In a new interview, Rakim talks about how praise from other hip hop legends helps him feel relevant.
Ahead of his collaboration album with Masta Killa and Kurupt, Rakim talked to Vibe magazine about the music that influenced him, about his writing process, and about uniting hip hop across generational and geographic divides.
High hopes
The star-studded feature list has become one of the biggest talking points about that upcoming album. Admittedly, even the glimmer of possibility to hear Rakim, Jay-Z, and Eminem on one track, as the tracklist implied, was enough to get everyone excited. Fans on social media and big industry publications shared the news and let themselves hope.
Our staff room stayed more sceptical, though. Knowing that Matthew “M80” Markoff was behind the project, we expected to hear their interview clips rather than newly recorded verses. The question the interviewer asked Rakim only confirms this suspicion:
VIBE: I love that you included JAY-Z quoting one of your lyrics: “constant elevation causes expansion”. I also love how Eminem’s talking about how you basically revolutionised Hip-Hop with your style of rhyming.
The star power
Case closed. Once again, Matthew Markoff utilised his skills and resources to turn legally licensed interview material into headline-grabbing album features on the projects he executive-produces or handles A&R for. And judging by the paraphrasing in the journalist’s question, M80 used the same Crook’s Corner interview with Eminem as for the Dheezy collaboration with KXNG Crooked.
Make no mistake, Eminem has been praising Rakim for years; you can find a good quote from him as far back as a 2002 Mass Appeal interview. But to say it on audio and in the same interview that M80 has already had his hands on? It strongly points to the Crook’s Corner conversation. There, Eminem said:
To me, greatness is not only how well you do something, but if you were the first to do it. Rakim was the first person I heard start using inside rhyme schemes, and coming back at the end and hitting it. He did something that hadn’t even been thought of yet. He single-handedly pushed the genre forward to be more complex lyrically.
Respect between legends
Rakim confirms in the same Vibe interview that M80 used interviews for the album and presents it as M80’s creative decision. “With the JAY-Z and Eminem interview, M-80 felt that was something he wanted to show people and highlight”, Rakim comments.
This decision is very much in line with Markoff’s strategy of attracting more attention to the projects he works on by putting more popular names on the cover. And while some might feel uneasy about it, arguing that the music has to speak for itself, without tricks or borrowed star power, we can all agree that it is not easy to push a veteran rapper, even one as skilled and respected as Rakim, into the spotlight.
In any case, Rakim himself did not talk about the shout-outs used on his album as a marketing tool. He focused on what they meant to him personally. “It’s confirmation that what I do is relevant”, he said. “Two people that I admire and respect crazily, Jay and Eminem, to hear your peers show you love and speak on you in their moment is very humbling. I’m a humble person. I put art out, and I hope people love it. When I hear people like that show me love, it makes everything that I do make sense”.