So what if the vibe at MTV’s Video Music Awards was a trifle Barnum & Bailey? It made for great theater:
In one ring, flashpots flashed. Blue-wigged dancers turned backflips as ubiquitous rapper-producer Sean “Puffy” Combs and his sidekick, Mase, descended on ropes from the sky, rapping a dead man’s song: “Mo Money, Mo Problems” by The Notorious B.I.G. (a k a Biggie Smalls).
In Ring No. 2, the mood changed for a pull-out-all-the-stops tribute to Biggie, Puffy’s “I’ll Be Missing You.” Sting crooned “Every Breath You Take,” while a chorus of gospel singers hummed along and Puffy chanted his homage to the slain Biggie.
In Ring No. 3, Biggie’s widow, Faith Evans, sang in a mournful wail, while the R&B group 112 provided backup and the audience members waved their lighters, transforming Radio City Music Hall into an orgy of light and sound.
Employing a cast of thousands to bolster a hip-hop hit isn’t just a trick used to wow a jaded, all-star crowd at an awards ceremony. Part pragmatism, part nepotism and part creative expression, these days the “posse cut” is the surefire ticket for rocketing straight to the top of the charts.
Indeed, Combs’ debut CD, “Puff Daddy & The Family: No Way Out” – featuring the late Notorious B.I.G. (who produced the CD), Busta Rhymes, raunchy girl rapper Lil’ Kim, teenager Foxy Brown, The Lox, Faith Evans and 112, Mase, Carl Thomas, Jay-Z, Black Rob, Ginuwine and Chicago rapper Twista – has been hanging out in the No. 1 slot in Billboard’s Top 200, outselling pop acts like Oasis, the Spice Girls and the born-again Fleetwood Mac for weeks. This week, Combs has been nudged to the No. 2 slot, outsold only by another master collaborator, Master P.
On Billboard’s R&B album chart, 15 of the top 20 cuts involve joint acts. Ten of the top 30 general-market singles and 10 of the top 30 general-market albums are also collaborations. Of the top 30 rap singles, 20 are joint ventures.
“The collaboration is just dope,” says Heavy D, rapper and senior vice president of Universal Music Group, who has collaborated with Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson and Monifah, among others. “It’s definitely a valuable commodity. When you put three hot people onstage, people just rush to it. Nothing is guaranteed, but that’s about as guaranteed as you can get.”
Flip to MTV or BET or The Box, and you’ll be confronted with a barrage of rapping best buddies, decked out in hip-hop couture, popping in for guest appearances in video after video after video: Salt from Salt n Pepa rapping about Jesus with Kirk Franklin and God’s Property. Puffy with Mariah Carey. Puffy with Biggie. Biggie with Puffy. Lil’ Kim with a battery of rapping ladies in “Not Tonight.” Lil’ Kim and Puffy. Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige. Janet Jackson mixing it up with QTip and Joni Mitchell samples. Foxy Brown and Dru Hill. Foxy and Puffy. Aaliyah and Ginuwine. Ginuwine and Aaliyah and Timbaland and Magoo and Missy and Puffy. Missy and Aaliyah . . . And yes, there’s even Puffy tap dancing with Savion Glover of Broadway’s “Bring In Da’ Noise, Bring In Da’ Funk.”
The collaboration craze gets to be almost comical. Gregg Diggs, music director for Black Entertainment Television’s music video shows, whose business it is to memorize the intimate nuances of each song, confesses that he sometimes has trouble remembering just which artist belongs with which song.
The confusion is understandable. It doesn’t matter what they’re saying as much as how they look and sound while they’re saying it. Creating an aura of excitement as they rap about “playas” and “playa hatas,” “Benjamins” and “sex in expensive cars,” over recycled pop tracks and “phat” beats, the rapper’s message is clear: We’re in the money. If you want to be “down,” buy this record.
“Years ago, kids bought into the live artists,” says Daniel Glass, president of GlassNote/Mercury, who helped launch the careers of Wilson Phillips and Jon Secada, and whose newest act, the rap group Nastyboy Klick, collaborates with R&B veteran Roger Troutman. “Kids today are buying into the records, not the artists. They’re buying into the scene, the producer, the street vibe.”
More often than not, if it’s 1997, Puffy is the producer behind the curtain. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)
As comedian Chris Rock, MTV’s Video Music Awards emcee, cracked, “You can’t make a video without Puff Daddy in it. You can’t even get a permit to make a video unless you have a Puff Daddy part already figured out. I saw Puffy in a country video the other day. Is that Puffy with Travis Tritt?”
There’s a reason for this, argues Tricia Rose, a professor of history and Africana studies at New York University whose doctorate dissertation, “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America” (Wesleyan University Press of New England), chronicles the roots of rap.
According to Rose, most rap artists don’t last longer than a single or two. The music industry, she says, doesn’t nurture hip-hop artists with multirecord deals the way it does alternative rock groups. Hip-hop and R&B are seen as ephemeral music, here today with a platinum record, but most definitely gone tomorrow. It is producers like Puffy and Dr. Dre, who have demonstrated that they can consistently crank out hits for a variety of artists, that claim any longevity.
The result? A studio-driven genre with artists who are dependent on a producer’s imprimatur to make mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money.
“It’s a very rapper-eat-rapper environment,” Rose says. “You have a get-your-money-now-and-run philosophy. To make it, you have to sustain a tremendous amount of visibility in order to induce sales. So you have to be associated with the next hot thing. You have people trying to touch whatever’s turning to gold very quickly.”
And so everyone, it seems, has got the collaborating bug.
Sometimes collaborators are brought in to bolster the shaky skills of the main act. And sometimes, collaborations are a way to introduce a new artist.
Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott carved out a highly successful career for herself as a songwriter/producer, the invisible force behind gold and platinum hits like Aaliyah’s “If Your Girl Only Knew” and Jodeci’s “Want Some More.” So when it came time to launch her own CD, “Supa Dupa Fly,” she called in the troops to appear in her “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” video, directed by Hype Williams, the Steven Spielberg of hip-hop videos.
“I said, `Yo, I’m doing this video. I want ya’ll to come in and come down with me,’ ” the Virginia native recalls. “I wanted them for the feel of it, for the love of it, for them just being my friends. I wanted them to support me.”
And so, even though she raps alone in this particular single, Elliott appears, clad in a Hefty bag, while her comrades — Lil’ Kim, Da Brat, 702, Timbaland, Ginuwine, Aaliyah, Busta Rhymes, YoYo and, yes, Puffy — make slyly silent cameos in her video. “The Rain” became, in the first week it was released, one of the more requested videos on The Box.
Calling in your crew is a shrewd marketing move. But often, these joint efforts are done just for the improvisational fun of it.
On “Chocolate Supahighway,” Spearhead, the alternative hip-hop group fronted by rapper Michael Franti, jams with Stephen Marley (son of Bob), alternative folkie Joan Osborne and Marie Daulne of the Afro-Belgium group Zap Mama. Most of them just happened to be in the studio when Franti was recording and joined in. Meanwhile, rap trio Salt n Pepa are in the studio recording their CD, which features a single with pop/rocker Sheryl Crow.
In his critically acclaimed solo CD, “The Carnival,” Wyclef Jean of the Fugees features his “Refugee Allstars,” among them Lauryn Hill, Pras, the Neville Brothers, salsa diva Celia Cruz, Bob Marley’s original backup singers, the I Threes, and Creole crooners Jacob Desvaviuex and Jocelyn Berouard — but no sign of Puffy.
“The record labels don’t care,” Elliott says. “Lil’ Kim’s label may feel like, `You don’t need Missy, you’re already platinum.’ But it’s the fact that we’re friends and we always include each other. That’s good. If Kim is still hot and I’m not so hot and she puts me on her record, it’s putting me in the spotlight again. If anything, we’re trying to bring it together so we can all blow.”
The collaborating fever isn’t confined to hip-hop or R&B, two music forms that are increasingly merging. Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney got together to sing the corny “Ebony and Ivory” in the ’80s. Keith Richards and Eric Clapton traded licks, as did Mick Jagger and David Bowie. The alternative rock group Sugar Ray features a cameo turn by Jamaican dance-hall toaster Super Cat. Aerosmith jammed with rap pioneers Run DMC.
Of course, you don’t have to be among the living to be a collaborator with a hit record.
Take the case of R&B songbird Minnie Riperton, in a scenario straight out of “Tales From the Crypt.” The multi-octave crooner had time to release only a few tracks of a new album before succumbing to breast cancer in 1979. Her untimely demise didn’t stop her producers, who went back into the studio and remixed “Love Lives Forever,” featuring “duets” with Peabo Bryson and Michael Jackson. Later, Natalie Cole did the same, recording a series of duets with her late father, Nat King Cole.
Nashville’s Hank Williams Jr. made a habit of crooning alongside his late father. Lorrie Morgan took advantage of misfortune, using the voice of her late husband, Keith Whitley, to spin a few duets.
Morbid, yes. But even these beyond-the-grave partnerships illustrate a central point: As long as there are musicians, they’re going to get together.
In fact, rap’s fascination with the posse cut is derived from the legendary collaborations of bebop greats, according to Scoop Jackson, Vibe columnist and author of “The Darkside” (Noble Press). John Coltrane jammed with Miles Davis. Charlie Parker hooked up with Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Thelonious Monk and Davis. They played apart. They played together. They just played. The format didn’t matter.
“The whole bebop thing and this connection to hip-hop is that everybody embraced everybody,” Jackson says. “It’s like, `Everybody’s trying to do their own thing, but together, we’re strong.’ “
So from the very beginning of hip-hop in the mid- to late ’70s, emcees would battle it out at the mike. Each rapper had eight bars to get his or her rhyme on, showing off verbal dexterity in convoluted rhyming boasts. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five duked it out with the rival Sugar Hill Gang on wax. Rap records became a way for different camps to talk to each other — a sort of musical newspaper, hashing out the issues of the day.
As a result, rap acts aligned themselves with certain camps: The Wu-Tang Clan is a fluid gathering of almost a dozen rappers from Staten Island, N.Y.; Bone Thugs-N-Harmony has a spinoff group, Mo Thugs, featuring acts from their hometown, Cleveland. Puffy’s posse is embodied in the acts floating in and out of Bad Boy Records in New York; the California contingent can be found in imprisoned Shug Knight’s Death Row Records.
There is a dangerous side to the posse cuts, most notably, the infamous East Coast/West Coast duel of the rappers, with gangsta rappers like Ice Cube trading threats and boasts back and forth. Many believe the conflict led to the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, sworn enemies of each other. But even they once collaborated in the studio. There’s a single currently on the hit list, rapper Trapp’s “The Realist,” which features the two dead men.
Rapping duels notwithstanding, the posse cut is mostly a benign venture with the potential to rake in big bucks.
Frequently, a pop star like Mariah Carey will join forces with a hip-hop act in the hopes that a little street credibility will rub off, winning over a skeptical hip-hop audience.
“You see collaboration in grass roots music where there is an organic theme, like hip-hop, jazz or the blues,” says Bill Stepheney, formerly of Def Jam Records and current president of Step Sun Music. “You won’t see it in mainstream pop or formulaic music.”
In other words, says Stepheney, you’ll see Mariah and Puffy.
“But you won’t see Mariah and Celine Dion in the pop milieu, saying, `Let’s represent.’ “
