On LL Cool J, And Knowing What You Came To Do Even When The World You Helped Shape No Longer Reserves A Spot For You

"In a fair world, we’d recognize all our totemic artists with a curtain call"

I will never ask you to read about music without giving you some to listen to. Enjoy the playlist below. There is a second playlist at the end of the piece.

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On December 28th, 2024, LL Cool J, or perhaps more realistically, whoever runs LL’s social media, read, praised, and shared something I had written with his more than three million Instagram followers…

To understand what a surrealistic thrill this was for me, I must take you back to a cul-de-sac in Cotati, CA. It's 1988, and seven-year-old Sayre is repeatedly rewinding and rapping along with a cassette tape…

No rapper can rap quite like I can/ I'll take a muscle-bound man and put his face in the sand/

If you think you can out-rhyme me, yeah, boy, I bet/ 'Cause I ain't met a motherfucker who can do that yet/

Trendsetter—I'm better; my rhymes are good/ I got a gold nameplate that says "I wish you would”/

I incessantly recited these rhymes, hoping to apprehend their power. Back then, I didn’t understand the intricacies of LL’s patterns or the politics of his producers crafting a canvas for Black teenage braggadocio out of a Q-siren. All I knew was that this was the boldest, vividest, most exhilarating stuff I’d ever heard, and that I wanted more of it.

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Johnny Cash was sixty-one years old in 1994 when he and Rick Rubin began work on the album that would become American Recordings and later “American One,” the first of their six collaborations. Cash had been a star since the mid-1950s. An icon, dressed for a funeral and haunted by demons, Cash would become synonymous with a signature strain of cool rooted in scofflaw stoicism that still resonates more than twenty years after his death.

I don’t know what brought Cash to Rubin, but I know where their collaboration took him. By the late 1980s, in the eyes of the music industry, Johnny Cash was an artistically homeless former addict in recovery. Columbia, his record label for nearly three decades, dropped him.

Johnny Cash’s “American-era” reanimated “The Man in Black” by removing everything nonessential. With sparse arrangements and a stark, grayscale aesthetic, Cash’s American saga showcases a fateful yet faithful American outlaw, wizened in his winter, sharing lessons learned by singing songs he loves.

In a fair world, we’d recognize all our totemic artists with a curtain call like Johnny Cash got—an opportunity to remind the world, and perhaps themselves, of what only they can provide.

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Ten years before his first work with Cash, Rick Rubin could be found in an NYU dorm with a 16-year-old James Todd Smith. There, Rick and Todd created a monster capable of rocking bells and vibrating concrete. At once, a teen idol and a battle rapper nonpareil, LL Cool J was, as both a sound and a persona, a harbinger of hip-hop’s coming status as the dominant pop culture form in the world.

LL’s initial rise occurred as hip-hop was reinventing itself almost annually. Just as Run-DMC’s rejection of disco breaks and elaborate costumes ended the Sugar Hill era, LL’s ability to infuse battle raps with pop appeal signaled the end for solo MCs like Kurtis Blow and Kool Moe Dee. By the 1990s, the metaphysics of Rakim, the rhythmic acrobatics of Kane, the unabashed vulgarity of NWA, and the sophisticated politics of artists like Chuck D and KRS-One had rap’s first crossover sex symbol looking outmoded by contrast.

Faced with rivals, doubters, and detractors, LL Cool J quickly became hip-hop’s maestro of the reminder. Going as far back as “Mama Said Knock You Out,” the defining arc of LL’s four-decade career could be charted by connecting the moments when he delighted in jogging memories.

Ask Russell Simmons who put 'em up in that skyscraper/
Ask my dogs up at Fubu, who made ‘em major/
LL…, now who's next to need a favor/

The first artist signed to Def Jam. LL really did come up with Alpo and Rich Porter; he really did rock a FUBU flex-fit in a Gap commercial, and he really did best every battle competitor he clashed with for almost two decades.

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It was a Tuesday morning in May of 1998. I know it was a Tuesday, because new CDs weren’t allowed to hit retailers' shelves until Tuesday mornings, and this particular Tuesday marked the arrival of DMX’s major label debut, It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot. The first 50,000 copies came with a bonus disc called “Survival Of The Illest” that included unreleased tracks from Def Jam artists like Ja Rule, who’d just been signed, Onyx, Def Squad, Method Man, and others. The final track on the collection was “The Ripper Strikes Back,” LL Cool J’s hotly anticipated response to a song called “2nd Round K.O.” by a since-forgotten rap phenom called Canibus.

Canibus spent 1997 appearing on remixes, mixtapes, and delivering freestyles live on the hip-hop radio shows of record. He had set himself apart from an elite crop of up-and-coming MCs, including Eminem, who used the same path to ascend to the top of the charts just one year later.

I was 17 then. I spent weekends seeking out freestyle battles and after-school afternoons bouncing between record shops. I would catalog and recite Canibus’ verses with the same obsessive frequency I had LL’s words a decade prior. Canibus told us, “The earth had one sun, (but he) walked with three shadows,” and he spit it so well that it sounded plausible, …until that Tuesday morning.

I can’t recall the name of my high-school classmate, a senior who had left campus to make the purchase right as record stores opened, but I recall verbatim what he said before beckoning me and a few others into an empty classroom. “I think LL won.”

He pressed play on a small stereo that must have belonged to the teacher whose classroom we’d commandeered. Huddled around the device, our group behaved like we did watching two of our peers battle in the courtyard during lunch. We reacted audibly to every punchline, eyes widening as the song’s energy escalated. And then, the deathblow…

“Ask Canibus, he ain’t understanding this/ Cause 99% of his fans, don’t exist/”

This reminder was a judo move. LL had taken the most potent line from Canibus’s “First Round KO” and flipped its full gravity back upon the unsuspecting youngster, breaking the back of his nascent career.

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Johnny Cash was 62 when American Recordings arrived in 1994, 38 years and 10 months after his debut singles “Cry, Cry, Cry” and “Hey Porter” first hit the airwaves. LL Cool J delivered The Force on September 6, 2024, 39 years and 10 months after Def Jam released his first single “I Need A Beat.” He had just turned 56.

LL Cool J may be best known as an actor to many. He has been on network TV for twenty seasons and appeared in as many films. Others may know him as a smiling sex symbol/spokesman. He has hosted the Grammys—a body that once had to be shamed into recognizing rap music during its broadcast—five times.

Four decades removed from Rubin’s dorm room and twenty years removed from his last effective reminder—an entirely unsuspected 40-bar recitation of his unparalleled CV over Jay-Z’s classic “Dead Presidents” instrumental—LL Cool J enjoys a level of stardom that obscures the fact that he remains the mold from which all NYC emcees take their shape. His bucket hat, gold jewelry, and b-boy stance have become every bit the hip-hop signature that Cash’s funeral denim remains within rural rockstar Americana.

LL had been plotting a return to hip-hop for several years. In 2019, it was announced that his fellow Queens-born hip-hop immortal, Q-Tip, would join the project. Like Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin in the American years, LL and Tip spend their collaboration luxuriating in the space made by diminishing relevance. The pop charts have no use for these two anymore, the Grammys famously dismissed ATCQ’s culminating masterpiece, and hip-hop’s contemporary mediasphere requires a Redditor-like fluency with gossip and social media that would be beneath these massively accomplished fifty-somethings.

The Force wisely avoids attempting to chase the zeitgeist or prove that the elder statesman can still keep up. Instead, it’s a return to first principles. “Passion,” “The Force” and “Post Modern” all showcase Cool J rapping in styles and cadences that sound like the natural evolution of a master; still unmistakably LL without re-heating rhythms and cliches from his glory days.

Q-Tip’s production belongs to the same oeuvre as Tribe Called Quest’s masterful 2017 farewell, and uknowhatimsayin¿, his excellent 2019 collaboration with Detroit emcee, Danny Brown. This means a wholesale rejection of anything radio-friendly, sounds from various genres, and drums that snap, crackle, and pound at the top of the mix. “The Force” surges with the noisy energy of a buzzing hornet, the nodding two-step of “Post Modern” provides new context for the Rubin-esque guitar stabs that were featured in so many of LL’s early hits, and “Black Code Suite” transforms at its halfway point to showcase Gambian griot Sona Jobarteh on the kora. The “Farmer’s Boulevard Superhero” and “The Abstract Poetic representing from Queens” return home, bringing four decades of worldliness with them.

The album’s peak is “30 Decembers.” Here, LL takes us along as the anonymity of a pandemic-era N95 mask allows the multimedia superstar to ride the NYC subway for the first time in three decades.

A lifelong hero's journey, and I'm always en route
What has now become wine started off as mere fruit
It's been thirty Decembers out here, nurturin' roots
It's been thirty Decembers, thirty Decembers
Thirty Decembers, this world ain't like I remember

Todd made himself a megastar, and activities as fundamental as riding the train through his city became beyond Cool J’s ken.

With The Force, LL becomes the first hip-hop artist to deliver quality music forty years in. Stripped of commercial expectations, he and Tip are free to discard an industry that was ready to discard them and their ilk years ago. But then, when there is no audience to chase, no proving ground left to dominate and all that matters is whatever made music matter to you in the first place, comes the come back, one more reminder of just who the fuck you are.

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