8. Eric B & RakimFollow The Leader
That was one of those moments where I realised I ain’t done shit! When I heard that, I threw shit at the radio. Damnnnn! It was just so far from where I thought I was at, and what I thought about hip-hop. I knew hip-hop was gonna work, but when he came along I could suddenly see it becoming jazz, I could see it becoming classical. You could take a Rakim song and do it opera. I did it! I did that with a choir. But that’s what I think about his music. Lots of them come out, that’s great, but you don’t get no Rakims.
You diss people to step up a level – that’s one of the ways you got famous, dissing someone and having them interact with you. You don’t find many people spitting Eminem tryna get famous! I would not want Eminem talking about me under no circumstances! I grew up playing the dozen. But the art of that is to hurt your feelings, and he do it with just a sheer amount of information. He can give you so much information, so harsh, that by the time you finish hearing it, you realise that you’d made an assumption that he didn’t even say. To us it was the art of playing the dozen in school. How close could you get to each other’s faces? Talking about them bad. And don’t lose your cool – if you get mad, you lose. How can you do that? Well, to do it poetically, fast and in your face. That’s the best way. It’s about saying that stuff without flinching. And once you realise you can do that and then get paid?! You can become Dr. Dre, Jay-Z… wow!
Rakim is the only one that can give you a compliment and it hurt. Rakim ain’t the one to write no poem to your girlfriend. He’s as good complimenting as he is dissing somebody. When you got lyrics like that… and then he got that Five-Percent Nation Muslim tone, that sound like he’s teaching. They learn those lessons at school, that monotone. He got that.
