VMP Magazine

Consider the alternative. Before Puffy inevitably got his way, Biggie demanded to call his debut, The Teflon Don. That original title conjures a tabloid montage of ’94 New York: infamous Mafiosi with blown-dried coifs and loose rectangular suits intimidating juries, incarcerated Scarfaces running the airwaves on Hot 97 and Rudy Giuliani’s cryptkeeper skulk.

It started at the beach. A chance encounter so ingrained into boomer lore that it feels like a fable. Run the faded Kodachrome reel through your mind. The sun, a hothouse July rant bathing the Venice worshippers of Ra. Surf’s up. It’s 1965. The last and only time everything felt like paradise, at least if you were fortunate enough for that to even be a consideration.

In July, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive the first official U.S. release — with the original artwork — of Lafayette Afro-Rock Band's Soul Makossa, the debut LP from a cracking U.S. funk band that recorded in France and which provided the backbone for much of early rap music. You can can sign up here.

Here, we have an excerpt from the Listening Notes Booklet in our edition of the album, written by Jeff Weiss.

Before the Clipse could cruise with black Jesus in the back of an old school, there had to be “The Funeral.” As the last millennium wilted, the Thornton brothers donned suits and danced on hearses, amidst burning crosses and canoes, howling mourners, and a second line funeral cortege that threatened to drown itself in the Chesapeake Bay.

It’s one of the greatest debuts in rap history and relatively few heard or witnessed the video’s sepulchral beauty and gothic stress. At the dawn of their half-decade defiance of gravity, “The Funeral” was the rare Neptunes-produced single that failed to scale the charts. It sounds like Mardi Gras on Polaris, where the parade leaders sell strawberry cocaine to a coterie of voodoo priests, who insisted that the brass band reimagine Blood, Sweat and Tears.

“It was written at a time when a few of my friends had died,” Pusha T told Complex several years ago. “We were going to an abnormal amount of funerals all at once. So we decided to make a song eulogizing ourselves.”

I don’t believe in “real hip-hop,” but I do believe in barbecues. Some say that the Fifth Element of hip-hop is knowledge. Others claim that it’s complaining. I’d personally make the case for the cookout as a more sacrosanct rite of hip-hop tradition.