My Mom's Basement - EPISODE 48 - ’NO WAY OUT’ WITH RONE

Episode Date: February 17, 2020

Robbie is kicking off a new series on the show this week where his friends will select an album (ANY album they want) for him to check out and study up on, and then they’ll be looking back into some of the history behind it while sharing their thoughts on the record track-by-track. Enjoy!You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/mymomsbasement

Hey, My Mom's Basement listeners. You can find our episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. You're a Swiss Army man, as they say. Rowan? Many years in the Swiss Army, and I love my time there. I made a lot of lasting commitments and friendships in the Swiss Army that I'll never forget. I'll never forget at all. Appreciate it, man. What an intro. You're a top intro guy. I've always said that. I don't know. I always start strong and then I don't know where I'm going. It's the Michael Scott thing. It's fun to know.

It's like you can know a couple of people's accomplishments, but when you get to anybody's like fifth and sixth accomplishments, it's like nobody even – like if you have that many accomplishments, you're kind of an asshole. Like what would we call us – like your videos? What are you in those? Hosts? Because it's easy to call you a barstool blogger. That's what we all are.

Right. But as far as like videos go, we're a video personality. I find personality is a tough thing to say, to call yourself. Producer, maybe, I don't know. But that's also like more professional. You're in front of the camera, too. In front of the camera, too. I don't know, dude. I don't know professional. But like you're in front of the camera too. In front of the camera too. I don't know, dude.

I don't know, man. We all got – it's hard to describe this job. We always go with blogger, but that doesn't really do it. When you were a kid, did you – do you know exactly what you wanted to be when you grew up? No, not really because I had like a few things. I watched the Revenge of the Sith, which is episode three. I watched the behind-the-scenes documentary for that movie. And I was like, oh my god, I was like oh my god i want to make movies definitely want to make movies and then it changed to like i want to be a pro wrestler to it was pretty much between those

two i guess now that i'm thinking about it and then i guess barstool came into the equation when i was like 13 and i started sending job applications in. So in a way, Barstool became that thing. That's fucking crazy. But yeah, it wound up being a job that like – I say that to say that Barstool wound up being a job that didn't exist. Oh, no. Yeah. For me, when I was a little kid, it sort of did. Kind of.

Not that little. You're wise beyond your years regardless. But we blossomed into interesting jobs over here that still don't have great titles and if you're a kid today rockstar was another one too and barstool affords us that opportunity you kind of have been able to do everything yeah we're not really professional wrestling i got super kicked that was like one of my first videos that's true yeah can you get into the wrestling world more? Why don't you develop a relationship with Vince McMahon the way you have with Dana White? Because Vince McMahon is—

Bad? He's so out of touch that, like, he—I think Vince would hate me. Really? I've said really bad things about Vince, too. I've said, like, basically things as bad as you could possibly say about another human being. Do you want to say them again? I've said, like, in the past, and I'm not saying this now. I might be saying this now, but, like, don't, you know, don't

hold me against anything. I'm just saying this to say, of course, wrestling will be probably much better once he passes away. Really? But that's probably like, that's what most people think. Who's going to take over? Cody Rhodes? Cody Rhodes on one side and the WWE side would be Triple H. And Triple H has been running NXT, their quote-unquote developmental system, for six years now. And fans pretty much haven't had a single complaint in six years. About all of NXT? Yeah.

It's known as one of the best pure wrestling products in the entire world. But Vince won't pass down the company until he dies. And he's like Jerry Jones kind of. Yeah. And he does not know what he's doing. He's very much the baseball thing where like he doesn't want to accept that wrestling is wrestling. Wrestling is a word that's banned on television. You'll never hear that word said in the WWE.

What? Vince hates wrestling. He says like explicitly like, oh, we're not a wrestling company. We're a movie company. We make movies. We tell stories. And wrestling is a medium. It's like, bro. we're not a wrestling company. We're a movie company. We make movies. We tell stories. And wrestling is a medium. What does WWG stand for again? World Wrestling Entertainment.

Huh. I don't know much about the field, but it almost seems like if the NFL stops saying that they play football, it might just be ignoring that they're just playing football. That's what people don't like. But that's a whole can of worms that we don't have to get into. Dude, then just link up with Cody Rhodes then. F it. Yeah, yeah.

Go over to AEW. I am with AEW. Fuck yeah. Yeah, I'm with AEW as well. But also, I like Triple H. Like, I'm with NXT. I'm just like... Well, which one of them is going to let you fulfill your dream of being a wrestler, though?

Cody. Cody probably more likely. Yeah, bro. That's what probably more likely. Yeah, bro. That's what I'm saying. I might have to just fuck the WWE. Just start cutting your forehead up.

Start slicing your shit up. The reason why I asked you to be on this podcast today, I've had this idea for a while where I think it would be fun

to grab friends, people in the office, people that I don't know, and have them pick a single album, any album. And it could be an album they love, could be an album they hate, could be an album they know, could be an album they don't know. And bring it to me. I'll listen to it.

We'll listen to it together, and we'll do a podcast about it, track by track, talking about the whole thing. You are one of the most musically inclined people in the company, if not the most musically inclined. So I company, if not the most musically inclined. Thank you. Very nice of you to say. So I said, why don't you kick us off? Pick an album for us, and you have selected one.

Do you remember what your first album that you owned was? I think it was a greatest hits album called You Wanted the Best, You Got the Best. And it's a Kiss Greatest Hits album. Did you buy it on Infomercial? No. It was like a scrolling songs written in white lettering and then we'll come up in yellow.

We play in the one in yellow. No, it was passed down from my brother. So that was like 99% of my first CDs were, and my brother would make me mixtapes because iTunes was around when I was a fucking kid. Like, kid kid. So he would make me tapes called Robbie's Rock

and it would just be like here's what you got to know two songs from Motley two songs from Guns two songs from Kiss two songs from Twisted Sister what a sick older brother dude it was awesome and he eventually it started getting like heavier so by Robbie's Rock 3 we were into like grunge and new metal and he was writing fake track lists on the front of them so my mom didn't know i was listening to slipknot it was a whole thing that's sick what i mean that's a crash course in music that everyone could use definitely it was like a lot of kids got that like kids my age got that through guitar hero that introduced a lot of kids to like rock and roll right i sort of got that right beforehand through those mixes yeah i didn't have that at all. I didn't really have anyone guiding my musical taste. I remember the first three albums that I bought

were pretty much all around the same time. One was an Adam Sandler album I bought from somebody else in my school for $4. And I just thought Adam Sandler was funny at the time. He had an album, and I had $4. Were these CDs or cassettes? This is a CD. You and my brother are near the same age, and I know he was a cassette guy.

He was buying arrows for the cassettes. I didn't have a ton of cassettes. I think I was a little bit after cassettes, at least when I was buying music. The other one I bought at the same time as the album that we're going to discuss. I bought River of Dreams by Billy Joel. It was one of the first ones that I owned. As a small child, you went with Joel. I think I was in fourth grade.

I think I was in like maybe third grade. I think I was in fourth grade when I bought the Adam Sandler one, fourth grade when I bought the Billy Joel one, and fourth grade when I bought No Way Out by Puff Daddy and the family. I think a couple things drew me to it, first of all. Puff Daddy, pretty cool name. Awesome name. As a fourth grader,

there's not fucking many cooler names than that. No, the best of his names, by the way. And this album is just full of fucking samples. It has a ton of samples. I didn't know that at the time, but I had heard another song just based on what my parents had been playing around the house.

And at our fourth grade party, we had some kind of party or something. Someone put on a song, and I tried to sing along with the song. And I sung the wrong song. The song I sung was this one. I sung, I'll Be Watching You when the chorus came on. But really, the song that they were playing was a song called I'll Be Missing You, which is on this album. And that was the first song I had heard from the album. And so automatically, I had an affinity towards that song.

The sample was familiar. It was like a cool song. It was like the cool kids in class were playing it. You know what I mean? There was something cool about it. So I had to find out what that song was, found out what the song was, found out that it was Puff Daddy who was on the song, had to get the album. It was a no-brainer. So I bought the album, No Way Out, at the Sam Goody on Lancaster Ave.

It was probably like fucking March or some shit like that. I had just found out who Biggie Smalls was a year before when I was in third grade, and I found out who he was pretty much when he died. It was just like, did you hear this guy Biggie Smalls died? And I didn't even know. A classmate of mine, Michael Flowers, told me at my locker that Biggie Smalls had died. But this album features Biggie Smalls in a big way. A lot of it, yeah.

Biggie has always been one of my top couple rappers for a long time. He was like my number one rapper of all time. And this album was kind of my introduction to his work. And the album is pretty much, I didn't realize it until I listened to it again recently, but even just right away the album is like about him and about his death and about

he's the first voice you hear other than the intro there's like a ditty intro but then on Victory he's the first voice you hear that was like one of my first notes about it that it's so Biggie that it almost feels like a Biggie album right it does feel like a Biggie album and Right. It does feel like a Biggie album. And it not only does it feature Biggie, it features a lot of Puffy,

but then it features, like, The Lox, who is Jadakiss. Mace, right, who is, like, Biggie's protege. Right. Mace is on the album a bunch. I think Lil' Kim is on the album a bunch. There's just his wife's on the album a bunch. There's just – His wife's on the album too. What's her name?

Faith Evans. Faith Evans. Faith Evans was on the album a bunch. The entire album is just – it's full of – I mean there's a lot of classics on this album. There's a lot of classics. So you got to listen to it. Did you know anything about this album? Did you know any of the songs?

Not really. I knew No Way Out was Diddy's debut album. I don't know why. I just knew that was the name of his first album. I didn't realize that this was an album that – I didn't even look at the date. When I started listening to it, I was like, man, they're really like – death is a big theme here. I didn't realize this came out after Biggie died. So I didn't even – I didn't know that Puff Daddy wasn't really a solo artist until after Biggie.

What was his reputation before then? Just a producer? Yeah, he was like the – he was the guy who got Biggie hot, but he was the one who was dancing in all the videos. Remember there's that clip where Snoop – there was like the big East Coast, West Coast song. I'm sorry, the big East Coast, West Coast beef or whatever. Yes. East Coast, West Coast song. I'm sorry, the big East Coast, West Coast beef or whatever. Yes. And they went on stage at like the Source Awards.

And it was like, if you don't want your producer like dancing in the songs, dancing in the videos. That was about Puff Daddy. That was about Puff Daddy. Yeah, he was just in the back. He just was dancing. He was just like, he would give it like a flavor. Like Biggie needed like somebody to dance alongside him. Plus he had like a cutthroat business mentality. He just was like a savage.

Like he was just going to make shit shit. So I guess that's a good place to go because my real first exposure to this album, I've known the I'll Be Missing You song from hearing it growing up. It's such a famous song that I'll hear it, but I didn't know specifically about it. I didn't know it was a song that came out where they got the police involved and they had Sting do it with them in tribute to Biggie. But I knew that classic performance they did. I think it was at the VMAs because I had tweeted about it before. Puff Daddy Dancing is so over the top and absurd for the song that it is, like a tribute to Biggie, that it feels like it's almost like dancing on his grave.

And I tweeted that and people were pissed. They were like, don't disrespect that song. Don't disrespect that album. And this is the album that it is. Yeah, so we're here to give it a bunch of respect. So you're doing the opposite of disrespect. Totally. We're here to go track by track.

We're going to go through the whole thing. Love it. Another thing that's really interesting about this song, and it's funny that you mentioned the sting thing about this entire album really, is that there are just so many fucking samples. This is like the heyday of like, you just take a sample and pretty much flip it. Like Biggie's biggest song or one of his biggest songs was Juicy, which has a sample of a Juicy Fruit gum commercial. All this shit is fucking sampled. When did that start happening?

Do you know? Was that a 90s thing? Was that like a heavy 90s thing? I guess so. I think as music technology kind of progressed, they were able to kind of scoop samples. But I'm sure there are people who have like a much deeper knowledge of this. I don't want to speak out of class about sampling.

Sure, like the original mix masters were taking shit and putting it on. Right, yeah. DJs, I mean, a lot of rap has to have come a lot from sampling so this is for that reason like a super hip-hop album but because of that you like songs from people that you don't know that you like this samples stuff from uh stevie wonder diana ross uh, Roberta Flack. David Bowie, which blew my mind the first time I heard it. We'll talk about it when we get to it. There's just so much. There's just so much that they draw from on this album.

So it might like people at the time, I even remember like I was reading Newsweek, and there was a letter to the editor, and it was like, rap is just like when you guys wrote that article about rap, you forgot that the C is silent. Oh, yeah, of course. It was just a very – rap isn't musical was kind of the refrain that I was getting at that time, or it's lazy or it's basic or whatever. But the music that's referenced on this album is like the best music of all time yeah by the best artists to that point this was this album was up for a bunch of grammys when it was against the wu-tang and that's where the whole odb thing came from where odb did the kanye before

the kanye he got up on stage and he said wu-tang's for the children talking about this album none of the rap awards i didn't realize this till i read it last night none of the rap awards on the that year's grammys were televised so people didn't even see that in real time or people did because it was during someone else's acceptance people didn't see the awards that the wu-tang had lost oh so like rap was getting no shine at all at this time not even on television and like you said they're going through all of this they're taking samples from everywhere that's where the rocky vibes come from and a little fun fact as well jay-z listens to this song before every show because he says when biggie comes in it gives gives him those rocky

vibes and he's like this is the song that hypes me up to go on stage every night but the way that that is so different from that opening track it's like uh it just gets you so fucking fired up yeah there's something about it's the perfect and it's biggie's voice i think biggie coming in with the one one you're just like oh fuck yeah uh and this song is uh it also features buster rhymes like who we yeah who we who we left yeah which is almost shocking because i wrote down buster rhymes like he's not going a million miles an hour he's just screaming he's screaming his head off but really slowly it's so fucking sick bro yeah it's just raw and yeah i don't know how uh how well i mean i i assume that those guys were pretty close with one another buster rhymes from uh flatbush, Biggie from the – obviously from Brooklyn, but just – I don't know.

It's just – it's crazy that those two dudes are on the album and that they opened it up. The whole list, like even the Jay-Z stuff. Jay-Z and Biggie, I didn't realize were only on three songs ever together. So to get two of them here is pretty awesome. Oh, I didn't realize that. Two of them, just one. Or is it just the one with, might just be Young Jeeves.

Yeah, it is. Okay, so Victory starts the shit off in a crazy way. As good as an opening track as you could ever ask for on an album, I would say. And the credited producer of that is a guy named Stevie J. Do you know who Stevie J is? I do not.

You've never even heard of Stevie J? Never. Stevie J, a lot of people know him from love and hip-hop. Does this guy ring a bell at all? There's like the Stevie J face. It's pretty much like a meme. Not really. much like a meme he was uh not really he but i mean people now associate him as just like this like i guess i don't know player lothario i don't know however you want to call it he just

fucks a lot of a lot of uh women but uh he was that lothario a lothario yeah is that a term for a player yeah lothario your vocab never ceases to amaze me. Lothario, a man who behaves selfishly and irresponsibly in his sexual relationships with women. I guess he's the main character of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605. So Stevie J, he's just another name that's on this album that has a fucking million names on it. But the next song on this album – Hold on. Before we even move on, two more notes. This is the last song Biggie ever recorded just a few days before he got shot.

Is that true? I thought that was interesting. That's crazy. And I love that Biggie shouts out how well Jurassic Park did at the box office in this song. What is he – what's the exact line that he says? He says, like, I'm making money like Jurassic. And then he hits something park and he turns park into something. Incredible.

Like he just was at the top of his game. Just the fact that he was – the way that he was rapping at that time, just a fucking – devastating. It's just so crazy that he died. Like he was just at the very, very top of his game. So he also had a posthumous album of his own. How did they decide like which songs and which unreleased tracks they were going to put on Diddy's and which one they were going to give to Biggie himself? I bet Diddy just said, I want these ones. Don't you think?

No, probably. He was just like, I want to make this – Because he was Biggie's producer on pretty much everything right uh i think i mean he probably had the files himself on this album yeah he he i mean it's he produced everything but it's his album so i don't know if like he he was in control and i think that if he wanted to do that that he could do that pretty much at the top of the label at that point especially with biggie now gone the the label was probably like, okay, you're our new star. You're our new A1.

It's – yeah. He can do whatever he wanted at that time, and I think that this is what he wanted to do. And I know that you said some – I don't know. You said like it looked like he was dancing on his grave. Some people thought that Biggie was killed by Puffy. I know that you said some – I don't know. You said it looked like he was dancing on his grave. Some people thought that Biggie was killed by Puffy. I know that, yeah. You know what I mean? That's like a common theme.

I don't know enough to make up my decision one way or the other. Well, even reading about this album last night, I saw that there's heavy ghostwriting accusations. A lot of people think some of Diddy's verses and some of even the Black Rob verse is just unreleased, unused, biggie stuff that they just went over and copied his flow. Bro, there's no way that Puff Daddy was writing his own raps. Really? No fucking way. I didn't know that. I don't know the history. I don't know the aura. I don't know the stigma. I think that he's just the type type of guy that had like some star power and he just would have people write for him.

Okay. Same with like how Kanye is now. Yeah. I don't think Kanye is writing a lot of his own raps. Maybe he's writing some of them. She said, can we get married at the mall? Someone else wrote that for him. Shit is bad. I was going to say, but the new Kanye stuff is so bad that it makes me think he is writing it himself because he's so out there crazy with the church stuff.

I think that for ghostwriting, I think that you could give someone a really good verse and they could still make it sound bad. Interesting. I think that, yeah, it doesn't't necessarily matter but I don't think that Diddy was really writing any of his own shit Biggie was probably writing some of it I think Mace was probably writing some of it I bet like there's on the writing

credits of this song I mean like he's listed as a writer on pretty much every song but there's multiple writers on every song. And there's really only two or three songs in this entire album without heavy features, which is why it's credited to Puff Daddy and the family. And the family. Yeah.

And the cover of the album is the entire family. It's a great cover. It's almost like a Western-type photo. Right, like a sepia-toned. Yeah, it looks like you went to a Western town and paid $25 to dress up in a musty old costume and take pictures. But the next song features just another huge fucking sample. Huge. It's massive. You could tell what's written by Mace because of how Mace raps.

And how Diddy raps when he raps on stuff that's written by Mace is a very specific flow. Mace is on this song, and Mace has a flow that's so distinct that even today, Drake will do something in the Mace flow. And it's like you know that it's the Mace flow. Interesting. I knew almost nothing about Mace coming into this. I read up on him a little bit last night but i'm very unfamiliar let me see let me let me uh what song did drake use the mace flow on he he did it on uh worst behavior the hoo-ha who's not

that is just a classic flow that he started pretty much around that time. Did he use the Mace flow? Mace used the Mace flow. Mace stopped using the Mace flow. Then he came back with Welcome Back, the KFC radio song that they always play with the Mace flow again. It was just – He stopped using his own flow? He stopped rapping, no, but he stopped rapping.

Oh, okay. He came back it was like he stopped rapping no but he stopped okay he came back i thought he i thought he continued rapping was like i'm using different flows and people were like we're not with it yeah like you have to do the mace flow you're not mace unless you're doing the mace flow but dude so this is a good time to talk about the difference between a sample and an interpolation yeah what do you what do you know about both of those things? So I know an interpolation is pretty much when you just use what it is, correct? Use like the melody. Okay. You like sing something in that melody.

I know that's what they used. They used the In Bloom. They interpolated In Bloom for Lil Nas X's Panini. Oh, okay. For the chorus of it. They interpolated Dave Grohl's drum part. And that's the same melody. So I think, so this song, Been Around the World, is an interpolation of a song called

All Around the World by Lisa Stansfield. He's Frankensteining songs. He was Frankensteining songs together. He said, I like this song from this night, or this hook from this 1989 song, but I also like this Let's Dance sample dance sample so i'm gonna marry the two together have mace rap on it and take mace's flow and then put it on my album you know who is the best at doing that in metal and rock and roll is nicky six nicky six does that a lot it's like it's like a

cop-out of plagiarism it's like plag plagiarism with credit. Yeah, and whoever you're interpolating from has to sign off on it. And you pay them. Yeah. They get paid on it. True. And if you don't pay them, they sue you, and then they get paid even more. Definitely. So it's a fair way to plagiarize.

And so I wonder what Puff Daddy was doing at this time to clear all these samples, to get all these songs and to clear all these samples. I don't know. Was he just paying people out of pocket? Was there maybe some type of connection within the record label? This came out on Bad Boy Artista, so I doubt that Bad Boy owned all these catalogs. No way.

There must have been some type of deal that was cooked up to get all these samples, but it's truly an astounding amount of samples, and we'll get into a lot more of just how much they're stealing. I don't know. I'm trying to think of a polite way to say it. The next song is called What You Gonna Do. Do we want to touch on the Mad Rapper skit that has been around the world? Yeah, it's

so weird the skits on this album are very weird and there's like one in particular that is so uncomfortably strange it's cringeworthy this one yeah it just seems like they were attacking them on there was just this was a time when albums thought they needed skits i think and maybe i could be completely off base but is it the wu-tang effect of their skits were so funny the torture skits and shit that everyone is like we could be funny but i think every i mean yeah people it's like a way to show your personality on the record or whatever but it's like when the opening the no way out intro it's not exactly a skit but it has a vibe of a skit where it's like it's spoken word like it's not lyrical monologue almost yeah it's a monologue and so it's like you have that skit where it's like it's spoken word. It's not lyrical. It's a monologue almost.

Yeah, it's a monologue. And so it's like you have that skit at the – not skit, but like that monologue at the beginning, and then you jump into this kind of trying to be funny, show the personality. I don't know. It seems like this was recorded, and they just left that skit in there. It doesn't really seem like it advances the story of the album or anything but almost like cheapens it yeah it's weird um you don't really i don't know i don't really get

to that part of the the song a lot i think you hear been around the world and you don't really hear the the tell them why you mad part of it but i don't know i'm glad you brought that up it was just a time when you just like i don don't know, you needed skits. You get your local comedian to come on. There's like a thing that came with albums. This is a 17-track album, by the way. It's a long one. And that skit doesn't even count as a track.

No. Which is crazy as well. In and of itself, you can't even skip that shit. And there are like intros and interludes that do count as tracks. It's wild. The next song is What You Gonna Do. Forgettable, honestly. This is like

a take on somebody's gonna die it's like a it's like puff daddy's take on biggie's somebody's gonna die are there no samples on this one maybe why this song oh the sample's a song called it's over by eddie holman um i don't know maybe they they should have put more samples on this song this one's probably like we're to try and produce this ourselves. And also, you just had two fucking heat rocks. They probably thought we need a 17-song album. It was a different time. Another thing, though, the original name of the album comes from this song.

It's the first lyric spoken. It's a hell up in Harlem was the original album name. Really? That's what this No Way Out was supposed to be? Yep. Was that supposed to be the name of the Biggie album? Or like, was Biggie going to have an album called that? No, I think it just said on Genius that No Way Out was originally titled It's a Hell Up in Harlem.

Oh, got it, got it. But the next song features Lil' Kim. Yeah. Who Biggie fucked. Yeah, his mistress. He used to fuck her. Did you ever watch the Biggie fucked. Yeah, his mistress. He used to fuck her. Did you ever watch the Biggie Smalls movie? Notorious?

Notorious, yeah. I think when it came out, but I don't really remember much of it. They did a decent job of telling the story for people who didn't get to follow it all in just kind of an incessant way, but yeah, they fucked. Yeah, I think that's pretty open too, right?

Yeah, they fucked. It's on the Wikipedia page for this. It's like it features the family, his wife, Faith Evans, his mistress, Lil' Kim, his brother. It really is a family affair, huh? Diddy and somebody else's family. But Lil' Kim at the time, there was rumors that she had sucked so much dick that she had to get her stomach pumped. One of the most prevalent cafeteria rumors of all time. That's a tough rumor about you.

You don't want that rumor. It's tough. I don't think that's really true. Semen is biodegradable. Soluble within all humans. I don't really think that's going to hurt you like that. Just a classic song. Those lyrics,

they didn't do anything. It's a party song. That part is nice yeah just i guess a little dance picks the vibe up and uh it has a little taste of stevie wonder in it stevie wonder played the drums on a lot of his own tracks really i never knew that before he played the drums on superstition and i looked up stevie wonder drum solos and there's some fucking crazy videos of this guy going off on the drums no he definitely went the fuck off went the fuck off on the drums because he could see. Yeah, I don't believe that. No, I don't believe that.

He's blind. You don't believe it? You honestly don't? I honestly, I think it's the prestige, you know, where there's that old man and they're like the greatest trick the old man ever pulled. He was convinced in the world that he was an old man. I think Stevie Wonder, I respect the shit out of him, but I'm on to him. That's so fucking funny. That's so fucked up.

There's a video of him catching a microphone that falls in front of him. How could he see it? Yeah, I mean, but have you ever like caught something without looking at it? I feel like you could kind of like sense something's about to fall. Maybe, and it's also the daredevil thing

where you take one sense away, the others are heightened. Yeah, I don are heightened. Yeah. I don't know. I can't call whether I believe it or not. I'd like to get him in here and interrogate him. Put a hot lamp in his face, see if his eyes squint. Yeah. But what if they're just sensitive to light, though?

I don't know, man. I don't know how blindness works. Yeah, fuck him. The onus of the fucking truth is on him, not on us. Then we have another interlude after this. Yeah, a long one. If I Should Die Tonight featuring Carl Thomas. This interlude right here. And do you know where you're going to?

These songs are like six-minute songs, five-minute, 26 seconds. Another one is five-minute, 26 seconds. Five minutes, eight seconds six minutes 37 seconds there's long songs super long songs and i'm a huge fan of long songs i'm like really if you could put a song in that six to seven minute range i'm so in for it but it's a fine line you gotta walk and it's like a small target you better make sure it's worth the seven minutes and i feel like a lot of these songs it would get to like the the 6 30 point you know or the 5 30 point you're like oh geez i'm ready can we just yeah let's get on to the next song a lot of this album i wrote down like in a lot of

my notes like every song is almost too too long too long yeah yeah too low and is that just like do we have just dumb brains right now there's a moment in do you know that i need to play because it's it's a good musical moment but it's just, I can't believe this made the final cut of a Puff Daddy record. And they're saying, do you know where you're going to? Bro, do you guys know where you're going to making this song? Because it seems like it has no point. The Roots' last album, most recent album, was right before their manager died. And the whole album, he produced it,

and it had like a feel of death just kind of hanging over it, which gives songs like a discomfort. But that album I know was about death. I know that it was about that. Bowie's last album was very much about his own death that he knew was coming. Nobody else did. Black Star, if you want to listen to a fucking, one of those heavy albums, it's kind of a shorter one,

but it's like, oh shit, this guy knew he was going and recorded a goodbye album. And does it, what do the songs feel like? Like, like a little uneasy, a little uncomfortable, a little like this guy's talking about something he knew was going to happen and we didn't know it was going to happen, that we were devastated by, we were shocked by, and he by and he was you know sort of sort of okay with it

there's a song i think it's like i think he opens one of his tracks on that album with like hello from heaven or something like it's so blatantly yeah it's weird it's just you're listening to this after i'm dead with this album i mean i don't want to not give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that that it wasn't intentional so maybe like the discomfort that you kind of feel with some of the stuff or uh is is in response to that that that could be a part of it um the next song is young g's featuring jay-z yeah the notorious big and jay-z It's just like I don't know if it's like his persona. Like why is his – is it the way his mouth is shaped?

Is it like was he conditioned to have a deeper voice as a child? Do you think people like us look at Biggie's voice and body of work way differently than people that say we're around for the entire thing? People that kind of look at Biggie as this larger-than-life figure never got to witness at his prime i mean i don't i don't know i didn't definitely didn't get to appreciate him at his prime but at the same time like is he definitely larger to people he's larger than life to me for sure yeah no definitely for sure especially after a song like by the way if you're hearing clicks that's that's the heating at barstool Sports HQ that clicks in in these podcast rooms. It's not a sample. This isn't something Diddy paid for. We're sampling all Biz Pete. Right, exactly.

That motherfucker. Next up we have I Love You Baby featuring Black Rob. What? This motherfucker. He doesn't know what I'm – You don't know about hip-hop, bro. You haven't heard every song that i've heard uh this was a time when people would just have a a sample that had like a word in it and they would write the whole verse around

like the whoa like that sample probably just had whoa in it and then they just uh they just wrote the entire shit around it but then black rob was just on this song before whoa i don't want to say i like the filler but as long as it's not like a skip track yeah put it in there what do you mean a skip track like you flat out skip it yeah yeah and none of these are skip tracks to you i mean this one might be a skip track yeah some of these are skip tracks i think i wrote down a few of them that were it almost is like they set this album up with tent pole songs and the next song that we're about to get to is a huge tentpole song it's like maybe i don't know if it's uh the biggest song on the album maybe no you don't think so no definitely

i'll be missing you okay well this one is uh i would say this is two though this is number two for sure all right i hate to cut in but i got it right now i gotta tell you guys about hawthorne i've told you about them the last two weeks but i don't think you're getting the point about how fucking good this stuff really is if you're still wearing your polo blue from your high school girlfriend toss it in the trash right now i don't want you walking into sephora getting all the shit sprayed on your wrist and they're spraying shit you're probably allergic to half the stuff they're doing none of of that. You wear your old spice shit. Girls think you smell like their dad. You don't want that.

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That's Hawthorne with an E and use promo code mom to get 10% off your first purchase. That's H-A-W-T-H-O-R-N-E.co. Use the promo code mom, you get 10% off and you will be smelling amazing for the springtime. So this is, it's all about the Benjamins. It samples, I did it for love, which is performed by Love Unlimited, but it also has a sample of It's Great To Be Here, performed by the Jackson 5, and an interpolation of Jungle Boogie, performed by Kool and the Gang. Graphic shit, man. It's Lil' Kim's talking about deep-throating on this album. Yeah, I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know what the fuck she was saying.

Dude, the first lines of this song are, what you want to do? You want to be brawlers, shot callers, brawlers who be dipping in the bends with the spoilers. No, no, no. I knew they knew what they were talking about themselves. I'm talking about your parents. I didn't know what any of those words meant. My parents didn't know what a brawler, a shot caller, or a brawler was, and they definitely didn't know about dipping in bends with spoilers.

They didn't know. On the low from the Jake, they didn't know they on the on the low from the jake they didn't they didn't know what the jake was they didn't know what the fuck was going on bro i played this and they were just like oh the singing song i they had i i hadn't i had no idea they had no idea it sounded cool and i was just memorizing songs and i would like hit me in the shower like years later like oh that's what the fuck they were talking about one of the first rap songs that I was ever featured on was by a guy named Young Zim who I used to do two-on-two rap battles with before I ever did a two-on-two rap battle with

him I think I was like 21 years old I was living down the shore and he was like I had this song I need you to be on and the song samples this next lyric from Biggie. And I'm living that whole life we push. Wait, fuck the state pen, fuck hoes at Penn State. And they flipped that sample. I was at Penn State at the time, had a fucking banging ass party track where we sampled that shit. And we sampled something that was always sampled,

that was sampling something else in the background. Just maybe one of the best simplest turns of phrase of all time. Fuck the state pen.

Fuck hoes at Penn State. It's just like it's genius. That line just speaks to how genius his shit was. How transcendent it is. There's definitely still

people up at Penn State who are like fuck the state pen. They probably put it on a million t-shirts bro there's probably like basic ass bitches yeah that are just going absolutely nuts for this shit and it speaks to less is more like it's a such a simple line that works so well he's getting so much out of so little yeah and he he's rhyming uh he does a great job of like uh right he he rhymes multiple syllables at once which is something i i find find like something about all in a kid, like something in a kitty cat, like all where a titties at, like kitty cat titties at.

Like these are multi, more complex rhyming than just cat and at, you know what I mean? Like he is taking it the extra level to make it more pleasing for our ears. He's more thoughtful with this shit. Like these are all tenets of what makes such a great rapper, ears he's more thoughtful with this shit like these are all tenets of what makes such a great rapper why he's such a fucking great rapper like nothing illustrates it as well as it's all about the benjamins that this is what this whole fucking album is about right here yeah badass track phenomenal absolutely like a top three on the on the album itself i would say unbelievable Then it goes into a song called Pain.

Some heavy shit. For sure. Pain samples Let's Stay Together by Life Jennings, performed by Roberta Flack. Yo, so I don't want to take too long on this, so I want to jump ahead to the next song. Yeah. The next song features Genuine.

Word selection is just insane. Just very cool. Very cool song. There's a shout to Lex Luger in that song just insane. Just very cool. Very cool. There's a shout to Lex Luger in that song as well. Lex Luger. Sort of the original Roman Reigns in terms of a wrestler that Vince McMahon said, this is the new Hulk Hogan. This is the guy.

And fans were like, absolutely not. Really? Send him back. What's the reference to the song? Let me pull up the actual lyric here. Do they talk about him like, I'm the future, like Lex Luger? They say like ripped Lex like Luger or something like that. Beautiful.

Beautiful gun talk. The next song features the Lox. Yeah. The Lox. They kind of grew into their own in this P. Diddy in the family world. Did people like them? Were they respected? The Lox. Very well respected. Jadakiss family world. Did people like them? Were they respected? Very well respected.

Jadakiss, a lot of people will say it. I know Jadakiss, yeah. And he ran with us top five that are alive, and they're very well respected, especially in New York. Just absolute legends in the game, legends. The next song features Foxy Brown. Yeah. We were talking about Nas and Jay-Z's disses at one another.

Nas said that Foxy kept you hot because you kept your face in her bush. So Jay-Z, before he was with Beyonce, used to have his face in Foxy Brown's bush, and she's featured on this song. I promise you not the biggest Puff Daddy fan in the world wants to listen to Puff Daddy in the early stages of Fucking Good Girl. There's 90 seconds left of just him. And it's all that. Dude, but let's be honest with ourselves. Puff Daddy jerked off to that.

Yeah, definitely. But don't put it on the album. Maybe it was for the dudes in prison who couldn't watch they're like pop throw something on that for us for the boys jay-z's another guy with just his voice i'll listen to him rap at anything i listened to 444 and i liked it yeah i'll listen to him rap anything he's awesome he's uh they make diddy look bad on this like as a rapper yeah they're so good both of them are so good that there's a lot of great

rappers on this album i mean like twister's great rapper genuine great rapper mace great rapper fucking jay to kiss great rapper all these dudes are great rappers and uh did he surrounded himself by them but i mean i i would see be being more of a diddy move to be the hot girl in the picture who surrounds himself by ugly girls to make himself look hotter. He's like a decent girl who surrounded himself by really hot girls, and it makes him look kind of ugly. Your debut album, and everyone's waiting around for the features. Right, exactly. But I guess that's one way to get people listening if you know you're not going to be able to carry the weight of the ship on your own. Yeah.

Seems like yesterday we used to rock the show. I laced the track, you locked the flow. So far from hanging off the block of dough. Those are multi-syllable rhyme schemes right there. Now, knowing what we've listened to, and knowing how bad Diddy is, and how fucking tight that is, he had somebody ghostwrite his song about missing his friend. Oh, that's not he didn't write that, bro. You can't say that he wrote that.

See, I don't know enough to definitively say he didn't write that, but I trust you enough. It's the perfect formula. It really is an incredible formula that uh they they did a beautiful job with the album uh it's it's all in there yeah so yeah that's basically the formula for the album the album as a whole i would say very very good there's a few filler tracks in there like we talked about it's too long the album itself is too long some of the songs are too long but if that's the biggest complaint that there's too much of this good album, whatever. Right. It's just like a trip down sample lane. It's got to be one of the most prolific jobs of sampling, sometimes lazy jobs of sampling, but it's almost like –

It's fun to listen to, though. Yeah. They just wanted to stay out of the way and just let the already good song be the already good song. It's very fun to listen to. It's instantly familiar, and I think that's by design. It's just a classic. I mean, it shaped me into a fan of the people on the out.

It shaped me into a Diddy fan. It shaped me into a Biggie fan. It shaped me into a fan of all the people that are featured on the songs, and it shaped me into a fan of all the songs that are sampled. So it just gives this whole

coaching tree trickle-down effect of appreciation for music across the board. And thank you for listening to it with me. Definitely. I'm very glad that I have now listened to it. It's one of these albums where I'm like, damn, there's a lot of history there. And now I'm glad that I'm a little familiar with it,

a little more familiar than I was. And I hope if you're listening, you're a little more familiar with this album than you were going in.