Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: Hip-Hop Verses That Changed Our Lives

Episode Date: August 6, 2023

This month marks 50 years since the birth of hip-hop, so our friends at Pop Culture Happy Hour reached out to some NPR colleagues and a few hip-hop luminaries and asked what hip-hop verse changed their lives.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, I'm Aisha Harris, co-host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, and I'm filling in for Aisha Roscoe, who's on vacation this week. So over here at NPR, we're celebrating the 50-year anniversary of hip-hop with a lot of special coverage. And today, on this Sunday story, we're featuring an extra special episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour that's all about hip-hop. Hip-hop is, of course, a global phenomenon, but it's also deeply personal. So we decided to reach out to some NPR colleagues and a few hip-hop stars and ask them, what's the hip-hop verse that changed your life? The one that you still remember all these years later. And we got some pretty amazing answers, from Code Switch to Louder Than a Riot to the one and only Big Freedia. Let's hear what they had to say.

And just a heads up, this episode has some explicit language. I'm Sydney Madden, one of the co-hosts of Louder Than a Riot podcast. So many hip hop songs, so many hip hop verses have changed my life. But I went right back to college and I went right back to Section 80. Section 80 is Kendrick Lamar's debut album before his major, the mixtape off TDE. So Section 80 is definitely the album that sparked something in me and on Section 80, High Power is really the song that turned me on and activated me to what it means to struggle with all these complicated emotions as a Black person living in America. For me personally, it was my college age years where you're

literally learning to unlearn a lot of things. High Power was just that constant, consistent soundtrack for that. And it floats in so beautifully. It's not like a dissertation. It's not like a lecture coming at you. It's Kendrick speaking from the bottom of his soul, like the soles of his shoes and the soul within his heart. When I heard High Power, it felt hymnal, it felt personal, and it felt like it was really speaking directly to me in a way that other conscious rap albums or conscious rap songs hadn't quite felt before. So in the third verse, after the bridge, after Laurie Jo says, every day we fight the system to make our way, we've been down too. He comes through and he just plants an image of your head and said, who said a black man was in the Illuminati?

Who said a black man in the Illuminati? Last time I checked, that was the biggest racist party. Last time I checked, we was racing with Marcus Garvey on the freeway to Africa till I wrecked my Audi. And I want everybody to view my autopsy so you can see exactly where the government has shot me. No conspiracy, my fate is inevitable they play musical chairs and once i'm on that pedestal he's a master builder of turns of

phrases of syllables similes and he gonna make you run back the track a few times every single time. I am Tank from Tankin' the Dangas. And one verse in hip hop that has changed me was, I think it was No Scrubs. TLC had on the intergalactic clothes and left eye. You just saw everything slow down and she had her praying hands. And she was like, if you can't especially expand my horizons, then leave your cross. I don't find the time.

Let me give you something to think about. All that. Just to be young and to see someone so verbose and so cool, modern and above their years and their time with us. It was incredible to see it. You just always wanted to be that cool. You always wanted to write words that was that dope. And I just remember pressing stop and pause and stop and pause, trying to memorize the rap and write it down from the radio. It was so hard because she was so dope at it. But once you learn those lyrics and you was able to recite them in front of your friends at the next party, huh? Worth every stop, record and play. My name is Gene Demby. I'm one of the co-hosts of NPR's Code Switch podcast. And the verse that changed my life was the second verse of Yacine Bey,

formerly known as Mostaf's, Mathematics, from his album Black on Both Sides. It's the second-to-last song on the album, and this album's really dense with New York slang, and if you did not know somebody from Brooklyn, it might be hard to actually figure out from context clues what the hell a lot of the album. And this album's, like, really dense with, like, New York slang. And, like, if you did not know somebody from Brooklyn, it might be hard to actually figure out, like, from context clues

what the hell a lot of the album is about. But this last verse on mathematics, which is so dope, it's produced by DJ Premier, it's Yassine Bey outlining mass incarceration.

And this album came out when I was in college. And so, like, you're in that mode where you're, like, reading, you're taking sociology classes, you might be taking, like, your first gender studies classes, you're like having your brain is exploding with all these new ideas. And it was the first time I'd ever heard anyone

articulate this thing that I knew to be true, which is like, there is this giant apparatus that is imprisoning, like that's throwing black people en masse behind bars. And that's something we know to be true now. But like, it's really important to contextualize like what things look imprisoning, like that's throwing black people en masse behind bars. And that's something we know to be true now, but like, it's really important to contextualize like what things look like in the early aughts was like, that was the period in which mass incarceration was at its height. And also no one was covering this. Like to the extent we talked about race and policing in America, we were talking about what was happening to middle-class black people, which is racial profiling, right? You go into Bloomingdale, somebody follows you around, you know,

you drive in a nice car and the cops pull you over, that kind of thing. That was what our conversations about race and policing looked like. But what was happening to people that I knew, right, into the, like, the world that I, like, was in and adjacent to was this thing. But, like, this verse is, like, such a tight spot on elucidation of all of this stuff. Like, he starts this verse talking about how low the minimum wage is, and then he goes on to talk about the ways that black people are criminalized, the ways that black people are hit

with harsher punishments for the same crimes. So he says, different stipulations attach to each sentence. And it goes on to talk about how black folks are the people who get rounded up this way. This was basically felt like not exactly a policy paper, but it was like, this is what this is. People commit low-level crimes because they're poor. But even when they don't, the police target them because they're poor. And there is a whole economy built around this. And like, I just remember first starting to think about things differently than I thought about them. I just remember being like, oh, I felt like, duh. Like when someone showed this to you, you're like, oh my God, this is obviously

what is going on. And also, it was a really lucid articulation of this thing that was happening in the world. And that the rest of the world wouldn't even start paying attention to for, you know, another half decade or so. Right. Like he's like actually doing a kind of like a real service in this song. But, you know, it could go right over your head because it's just a dope, powerful statement. That's still like as relevant today in 2023 as it was when it dropped at the end of the 90s hey there this is felix contreras i am the co-host of npr music's all latino podcast i'm gonna be 65 years old this year so hip hip hop was not part of my youth. I came to this well after I already had my music taste established.

And what stood out to me was how familiar it sounded because I grew up with Gil Scott Heron. The revolution will not be televised, that kind of stuff. So there was already spoken word. And then when I heard the message from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, that was like a light going off. Like I understood not only the message behind the music, but the idea of spoken word and introducing something new. And it felt fresh and new and revolutionary and like an extension of what Gil Scott Heron was doing. I can still recite some of the lyrics. It's like a jungle sometimes.

It makes me wonder how I keep from going under. Broken glass everywhere. People pissing on the streets, you know. They just don't care. All my children, the daytime, Dallas at night, can't even watch the game or the Sugar Ray fight. That kind of stuff just completely opened a whole new world for me. And so I've been able to watch the genre grow and develop

and change and develop and change and morph and go through struggles and things with misogyny and all that other stuff. But then also always finding the artists that speak to these social issues that I associated with hip hop in this earliest, earliest days. I have had to pay more attention to hip hop once I started doing out Latino in 2010 because of the Spanish language hip-hop and hip-hop coming from Latin America. But how it changed me is just being able to understand what a powerful tool hip-hop has become in Latin America. And I began to understand the power of hip-hop for a whole new generation to speak out against injustices, speak out against things

that are not right in the world, and also offering hope for the variety of artists, both in Latin America and here in the United States. I always think of one of the first artists I met in like 2009 or so, Ana Tijoux, who is Chilean, but her parents had to leave the country because of politics. They had to go in exile. She went back and started speaking out against things. I think even at the beginning as she comes in, her command of her flow in Spanish, because the syntax of Spanish, of course, is different than English.

So I'm always listening for how that is broken down into the speaking form, right? Like the almost spoken word version of that, because it doesn't always work. You can't always take the Spanish syntax and put it over something that doesn't come from Latin America. And I think that this is one of those songs where it does. It fits perfectly. The way she plays with the rhythm, stops and starts, comes back in, all of that stuff, just listening to it's like, wow, this is something new. This is something different with Spanish language. And it's something that I could relate back to the power of the language of the message when I first heard it many, many years before. My name is Sheldon Pierce. I'm an editor at NPR Music.

And the verse that changed my life is the Lauryn Hill verse on Fuji's How Many Mics. yeah so my household was not a rap household it was a soul and r&b household the only rap my mom listened to was like highly political like public enemy that kind of thing my dad mostly listened to was like highly political, like Public Enemy, that kind of thing. My dad mostly listened to KRS-One and Heavy D. I'm a kid from the DMV, born in the 90s. So I was in the first generation, essentially born into rap. So I was seeking it out in a way that just trying to make it sort of crucial to my life, trying to understand it. And because it wasn't in my household, the stuff on the outside at that moment in the late nineties, early two thousands, that was dominating rap DMX, Eminem, Jay-Z wasn't sort of broaching the inside of my little suburban life. I was trying to seek it out through what I could. And when going through

the stuff that my parents had, they had this Fugees record and how many mics you listen to it and right off the bat, it's like, I think through Lauren's verse in particular, you understand everything that is great about rap. I love this verse for a lot of reasons. Foremost, because it's rapping about rapping, but also it isn't just a gripe about what other rappers are doing wrong. It's inherently this display of how they should be doing it. It's like a lesson within a lesson. Lauren is such a singular performer. Her flows are so tricky, but they're also so conversational. And there's these sublime displays of personality. Like you think about even just the opener alone.

I get mad frustrated when I rhyme thinking about the kids like the love doctor strange i'm tamed like the rapper get red like a snapper when they do that you can feel the weight of disappointment in her voice as she gets through that the second half of that bar and she carries off through the rest of it pointing out the flaws in their approach and masterfully dissecting everything that the other kids don't get about what's great about rap. And in that moment, me listening to it, it's like, I understand you're saying NAWAC, but I see why you're not too. In the end, it is a verse that is about more than the natural lyrical miracle elements of it. It is not just sort of empty technicality. There is a real story, a clear arc being displayed throughout this verse.

She is really expressing something powerful and potent. I mean, it spoke to me, and it was that aspect of it that ended up being more important to me than whether or not your bars were hard. Peace, I'm coming. And a verse that changed my life is the verse that Nas did from his album Illmatic and the song New York State of Mind. Rappers are monkey flipping with the funky rhythm I be kicking, musician, inflicting composition I believed it really changed my life in ways because it changed me as a writer. It changed me as an artist.

When I heard that verse, I realized how beautiful rap could be, how deep it could be, how much imagery you could use with your words and how just getting to the essence of where you are in life and who you are and what you've seen is just powerful. And that's always been, for me, what I loved about rap was the expression to be and say who I am. But Nas had this expression that where it was brought down to earth, like it was the things he had seen and experienced, but it was elevated in the way he was saying it and writing, which was something different for me because, you know, a lot of the raps we were writing were like kind of boasting and going into our visions of what we wanted to see ourselves and how we wanted to see ourselves.

But New York State of Mind just described things where these are the things we see, and this is how I see them. It drops deep as it does in my breath. I never sleep because sleep is the cousin of death. Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined. I think of crime when I'm in a New York state of mind. That, to me, talks a lot about just the things that we were seeing and experiencing, and that he was, and he still wanted to go to higher places and other places.

That is the verse that I would say changed my life and changed the way I rap, and that's why it's so significant to me, and to this day is one of the greatest hip-hop songs and verses and albums ever. Love. Now Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to our change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. I'm Juana Summers. I'm a co-host of NPR's All Things Considered, and the hip-hop verse that changed my life is from Nelly's first single, a song called Country Grammar. It came out when I was 12 or 13 years old in middle school, and it was really the first hip-hop song that

I ever related to. I didn't listen to a lot of hip-hop growing up until that point. And I remember the first time I heard it, it was something totally different. And I think one of the reasons I felt so attached to the song and to Nelly and really the entire album is that it was one of the first songs that really seemed to put St. Louis hip-hop on the rap. I grew up in Kansas City across the state, but at that time, being from Missouri didn't feel like something that I had a whole lot of local pride in. I wanted to be from literally anywhere else. I wanted to move out of the state as fast as I could. But hearing a rapper on a global stage shout out being from St. Louis and being proud, seeing the arch, the monument in that music video on national TV,

I remember seeing it on TRL as a kid, was just nothing like anything I'd ever seen or heard before. And I think hearing that song when I was still kind of young really is what got me turned on to hip hop. This is one of those songs that even though it's been out for decades at this point, I probably if I tried and I won't because I'd be embarrassed, I could probably still sing every line to. But I mean, it's the first line of that first verse where he goes, you can find me in St. Louis rolling on dubs. And then he goes on to talk about later in that verse, he says, so feel me when I bring it, sing it loud. What? I'm from the loo and I'm proud. Run a mile for the cause. And that riff was just so cool to me at the time. He is centering St. Louis and pride. Later on, there's parts of the song where he's listing off all of these different neighborhoods in the city, like U City, Jennings, Kingsland,

all these places I remember going when I was a kid and we would go to visit family and friends in St. Louis. And I think I could still probably go through every word of it. This song and this album was definitely a huge gateway for me. I think I started getting more curious about what else was out there, what hip hop was out there. And I think it was also one of the first times when I realized hip hop was a thing that people from the Midwest could make. It wasn't just the legendary stories that you hear from the hip hop that was coming from New York and from the West Coast, that it could come from a place like Missouri to. Hey, this is Big Freedia, the Queen Diva. And as I sit back and reminisce about 50 years of hip hop, it was a beat that changed my life.

And this particular beat was drag rap by The Showboys. Drag Rap. A story starts in a town that was not tamed. There was no law, things were insane. In order to survive, y'all had to be mean. A story starts in notorious Queens. The reason that this beat changed my life is because it was so essential, you know, what was happening in New Orleans with the bounce culture. And this beat will be the start of every party, every club show,

every block party that we had, this particular beat, they will play the Trigger Man and everything will start to go down. It was real ghetto. So this song, in particular, beat changed my life. It made me realize that I wanted to be a rapper. It made me realize that New Orleans has so much potential with the bounce culture. And I'm grateful for this beat

and grateful for the showboys for making this beat because rag rap definitely changed my life and is essential and very essential to the culture of hip hop. Hi, I'm Brittany Luce, host of It's Been a Minute. And the hip hop verse that changed my life is the third verse of Trick Daddy's I'm a Thug. I think it's just the most fun verse of the song,

but also has like a deeper kind of emotional core to it that makes me want to believe in and trust myself. And now like also the older I get, like the meaning has deepened over time, makes me want to believe in and trust myself. And now, also the older I get, the meaning has deepened over time. But I don't know, when I look back and reflect, I more deeply understand Trick Daddy's commentary about the hip hop establishment

and about the music industry establishment that he was making in that third verse. It's kind of notable because it has that guitar and strings sample that's like on loop that has like a nice kind of upbeat feel to it. Also, there's like these kids that are singing like, I don't know. Like having the kids in the chorus, like it just has all the elements of a hit. And Southern rap was not popular in the same way it is now. Or like Southern rap didn't necessarily set the sound for the nation, like the national hip hop landscape.

So like it was the specific sound of Trick Daddy, like his twang, the manner in which he rapped was so different to me, at least coming from like, I'm from suburban Michigan during the height of Eminem and like D12. I have a whole different understanding of what hip hop could sound like at that time. So I don't know, just everything about the song and the video caught my attention and felt so different than what I was used to seeing at the time. The last few lines of this verse where essentially Trick Daddy has just been like, y'all can say what you want. You can do what you want. You want to talk big talk. You might pretend like you want to walk big walk. But me, myself personally, I'm just going to relax because a lot of y'all putting out music that shouldn't even be on anybody's radar.

Like it's whack. The last four lines, though, really of that verse are something that I've taken up to be sort of like a version of a personal mantra for me. So he says, I don't care who he is or where he from. That line, I interpreted that as basically like, I'm not looking for the rewards of a given lifestyle. I'm not looking for the rewards of the music establishment. I'm not looking for Grammys. I don't need your source awards. I don't need these things. You don't have to give me my props. More importantly, I don't need them from you. I'm an authentic person. I don't care who you is or where you from. I don't care who you are. I'm going to be authentically me. If I'm honoring my authenticity and I'm being me and I'm enjoying what I'm doing and I'm not

hurting anybody, what's the problem? I've already won. And I just love that attitude. I think it's the healthiest way that you can go about in life. I know on many levels I cannot identify with Trick Daddy for loads of obvious reasons. I'm not a thug, but I think it's really emotionally healthy. And that verse has always struck something within me. And like I said, I kind of carried it for the last 20 years. And I can recite that entire verse from memory. It's like, it's soothing. What up?

I'm Bobby Carter, senior producer for The Tiny Desk. And the verse that changed my life was Andre 3000's final verse on OutKast's A.T. Elliot. his final verse on OutKast's A.T. Elyens. Every time I hear that verse, it takes me back to the first time that I heard it in 1996. It is the same feeling every time. I was a freshman at Jackson State University. I was very homesick. My roommate had been robbed at gunpoint, walking to grab lunch over the weekend. I was broke. And a day later, my mom sent me this CD and the CD changed my life.

But this verse in particular just totally spoke to me. It calmed me down and it reminded me that I wasn't alone in this new journey into independence into manhood and like even before he started rapping he goes like like calm down and he goes softly as if I play piano in the dark softly as if I play piano in the dark found a way to channel my anger not to involve the world's a stage and everybody's got to play their part. Each line, it's like he was talking specifically to me. But the line that really struck me is when he said, no drugs or alcohol so I can get the signal clear as day. Now, in my peer group, I'm probably at the time, especially I was one of the only people who didn't smoke or didn't drink. And I thought that I was the complete, for lack of better word, outcast.

But when he said no drugs or alcohol so I can get the signal clear as day when so many people used to always ask me like man why don't you drink why don't you I finally got it my answer from then on was is so I can get the signal clear as day so that verse just like it made me feel so normal in that moment and I always walk with that I mean I walk with the album the album means so much to me. It completely shaped who I am. But specifically for OutKast, that album, that verse cemented them as my favorite hip hop group of all time. Hi, I'm Ana Maria Sayer. I'm one of the hosts of NPR Music's Alt Latino. And the verse that changed my life is the first verse of Kendrick Lamar's Mad City.

I cover hip hop all the time, specifically mostly Latin hip hop, but came to hip hop kind of later in life. I would say like late middle school, early high school. It was not something that I grew up listening to. It was not something that my family listened to a lot. I was more listening to more traditional like corrios, boleros, and then classical even. So I remember hearing Kendrick Lamar's Mad City for the first time and being like, wow, this is poetry. I was really amazed by the way that you could structure a hip hop song or hip hop sound and be so overt in what you were talking about. With this track, it's like he lays everything out. He channels all that's on his heart that's in his soul and he puts it it into the lyrics, and I was just blown away.

There's one line in particular that I just think is so beautiful and true, true amazing wordsmithing that Kendrick is so capable of. Hope euphoria can slow dance with society. And then there's a later part in the verse that I love, kind of a whole section of it, where he talks about, that was back when I was nine, Joey packed the nine, Pakistan on every porch is fine, we adapt to crime, pack a van with four guns at a time.

That was back when I was nine, Joey packed a nine, Pakistan on every porch is fine, we adapt to crime, pack a van with four firsthand as a child. And then he ends that kind of section by saying, that's what mama said when we was eating that free lunch. That line has stuck in my head for years and years and years and years. It's something I have revisited so many times. It's so visual and it's so just like that pairing with AKs, ARs, AYAL duck. That's the line you get before and then you have the contrast of, that's what mama said. Like, there are a few things that are so visceral, and I think he does such a beautiful job of painting jarring imagery in his lyrics. And that's just the mastery of Kendrick.

Hey, what up? This is Kweli. You know, hip-hop has just always been a key core, I guess, of my life. Every verse and every song I've heard changes me in some way. And then I'd say like a tie between ODB, Brooklyn Zoo, which is, you know, essentially just one long verse in the chorus. Yeah, shame on you when you step through to the old dirty bastard. Brooklyn, shame on you when you step through to the old dirty bastard. Swim Village, I don't know. Ask my man T3. I ain't the one to be playing with the James Brown sellers.

You could ask my man T3. I ain't the one to be playing like the **** that used to play for money and no time to act with me. And best believe that you won't do it. I'm influenced to like, you know. My brother was my reason to get into hip-hop, but we have a good age gap between us. And, you know, when you're a teenager, even two years is like a whole lifetime. But we have, you know, a good handful of years between us. And those moments when we would listen to Brooklyn Zoo in the car or listen to Slum Village I Don't Know in the car and rap the verses together, the way those songs or those verses brought us together, it's one of those moments in life that I still call back on as whenever I'm down, I'm like, oh,

that's what joy feels like. The way that that could bring us together. It always like strikes me and still holds tight to me as a testament to the power of a verse and how just one verse, not even a whole song, just how much one verse can bring worlds of people that possibly hate each other and never talk to each other, how one verse can bring so many people together. I mean, there's so much power in a verse. So those verses, just from my past experience, really hold a lot of weight to me. But anyway, I love you.

Peace. That's it for our show. We want to know what's the hip hop verse that changed your life. You can find us at facebook.com slash PCHH. And a huge thanks to everyone who shared their personal stories for this episode. If you'd like to hear more of NPR's coverage

on the 50th anniversary of hip hop, head over to NPR Music and the Code Switch podcast feed. This segment from Pop Culture Happy Hour was produced by Cher Vincent, Robin Hilton, and Mike Katziff, and it was edited by Jessica Reedy. This episode of The Sunday Story

was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Liana Simstrom. The team includes Jenny Schmidt, Justine Yan, Henry H Henry Hadi, and Emily Silver. Our engineer for this episode is Maggie Luthar, and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Harris, in for Ayesha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Till then, enjoy your day. Thank you.