request songs. And those dedicated Box viewers, from all over the country, requested Bone Thugs—a lot.
But who the eff were these guys, anyway? Trapped in an East Coast bubble, my friends and I viewed the group as a total curiosity—a weird joke, even, with their braids and blowouts and that strange sing-songy style that nobody had ever heard before (sorry, Freestyle Fellowship fans). On the Box, the “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” video would pop up in between “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” and “I Got Cha Opin,” and we’d all groan and cringe and crack jokes at the TV. Remember, this is months after Illmatic dropped, when singing was considered antithetical to “real hip-hop” and the battle lines between rap and non-rap were fully drawn.
The following year, as those lines began to blur, a new division consumed hip-hop. With East-West tensions heating up, the Cleveland boys occupied, literally and figuratively, the hazy middle. (It’s no mistake that Bone was one of the very few to record with both Biggie and 2Pac while they were still alive.) In July of 1995, Bone dropped their full-length debut, E. 1999 Eternal, which sold an impressive 300,000 copies in its first week. In fact it was “1st of tha Month,” the ode to welfare checks that was the album’s first single, that turned me into a fan. It was trademark Bone: joy and pathos and celebration and melancholy all wrapped up in a melodic stew that, while pleasing to the ear, had a dash of menace.
With East-West tensions heating up, the Cleveland boys occupied, literally and figuratively, the hazy middle.
But even if Bone now had commercial success, to the general Hip-Hop Caucus (read: New York), they remained a novelty act. (Let’s not forget the group’s early obsession with ouija boards, backwards vocals, and vaguely Satanic iconography.) I still remember the crowd reaction (or lack thereof) when Bone took the stage at Madison Square Garden during the infamous 1995 Source Awards, one month after E. 1999’s release. The MSG audience was frozen like my friends and I watching the Box: Who the eff are these guys?
If our story ended here, then Bone’s enduring legacy would likely play out the same as any regional act that had a taste of national fame—something akin to an 8Ball & MJG. In other words, a perfectly acceptable, solid rap career.
But now we reach “Tha Crossroads.” As Bone devotees know, the version of the song that went worldwide didn’t appear on the original LP—instead, it is technically a remix (and, to hear hardcore fans tell it, an inferior version) of the album cut “Crossroad,” for which DJ U-Neek memorably samples the theme of a Sega Genesis game. “Crossroad” was a dedication to a fallen friend named Wally, the group’s neighborhood muscle who was killed before they rose to fame. It’s a good song but hardly one you’d pick to transcend the genre.
As with Bone’s initial origin story, Eazy-E’s shadow looms large on the remix. It was E who famously discovered Bone in 1993; it was his death, two years later, that spurred them on to make the song that turned them into global stars. Toward the end of recording E. 1999, Bone dealt with the crushing losses of not only their mentor but also close family members—Wish’s uncle and Krayzie’s cousin among them. Thus inspired, Bone returned to the studio to record an updated version of their in-memoriam song, profanity-free and over a catchier U-Neek beat (this time sampling the Isley Brothers).
![Tha Crossroads Lyrics Meaning Tha Crossroads Lyrics Meaning](/uploads/1/2/3/7/123710189/970680715.jpg)
“Tha Crossroads” was released on April 23, 1996 (and later added to reissues of E. 1999 Eternal). It was an immediate hit, debuting at No. 2 on the Billboard 100, then a record for a rap single. At the time, MTV News labeled the song “a major departure for Bone Thugs”; with the benefit of history, I’d call it less a “departure” and more a crystallization of the elements (you know, thugs and harmony) that made them great in the first place. “Tha Crossroads” is the perfect marriage of content and form; in subject and tone, it was the ideal vehicle to introduce Bone’s style of rapping to the world. Movie fans talk about certain roles that an actor was “born to play.” In that sense, Bone Thugs was born to make “Tha Crossroads.”
If the bulk of the lyrics, in typical Bone fashion, was largely unintelligible (save, of course: “I miss my Uncle Charles, y’all”), the sentiment within was easily relatable —as Layzie later noted, succinctly: “Everybody go through death.” The video, capturing that universality, played an integral role in the song’s commercial rise. It starts, as in Bone’s first video, with female vocals, in this case a rendition of the spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep” by Tre’ (who were later prominent in Bone’s underrated Mo Thugs projects).
From there, each verse is accompanied by vignettes featuring an ominous Grim Reaper figure who claims his victims by turning their eyeballs black. By the end, the Reaper has sprouted wings to lead his new angels (and a digitized Eazy) to salvation. Emotional stuff, and enough to earn Bone Thugs five VMA nominations (though no awards) and a spot on the VMA stage, just over a year after their Source Awards performance. Suffice to say, the Radio City crowd was much more hospitable. It has always been Wish Bone’s simple, plaintive line at the end of “Tha Crossroads” that stuck with me: “I don’t wanna die,” he sings, an about-face from the era’s usual nihilism. The song certainly didn’t die, holding down the No. 1 Billboard spot for eight weeks, the eighth rap song to ever reach the top spot—and definitely the first to actually deserve it. It went on to go platinum twice over, win the group a Grammy, and, in the long run, carve out a new lane for Bone: radio-friendly, inspirational hip-hop, as evidenced by the likes of subsequent collaborations with Phil Collins and Akon.
Eventually—since comedy is tragedy plus time—“Tha Crossroads” become fodder for standup routines and sketch bits. Sad but not sappy, it’s still the best hip-hop R.I.P. song ever (edging out “T.R.O.Y.” and crushing Puff’s maudlin, ghostwritten Biggie tribute), and if you read the dedications in the video’s YouTube comments, it’s as relevant now as it was 20 years ago.
So, then, who the eff are these guys? Legends.
Want more from The 1996 Project? Visit the links below.
'Talkin’ ’Bout Houston: Bun B and ESG Remember the Year the City Broke Out'
'Back Issues: The Real Story Behind ‘VIBE’’s East vs. West Cover'
'The Best Rap Songs of 1996'
'Talkin’ ’Bout Houston: Bun B and ESG Remember the Year the City Broke Out'
'Back Issues: The Real Story Behind ‘VIBE’’s East vs. West Cover'
'The Best Rap Songs of 1996'