Recently when I wrote about C-Rayz Walz, I coined (or at least think I coined) the term "punchline inflation": "It makes me wonder if the most mindblowing bars of today will look simplistic in 20 years, & what punchlines will sound like then. Is there an upper limit to lyrical complexity?" I got interested enough to make a social media post asking what is the oldest bar that would still go hard (i.e. not get you laughed out of the cypher) today. The artist who came up most frequently in people's replies was Big L. (Noted, none of the Big L bars people suggested were older than Phife's 1991 "bust a nut inside your eye to show you where I come from," but I digress.) Certainly L's lyricism resonates with people today, & he has a reputation as one of the major innovators of punchline rap, but does his work really hold up that well?
In a career cut heartbreakingly short at age 24, Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous was the only studio album L got to release in his lifetime. Realizing that he was barely 21 when he recorded this album, you have to marvel at how self-assured he sounds here, & how developed his style is. (For comparison, Jay-Z was 5 years older & sounds way less confident in his feature on this album.) The question of where L might have taken his talent is unavoidable--we know a little bit from his unfinished later work like The Big Picture, suggesting that he would expand further into storytelling joints & more conceptual songs. But it's still an open question, & I can't really fault the immaturity displayed in some lyrics here because he was still in the prime of his growth as a young artist.
Big L's writing could be complex, but it's very easy to describe. He relies on multisyllable rhymes--usually 2 or 3, sometimes as many as 4, but very seldom does he rhyme single syllables. He uses internal rhyme at least once every few bars: a common technique is to repeat a rhyme pair twice in the 1st line of a couplet, then once to punctuate the end of the 2nd line: "I'm known to have a hottie open, I keep the shotty smokin'/Front & get half the bones in your body broken." He doesn't use much of the elaborate wordplay & brainy double entendres favored by punchline rappers who followed in his wake: L's impressiveness is all about unexpected & creative rhyme pairs. This might get boring were it not for his effortless delivery--it sounds as if he's hardly trying, & that's captivating to listen to.
Well-versed hiphop heads might realize that the above description could just as easily be written about L's mentor Lord Finesse, & that's true. It's why I've never fully been able to give L his props as an innovator because I've been aware that what he did was more of a refinement of Finesse's style than something wholly original. But, again, any originality score needs to be graded on a curve given how young the cat was.
Finesse himself is all over this album, of course, because in the early '90s, DITC was the crew any hardcore NYC lyricist dreamed about being down with, & DITC producers Finesse, Buckwild & Showbiz handle almost all the beats here. The result is a unified, bass-heavy boom-bap sound with swinging drums & hooky sample chops. In this type of beat the rhythmic pocket is easy to find, & L mostly sticks to it, switching between 2 or 3 flows per song, including a quick triplet patter that he was nimble-tongued enough to pull off (though not all his collaborators were, including young grasshopper Jay-Z). The downside of this sonic consistency, though, is that tracks have a tendency to blur together as the album goes on. None of the beats really stand out--a recognizable sample here, a slightly different feel there. When one does stand out, it's sometimes for the wrong reasons, like the incongruous, more old-school sounding uptempo "No Endz, No Skinz," which features the distasteful bar "A girl asked me for a ring & I put one around her whole eye." That's not the only time L brags about beating up women, & you can't really take any of it seriously (remember, he was still best known for his horrorcore "Devil's Son" single), but it's hard not to cringe when 3 of his collaborators on "8 Iz Enuff" brag about gaybashing. Some of these potholes in his subject matter are smoothed over by more conceptual songs like the cautionary "Street Struck," the anti-cop "Fed Up With the Bullshit," & even "I Don't Understand It," which bemoans the current state of the rap industry & criticizes emcees for being inauthentic--although the latter song has kind of a confused message: are the sellouts he's targeting supposed to be successful or not?
Ultimately, Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous is a work by a spectacularly talented young man who still had a lot of growing up to do. Yes, it's weird to hear a rapper who died by the gun brag about gunplay, the same as when I hear Pop Smoke or King Von boast about how untouchable they are on the streets. There's a good chance Big L would have outgrown some of the foolishness had he lived. Instead, we get yet another document of a fierce talent taken from us too soon, & a whole novel's worth of questions about what might have been.
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