WingsOfAnAngel
Banned
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 3
Words: Brendan Frederick
Illustration: Maceo Eagle
In the summer of 1994, the Gravediggaz and the Flatlinerz brought hip hop’s dark side to the forefront with a new genre dubbed “horrorcore.” With rhymes about serial killers, Satan worshipping and bloodthirsty movie villains, had hip hop lost its damn mind? Ten years later, Mass Appeal salutes an influential fad and wonders.
Rappers like to be feared. Some MCs intimidate foes with their ruthless battle rhymes, while others give you an unflinching glimpse into a violent life of crime. Whatever the approach, you’ve got to scare the shit out of somebody in order to be taken seriously in hip hop. But what happens when hiphop goes too far? Horrorcore, that’s what.
Ten years ago, New York rap was still being nursed back to health. In `92, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic [Death Row] dropped, and suddenly record companies lost interest in rhymesayers from the near East. In early `94, Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready To Die [Bad Boy] and Mobb Deep’s The Infamous [Loud, `95] were still months away from bringing light back to the Empire State. Record companies like Def Jam, which had built an empire on New York hip hop, suddenly found themselves fumbling for a new sound that would reestablish them financially and culturally on a national hip hop scene overwhelmingly dominated by chunky George Clinton grooves and gangsta tales. All of Def Jam’s star artists—cats like Public Enemy, LL Cool J and Slick Rick—were now struggling to maintain their fan base. Russell Simmons’s team desperately needed new blood, and the only New York artists that had given Def Jam success since `92 were a group of four crazy cue balls from Queens called Onyx (who were discovered by the late, great Jam Master Jay of Run-D.M.C. fame). After Onyx’s debut, Bacdafucup [`93], went platinum, Def Jam became interested in signing more acts with menacing styles. So yet again, Jam Master Jay stepped up with a group of scary dudes from Queens: the Flatlinerz.
Named after the Kiefer Sutherland film Flatliners [Columbia, `90] about a group of med students who play with death, the Flatlinerz was comprised of crew members with names like Tempest, Gravedigger and their fearless leader, Redrum (who just so happened to be the nephew of Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons. Nice.) “We all used to hang out at the Bushwick [Evergreen] cemetery,” Redrum remembers. “We would do shit like walk on top of a bus or run across the highway—anything that would risk your life. We would call that ‘flatlining.’” They would take Onyx’s in-your-face gangsta persona one step further—maybe a step too far, even. Their first single, “Live Evil,” sports lines like “Six, six, six / I’m sick, so sick / Your body’s on a crucifix,” over a track that sounds like the climax of The Exorcist [Warner Bros., `73], complete with off-key strings and haunting, gothic-style choral vocal samples. The Flatlinerz sold just under 200,000 copies and were promptly dropped by Def Jam. Today, most people remember the Flatlinerz from the `01 MTV documentary Def Jam Uncensored, where former employees recounted the record company’s biggest missteps.
While horrorcore seems thematically outrageous—lyrics about death, Satan and violence fill the album like blood filled the hallways of the hotel in The Shining [Warner Bros., `80]—it actually evolved organically from battle rhyming. It’s easy to see where the extreme style came from when you revisit songs like Big L’s `93 record “Devil’s Son” or Main Source’s `91 classic “Live at the Barbeque,” where Nas spits, “When I was 12, I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus.” Back in those days, the line between a vicious battle rhyme and a horrifying fantasy was thinner than ever.
While the Flatlinerz recorded their album U.S.A. (Under Satan’s Authority…) [Def Jam, `94], another group was already making waves with a similar style, blending hardcore battle rhyming with the dark imagery of horror flicks. The Gravediggaz formed in `92 and brought together four “rejects” from the New York rap scene. Prince Paul, the producer who had made a name for himself with his wildly creative production for De La Soul, orchestrated the group. For all his talents, Paul was being regarded more and more as a has-been in the industry, due to his inability to get his label Dew Doo Man Records (distributed by Def Jam) off the ground. There was money, and music videos and industry buzz, but the label went nowhere.
“It kind of got me into a depression,” says Prince Paul today, who has gone on to become one of the most critically acclaimed producers in hip hop. “That’s the reason why I put all the guys in the group together. Sometimes, being an artist, you hear that people think you’re wack. So I wanted to get these guys that I thought were really dope and show people that nobody can say we’re over until we say we’re over.” Also known as the Undertaker, Paul brought together three MCs who had all been dropped by Tommy Boy Records as solo artists—Poetic (aka the Grym Reaper), Frukwan (aka the Gatekeeper, aka Paul’s onetime Stetsasonic bandmate) and RZA (aka the Rzarector, aka the mastermind behind the Wu-Tang Clan).
The group’s debut album 6 Feet Under [Gee Street, `94] (originally titled Niggamortis) was rife with Five Percenter references and dark imagery spewed over diverse, sample-happy production. On their first single, “Diary of a Madman,” RZA viciously rhymes, “Ahh!! I cry / As the blood drips inside of my eye / Refusin’ to die / Visions of hell tormented my face / So I chewed my fuckin’ arm off and made an escape.” While the content of the lyrics was decidedly gory, their intent was not to make gimmicky horror-hip hop. “When RZA talks about chewing his own arm off and making an escape, it had the horror imagery, but it was all mental stuff, dealing with coming up out of your situation,” Paul adds. “Or acknowledging all the horrors around you, comparing the crackhead to a zombie. I think the concept got lost [on people].” With the success of Biggie and Nas in `94, New York hip hop was stuck off the realness, and there was little tolerance for rappers who were perceived as horror-movie caricatures. At a time when “keeping it real” became the staple, the extreme fantasy of horrorcore had no place. Sure, the Gravediggaz would pick up some fans due to their Wu-Tang association and Prince Paul’s creative production, but the squad was ultimately a commercial failure with seemingly little effect on hip hop.
While New Yorkers wrote off horrorcore as a one-year fad, in America’s middle states, hip hop dealing with the frightening side of life had been around long before `94 and would continue long after. In the late `80s, Houston’s Geto Boys were putting the South on hip hop’s map while laying the foundation for gangsta rap along with N.W.A. Whereas N.W.A stuck to assaulting its listeners with a celebration of the criminal life, the Geto Boys took it one step further. In `90, on their groundbreaking track “Mind of a Lunatic,” Bushwick Bill, Scarface and Willie D took a break from their usual routine and rapped from the perspective of crazed, bloodthirsty serial killers.
“Have you heard the saying, ‘To catch a thief you have to think like one’? That’s the way we approached that song,” remembers Geto Boy Bushwick Bill. “I believe that everyone has a dark side. Hell, I’ve seen a normal man after his wife and kids have left him [adopt] the mind of a lunatic.” When their independently distributed album was picked up by Rick Rubin’s Def American Records, the parent company refused to release it based on lines like Bushwick’s “She begged me not to kill her / I gave her a rose / Then slit her throat, and watched her shake `til her eyes closed / Had sex with the corpse before I left her / And drew my name on the wall like helter skelter.” The album was too much for Geffen Records, so Rubin opted to strike a deal with Giant Records instead of changing the lyrical content. “Geffen is the Tinkerbell of the industry,” Bushwick says with a giggle.
It’s difficult to say just how much of an impact the Geto Boys’ horrifying fantasies had on the rest of the nation, but the early `90s saw a slew of artists taking gangsta rap and pushing it over the line of reality to create morbid personas. Ganksta N-I-P, an artist who was an important collaborator with the Geto Boys, expanded on the extreme style he helped to pioneer with his `92 album The South Park Psycho [Rap-A-Lot]. Los Angeles underground group Insane Poetry appeared on the cover of their debut album, Grim Reality [Ichiban, `92], in straightjackets, devoting one half the album to rhyming from the perspective of serial killers and Satan worshipers, and the other half to brutally honest social commentary. And Sacramento’s Brotha Lynch Hung broke onto the scene in `93 with his EP 24 Deep [Black Market], beginning a 12 album career that would stretch the limits of hip hop’s good taste.
But the most influential artist to explore hip hop’s fascination with death during this period was Detroit’s Esham. The MC spent his summers with family in Amityville, Long Island (the town where the film The Amityville Horror [Professional Films, `79] took place); there, he listened to both hip hop and death-obsessed heavy metal like Black Sabbath. His debut album, Boomin’ Words From Hell [TVT, `90], reflected this combination, breaking all the rules of rap. “People didn’t know what to do with it at first,” Esham says. “They called it ‘devil rap.’” Esham himself called it “acid rap,” and its potency made him one of the first rappers from Detroit to gain national exposure. “[In rap], everybody had started repeating each other. We were incorporating Metallica and Slayer’s imagery into our lyrics,” says Esham. “But the Geto Boys also influenced me a lot. I can’t sit here and say that they didn’t.” While the Geto Boys kept one foot grounded in reality rap, Esham was without a doubt the first artist to unapologetically bring rap’s morbid side to the forefront. He sold respectable numbers throughout the `90s, with his popularity peaking in `94 when the Gravediggaz and the Flatlinerz brought some extra attention to the style he had pioneered.
While most hip hop heads laughed off horrorcore in `94, what was known in the underground as “the wicked shit” lived on. “When I tell you I created white rap, I literally did,” Esham boasts. Today a slew of artists from Detroit openly acknowledge being influenced by Esham—from Insane Clown Posse to Kid Rock to Twiztid; they all have blended rock influences with Esham’s acid rap style. These days, the underground is teeming with horrorcore MCs. “The market is strong. Horrorcore fans get excited quickly about new releases,” says Mark Kempf, a Detroit entrepreneur whose company Long Range Distribution has been signing horrorcore artists like Bedlam, Lavel, Cardiac and 2 Sins. Another underground artist named Mars has recently signed both the Flatlinerz and Ganksta N-I-P to his own Mad Insanity Records, anticipating the return of
But perhaps horrorcore isn’t as far away as we think it is. It’s hard to listen to artists like DMX without seeing the similarities. On his `98 song “Bring Your Whole Crew,” D spits, “I got blood on my hands and there’s no remorse / I got blood on my dick `cause I fucked a corpse.” Everyone from Twista to Three 6 Mafia to the LOX (originally known as the Warlox) consider their roots to be in horrorcore. Underground favorites Cage and Necro have built respectable careers combining violent battle rhymes and shock value. Even Eminem, the most famous rapper in the world, said on The Slim Shady LP [Interscope, `99]: “I’m a cross between Manson, Esham and Ozzy.” Although personal beef between Esham and Eminem’s crew D12 has severed any ties between the Detroit legends, Em’s early style sounds distinctly like a combination of Esham’s morbid lyrics and the outrageous humor of Redman.
With rap’s hardcore street tales constantly pushing the limits of decency in America, the line between “real” and horrifying is getting blurrier every day. “Our culture thrives on horror,” says Redrum from the Flatlinerz. “I feel like gangsta rap is much more of a gimmick than what we’re doing. These dudes that’s rapping gangsta ain’t even doing none of that stuff.” Yeah, that’s right. Dracula was pretty thugged out. Forget about an AK—it’s time to pack garlic! Boo-yah!
Illustration: Maceo Eagle
In the summer of 1994, the Gravediggaz and the Flatlinerz brought hip hop’s dark side to the forefront with a new genre dubbed “horrorcore.” With rhymes about serial killers, Satan worshipping and bloodthirsty movie villains, had hip hop lost its damn mind? Ten years later, Mass Appeal salutes an influential fad and wonders.
Rappers like to be feared. Some MCs intimidate foes with their ruthless battle rhymes, while others give you an unflinching glimpse into a violent life of crime. Whatever the approach, you’ve got to scare the shit out of somebody in order to be taken seriously in hip hop. But what happens when hiphop goes too far? Horrorcore, that’s what.
Ten years ago, New York rap was still being nursed back to health. In `92, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic [Death Row] dropped, and suddenly record companies lost interest in rhymesayers from the near East. In early `94, Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready To Die [Bad Boy] and Mobb Deep’s The Infamous [Loud, `95] were still months away from bringing light back to the Empire State. Record companies like Def Jam, which had built an empire on New York hip hop, suddenly found themselves fumbling for a new sound that would reestablish them financially and culturally on a national hip hop scene overwhelmingly dominated by chunky George Clinton grooves and gangsta tales. All of Def Jam’s star artists—cats like Public Enemy, LL Cool J and Slick Rick—were now struggling to maintain their fan base. Russell Simmons’s team desperately needed new blood, and the only New York artists that had given Def Jam success since `92 were a group of four crazy cue balls from Queens called Onyx (who were discovered by the late, great Jam Master Jay of Run-D.M.C. fame). After Onyx’s debut, Bacdafucup [`93], went platinum, Def Jam became interested in signing more acts with menacing styles. So yet again, Jam Master Jay stepped up with a group of scary dudes from Queens: the Flatlinerz.
Named after the Kiefer Sutherland film Flatliners [Columbia, `90] about a group of med students who play with death, the Flatlinerz was comprised of crew members with names like Tempest, Gravedigger and their fearless leader, Redrum (who just so happened to be the nephew of Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons. Nice.) “We all used to hang out at the Bushwick [Evergreen] cemetery,” Redrum remembers. “We would do shit like walk on top of a bus or run across the highway—anything that would risk your life. We would call that ‘flatlining.’” They would take Onyx’s in-your-face gangsta persona one step further—maybe a step too far, even. Their first single, “Live Evil,” sports lines like “Six, six, six / I’m sick, so sick / Your body’s on a crucifix,” over a track that sounds like the climax of The Exorcist [Warner Bros., `73], complete with off-key strings and haunting, gothic-style choral vocal samples. The Flatlinerz sold just under 200,000 copies and were promptly dropped by Def Jam. Today, most people remember the Flatlinerz from the `01 MTV documentary Def Jam Uncensored, where former employees recounted the record company’s biggest missteps.
While horrorcore seems thematically outrageous—lyrics about death, Satan and violence fill the album like blood filled the hallways of the hotel in The Shining [Warner Bros., `80]—it actually evolved organically from battle rhyming. It’s easy to see where the extreme style came from when you revisit songs like Big L’s `93 record “Devil’s Son” or Main Source’s `91 classic “Live at the Barbeque,” where Nas spits, “When I was 12, I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus.” Back in those days, the line between a vicious battle rhyme and a horrifying fantasy was thinner than ever.
While the Flatlinerz recorded their album U.S.A. (Under Satan’s Authority…) [Def Jam, `94], another group was already making waves with a similar style, blending hardcore battle rhyming with the dark imagery of horror flicks. The Gravediggaz formed in `92 and brought together four “rejects” from the New York rap scene. Prince Paul, the producer who had made a name for himself with his wildly creative production for De La Soul, orchestrated the group. For all his talents, Paul was being regarded more and more as a has-been in the industry, due to his inability to get his label Dew Doo Man Records (distributed by Def Jam) off the ground. There was money, and music videos and industry buzz, but the label went nowhere.
“It kind of got me into a depression,” says Prince Paul today, who has gone on to become one of the most critically acclaimed producers in hip hop. “That’s the reason why I put all the guys in the group together. Sometimes, being an artist, you hear that people think you’re wack. So I wanted to get these guys that I thought were really dope and show people that nobody can say we’re over until we say we’re over.” Also known as the Undertaker, Paul brought together three MCs who had all been dropped by Tommy Boy Records as solo artists—Poetic (aka the Grym Reaper), Frukwan (aka the Gatekeeper, aka Paul’s onetime Stetsasonic bandmate) and RZA (aka the Rzarector, aka the mastermind behind the Wu-Tang Clan).
The group’s debut album 6 Feet Under [Gee Street, `94] (originally titled Niggamortis) was rife with Five Percenter references and dark imagery spewed over diverse, sample-happy production. On their first single, “Diary of a Madman,” RZA viciously rhymes, “Ahh!! I cry / As the blood drips inside of my eye / Refusin’ to die / Visions of hell tormented my face / So I chewed my fuckin’ arm off and made an escape.” While the content of the lyrics was decidedly gory, their intent was not to make gimmicky horror-hip hop. “When RZA talks about chewing his own arm off and making an escape, it had the horror imagery, but it was all mental stuff, dealing with coming up out of your situation,” Paul adds. “Or acknowledging all the horrors around you, comparing the crackhead to a zombie. I think the concept got lost [on people].” With the success of Biggie and Nas in `94, New York hip hop was stuck off the realness, and there was little tolerance for rappers who were perceived as horror-movie caricatures. At a time when “keeping it real” became the staple, the extreme fantasy of horrorcore had no place. Sure, the Gravediggaz would pick up some fans due to their Wu-Tang association and Prince Paul’s creative production, but the squad was ultimately a commercial failure with seemingly little effect on hip hop.
While New Yorkers wrote off horrorcore as a one-year fad, in America’s middle states, hip hop dealing with the frightening side of life had been around long before `94 and would continue long after. In the late `80s, Houston’s Geto Boys were putting the South on hip hop’s map while laying the foundation for gangsta rap along with N.W.A. Whereas N.W.A stuck to assaulting its listeners with a celebration of the criminal life, the Geto Boys took it one step further. In `90, on their groundbreaking track “Mind of a Lunatic,” Bushwick Bill, Scarface and Willie D took a break from their usual routine and rapped from the perspective of crazed, bloodthirsty serial killers.
“Have you heard the saying, ‘To catch a thief you have to think like one’? That’s the way we approached that song,” remembers Geto Boy Bushwick Bill. “I believe that everyone has a dark side. Hell, I’ve seen a normal man after his wife and kids have left him [adopt] the mind of a lunatic.” When their independently distributed album was picked up by Rick Rubin’s Def American Records, the parent company refused to release it based on lines like Bushwick’s “She begged me not to kill her / I gave her a rose / Then slit her throat, and watched her shake `til her eyes closed / Had sex with the corpse before I left her / And drew my name on the wall like helter skelter.” The album was too much for Geffen Records, so Rubin opted to strike a deal with Giant Records instead of changing the lyrical content. “Geffen is the Tinkerbell of the industry,” Bushwick says with a giggle.
It’s difficult to say just how much of an impact the Geto Boys’ horrifying fantasies had on the rest of the nation, but the early `90s saw a slew of artists taking gangsta rap and pushing it over the line of reality to create morbid personas. Ganksta N-I-P, an artist who was an important collaborator with the Geto Boys, expanded on the extreme style he helped to pioneer with his `92 album The South Park Psycho [Rap-A-Lot]. Los Angeles underground group Insane Poetry appeared on the cover of their debut album, Grim Reality [Ichiban, `92], in straightjackets, devoting one half the album to rhyming from the perspective of serial killers and Satan worshipers, and the other half to brutally honest social commentary. And Sacramento’s Brotha Lynch Hung broke onto the scene in `93 with his EP 24 Deep [Black Market], beginning a 12 album career that would stretch the limits of hip hop’s good taste.
But the most influential artist to explore hip hop’s fascination with death during this period was Detroit’s Esham. The MC spent his summers with family in Amityville, Long Island (the town where the film The Amityville Horror [Professional Films, `79] took place); there, he listened to both hip hop and death-obsessed heavy metal like Black Sabbath. His debut album, Boomin’ Words From Hell [TVT, `90], reflected this combination, breaking all the rules of rap. “People didn’t know what to do with it at first,” Esham says. “They called it ‘devil rap.’” Esham himself called it “acid rap,” and its potency made him one of the first rappers from Detroit to gain national exposure. “[In rap], everybody had started repeating each other. We were incorporating Metallica and Slayer’s imagery into our lyrics,” says Esham. “But the Geto Boys also influenced me a lot. I can’t sit here and say that they didn’t.” While the Geto Boys kept one foot grounded in reality rap, Esham was without a doubt the first artist to unapologetically bring rap’s morbid side to the forefront. He sold respectable numbers throughout the `90s, with his popularity peaking in `94 when the Gravediggaz and the Flatlinerz brought some extra attention to the style he had pioneered.
While most hip hop heads laughed off horrorcore in `94, what was known in the underground as “the wicked shit” lived on. “When I tell you I created white rap, I literally did,” Esham boasts. Today a slew of artists from Detroit openly acknowledge being influenced by Esham—from Insane Clown Posse to Kid Rock to Twiztid; they all have blended rock influences with Esham’s acid rap style. These days, the underground is teeming with horrorcore MCs. “The market is strong. Horrorcore fans get excited quickly about new releases,” says Mark Kempf, a Detroit entrepreneur whose company Long Range Distribution has been signing horrorcore artists like Bedlam, Lavel, Cardiac and 2 Sins. Another underground artist named Mars has recently signed both the Flatlinerz and Ganksta N-I-P to his own Mad Insanity Records, anticipating the return of
But perhaps horrorcore isn’t as far away as we think it is. It’s hard to listen to artists like DMX without seeing the similarities. On his `98 song “Bring Your Whole Crew,” D spits, “I got blood on my hands and there’s no remorse / I got blood on my dick `cause I fucked a corpse.” Everyone from Twista to Three 6 Mafia to the LOX (originally known as the Warlox) consider their roots to be in horrorcore. Underground favorites Cage and Necro have built respectable careers combining violent battle rhymes and shock value. Even Eminem, the most famous rapper in the world, said on The Slim Shady LP [Interscope, `99]: “I’m a cross between Manson, Esham and Ozzy.” Although personal beef between Esham and Eminem’s crew D12 has severed any ties between the Detroit legends, Em’s early style sounds distinctly like a combination of Esham’s morbid lyrics and the outrageous humor of Redman.
With rap’s hardcore street tales constantly pushing the limits of decency in America, the line between “real” and horrifying is getting blurrier every day. “Our culture thrives on horror,” says Redrum from the Flatlinerz. “I feel like gangsta rap is much more of a gimmick than what we’re doing. These dudes that’s rapping gangsta ain’t even doing none of that stuff.” Yeah, that’s right. Dracula was pretty thugged out. Forget about an AK—it’s time to pack garlic! Boo-yah!
