LL COOL J and the force of hip-hop (pt.1).
LL COOL J headlines September's digital-only cover. Image: Chris Parsons.
In 1984, the 16-year-old LL COOL J was signed to new label Def Jam, and before long found himself leading the first wave of hip-hop artists to break through to a mass audience. In the first of a two-part interview, he looks back on his forty-year career as a musician.
When the young James Todd Smith started rapping at the age of ten, access to the music that was inspiring him was limited to bootleg cassettes of unsigned artists that circulated on the streets. “I was a fan from when it first started, so there were no records – I was a fan listening to tapes.” Even after artists like the Treacherous Three and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released their first records at the start of the 80s, rap was kept in the shadows so far as radio airplay went. “They didn't play hip-hop during the daytime, they didn't even play it during the week – they only got an hour or two on the weekends at night, if that. But I guess those limitations made it sexier, it just gave us more of a reason to love it. It gave us ownership, it made us feel like, ‘Ah, you don't know about this. You're listening to R&B; you're listening to Lionel Richie and Cameo; you’re listening to Rick James and Madonna. This is the cool shit that you don't know about. So it gave us pride: we had something of our own.”
But before long, hip-hop was attracting fans from across the globe, something that LL COOL J alluded to on his debut single “I Need a Beat” (1984). “I said, ‘The beat expands to many foreign lands / Germany, Italy, France and Japan’. I said those things because I envisioned the whole world being in it.” Even so, with minimal airplay and little representation in the media, those lines were based more on his imagination than any solid sense of how fast and how far hip-hop was spreading. “I had no idea that it was going around the world and becoming what it became, at all. There was just no way to gauge that.”
Now that hip-hop has entered its sixth decade, it enjoys the kind of established status that was unimaginable back then, when its proponents felt they had to fight for recognition. “When I started, and when the Beastie Boys started, and Run DMC, Public Enemy, when we all came out, we were looked at as underdogs, as guys who came from nothing and were making something of ourselves.” He says that the genre’s trademark bravado and machismo should therefore be understood within that context, rather than the one in which contemporary rap operates. “It had more of a Muhammad Ali-ish aspect to it; it was more heroic. Now it comes off to probably a lot of people like the nobles shouting at the peasants, ‘I have money, I have this, I have that. You don't have anything, I have it all’ – the energy is different.”
“I have countless albums that I haven’t put out for one reason or another. So there is an original 14 Shots to the Dome album with samples that’s crazy, and then there’s another Mr. Smith album that never came out”
LL COOL J wasn’t an underdog for long, however. In retrospect, it seems fitting that his debut album Radio was also the first long-player from influential label Def Jam, its success marking a turning point for hip-hop, while 1987’s Bigger and Deffer lived up to its name, establishing the rapper as a major artist with double-platinum sales. But by the late 80s, he was ready to move beyond the parameters of the genre, releasing Walking Like a Panther, with a more commercial sound that sold well but was unpopular among the hip-hop community. “I'm not limited by what I can do musically: it's a matter of doing what I feel inspired to do, period. That's why I was at Hammersmith Odeon, humping couches and singing love songs at the height of Public Enemy, because I do what I want. And that's why we’re still having this conversation today: it pays off to just be who you are. If people think you're right or wrong, it's up to them, but as an artist, your job is to do what you're inspired to do.”
1990’s Mama Said Knock You Out proved the naysayers wrong, improving on its predecessor’s sales while also pleasing the critics with its return to a harder sound. Still in his early twenties, LL COOL J wasn’t interested in sticking with a successful formula and his next album, 14 Shots to the Dome, saw another change of direction. However, as he explains, the album that was released in 1993 started life as a very different record before producer Marley Marl (who had also worked on Mama Said Knock You Out) removed the samples from the original recordings to avoid paying the publishers. “14 Shots to the Dome was a significantly better record when it had the samples. I love Marley, that’s my man, I love him, but he was being a cheap bastard: he knows it, I know it. He went and he pulled all the samples out and tried to rejig it, so you didn't get the full impact of what that album could have been like.” LL takes responsibility for his share in the change, admitting that he was too distracted by other commitments and dazzled by the success of his previous album. “In all fairness, we both got so caught up in Mama Said Knock You Out, we didn’t really pay as much attention to critical detail on that record as we could have. It could have been a significantly better record – the original was way better.”
His next album, Mr. Smith, also went through two iterations before its release in 1995, although in that case he believes the second version was an improvement. “I did another album called Mr. Smith before that one, and I threw it away and then did that one. So the Mr. Smith album that you're hearing is actually the second Mr. Smith album, because I didn’t feel the first one was good enough.” It’s a recurring pattern, he says. “I have countless albums that I haven't put out for one reason or another. So there is an original 14 Shots to the Dome album with samples that's crazy, and then there's another Mr. Smith album that never came out.”
Image: Chris Parsons.
Tracing the development of LL COOL J’s sound through those six albums reveals how fast hip-hop was evolving during the first phase of his career. He wonders whether the democratization of music-making has also led to a dilution of talent, resulting in a slower pace of innovation. “Social media giving access to the market to so many people has had good effects, and it's also had some adverse effects creatively. What do I mean by that? OK, let's take soccer, or football as you call it: to make it to the Ronaldo level, to get to Messi level, you have to have a certain skillset. To become a Rakim in hip-hop, to become a Chuck D, to become LL, to become Eminem, you have to have a certain skillset to get to a certain level. Well, what has happened in hip-hop because of social media, it's like they took the soccer ball and threw it in the stands. Now everybody can play. Yeah, it's great, it's fun, it feels fairer and everybody has access, but the quality of the game has suffered a bit because I don't need to be as good as Messi to get a call-up from the club. That affects the play because the more people learn from me and not Messi, the bar gets lower in terms of the standards from a craft perspective.”
He's quick to acknowledge that there are plenty of talented and committed hip-hop musicians around today, some of whom feature on his new album, The FORCE (Frequencies of Real Creative Energy). “The one thing I want to caution is that we have to be respectful of all generations of artists because it's unfair to say, ‘Oh, because they started now they are somehow not as talented’, because that's not true. It's just that there's a lot of people, and they're not all as talented.” With The FORCE, LL wants to create something fresh while also staying true to the original values of hip-hop, which are in danger of being forgotten by younger artists. “Respectfully, they think Biggie and Tupac are the beginning; they don't even understand that there's a whole world that comes before that, in terms of jumpstarting the genre, and getting it up and rolling – Bambaataa, and the Treacherous Three, the Fearless Four, Crash Crew; ‘Disco Dream’ by the Mean Machine, and the whole Sugar Hill thing; and Soulsonic Force, G.L.O.B.E & Whiz Kid, all of these things. That's why it was so important to me to make a new record, because I'm showing people that it's possible to start 40 years ago and to make music that is impactful now. So that was the fun part for me.”
In the second part of this interview, LL COOL J talks in detail about The FORCE (Frequencies of Real Creative Energy), which will be released on 6th September.
Author: Rachel Goodyear