balogun's Full Review: Long Live the Kane by Big Daddy Kane
He was the purveyor of wit and exuded charm and charisma long before Jay-Z slew millions with his enticing double entendres and business-like swagger. He was a master and pioneer of the complex method of rhyming way before Eminem fooled millions in suburbia into thinking no one rhymed like him before. And he was an unprecedented smart mouth right before Big L claimed to get women even when his ride was a peddle bike. Hell, I’ll throw in a few more punchline-oriented rappers in there – Fabolous, Cassidy, Jadakiss, Lloyd Banks. All these guys have one thing in common. They got a lot of inspiration from one of the masters of the Rap Golden Age – the flat-top and gold-chain-rocking Brooklynite from Bed-Stuyvesant, Antonio Hardy, better known as the Big Daddy Kane.
His 1988 debut, Long Live the Kane, is arguably the definitive brag rap album, the masterpiece that future braggarts and elaborate wordsmiths carved pieces out of to build their respective legacies. Was the Kane the first rapper to boast of his mic skills? Far from it – M.C.s have been doing that at block parties since the early days of hip-hop, and LL Cool J had beaten him to it with two excellent albums. Was he the first to employ complex rhyme schemes? Rakim had already started doing that a few months earlier. However, it was Kane that combined the two attributes and created a balance, something that the two aforementioned emcees never quite matched. And the same goes for his successors, each of who has missed a trait or two that made Kane comparatively a more complete artist than they ever have been.
His battling legend lies mainly in two songs. “Raw” (“like sushi,” he claims) couldn’t have been any more aptly titled. Marley Marl (who produces every track on this album, by the way) provides the rapid sharp drums and vigorous scratching for Kane to spit for an abated six minutes. It showcases one of the examples of him pioneering compound rhyming, a method of rapping in which the rapper crams as many words as he can in a couplet that rhyme with each other (e.g. “I appear right here, and scare and dare, a mere musketeer/That would dare to compare, I do declare…”); drops contrasting metaphors and similes (e.g. “All your vocals go local on the m-i-c/Mines go a great distance, like AT&T”); and predicts doom for his microphone enemies (e.g. “We can go rhyme for rhyme, word for word, verse for verse/Get you a nurse, too late - get you a hearse/To take you to your burial ground!”). “Ain’t No Half Steppin’” is more of the same, with more contrasting figures of speech (e.g. “You’re just a butter knife, I’m a machete!”); internal rhyming and multi-syllables (e.g. “…until when it’s the/Climax, and I max, relax and chill/Have a break from a take of me acting ill.”); and a dazzling compound-rhyme ending: “I’ll just break him and bake him and rake him and take him and mold him and make him/Hold up the peace sign: Assalam Alaikum!” Listening to songs like these is wonderfully overwhelming in that they are bursting at the seams with such technical excellence. To this day, they remain benchmarks in battle emceeing mainly because hardly anyone has been able to surpass their high levels of condensation.
Not that two other songs are that far off. “Long Live the Kane” finds him dropping more witty one-liners like “The rhymes I recite are fully dressed, and yours are butt naked!” And “Set It Off” is another rapid breakbeat number in which Kane, who happens to be asthmatic, alarmingly raps at Flash Gordon-like speed without once losing a step, not to mention introducing another innovation – that of lyrical verb acting – that future rappers like Method Man and Biggie would use: “I can sneeze, sniffle and cough/E-e-e-even if I stutter I’ma still come off!” Genius. Save for Rakim, no one possessed such a silky-smooth flow.
However, it is because of such bastions of braggadocio that Long Live the Kane has earned a reputation as an album low on substantial variety. Bollocks. Those who contend that do not have the same album as I do. After all, his greatness does not solely rely upon his raw lyrical prowess. “The Day You’re Mine” is a welcome change of pace. It’s a slow backdrop of melodic keys and soaring strings married to a punctured bassline as Kane lays his mack down, setting the precursor for his love persona in his future albums: “Not a crab I see, but such a lovely female/And if looks could kill, she would be in jail!” His DJ, Mister Cee, gets his chance to shine behind the boards in “Mister Cee’s Master Plan”. Biz Markie drops in to lay down some absurd lines in “Just Rhymin’ With Biz”. And “On the Bugged Tip” is just him fooling around with his back-up dancers Skoob Lover and Scrap Lover as they trade verses, although he certainly does not coast on his talent as evidenced by the hand-clapping outro:
Now, the name Kane is superior to many people -
It means "King Asiatic Nobody's Equal"
I hate to brag, but damn I'm good!
And if mics were a gun, I'd be Clint Eastwood
And if rap was a game, I'd be MVP:
Most Valuable Poet on the m-i-c
And if rap was a school, I'd be the principal
Aww, fu@k it - the Kane is invincible!
And who can forget Kane’s Afrocentric/socially conscious side? “I’ll Take You There” finds Big Daddy Kane dreaming of utopia, where there is no crime or poverty, “war [is] nothing but a game on Atari,” and “where peace and harmony is everyone's culture”. And he closes the album with “Word to the Mother (Land)”, his first of several entries into rap’s Afrocentric canon. Here, Kane affirms the indelible link black Americans have with their ancestors’ land of origin: “I say the mother, as in the motherland/But on the other hand, another man/Tackled and shackled our ancestors/But we beat him with freedom, so let’s bless the country that we all came from.” Preach on, brother!
As for his fellow Juice Crew member and labelmate Marley Marl, he’s on hand for all the tracks as previously mentioned. He crafts crushing funk-laden beats for his battle raps (e.g. “Raw” and “Set It Off”), while smoothing it out on the soulful tip for the more socially-conscious numbers (e.g. “I’ll Take You There”). As he was the first producer to use James Brown samples, thus kicking off a mid- to late-'80s trend in rap, expect no different in Long Live the Kane. However, it is interesting to know that some of his production here still holds up against contemporary beats that use the same samples. For instance, “Set It Off” uses James Brown’s “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved”, the same song that Salaam Remi and Nas would use for Hip Hop Is Dead’s “Where Are They Now?” almost two decades later. Listen to both tracks and compare the two. If you dare say “Where Are They Now?” is better than “Set It Off” instead of the other way round, I have a resounding slap waiting for you.
Being that Long Live the Kane is such a great album, it is easy to disregard its minor flaws, you know, like the fact that Marley Marl blatantly samples the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” without making any significant changes to distinguish it from the original (even down to the title). Or that Kane uses the same verses in “On the Bugged Tip” for “Just Rhymin’ With Biz”. Or that he is so off-tune in the sung chorus of “The Day You’re Mine”, it’s pretty funny. Or that close to the end of “Word to the Mother (Land)”, Big Daddy Kane – as a Five Percenter - utters a few questionable things: “Here’s the real deal upon our skin color/Lay down white, yellow, red or pink/But the color of black is most dominant!” Umm, leave that kind of rhetoric to those Nazi bastards, brother man!
Long Live the Kane is a trendsetting, definitive record that reveals Big Daddy Kane at his ravenous, battle-hungry best. It is largely due to him that rappers in the golden age of hip-hop began to rap faster; indeed, he is one of the pioneers of that style. And his exhibition of his abundance of pure lyrical skill would help other rappers of the period step their games up, not to mention spawn a host of imitators afterwards. Even as twenty years have passed by, Long Live the Kane still remains on its high perch and is yet to be toppled by any subsequent album in its sheer concentration of punchline ingenuity. Funny how, in “Ain’t No Half Steppin’”, he has a second thought on opening a school of emceeing because he is worried that it would be “quite confusing” for people “to remember the originator.” With an indelible and unsurpassable imprint like Long Live the Kane, he need not worry much about that, though. Bow down, you pathetic peons.
TRACK LISTING:
1. Long Live the Kane
2. Raw (Remix)
3. Set It Off
4. The Day You’re Mine
5. On the Bugged Tip
6. Ain’t No Half Steppin’
7. I’ll Take You There
8. Just Rhymin’ With Biz
9. Mister Cee’s Master Plan
10. Word to the Mother (Land)
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