A while back I was listening to "I Know You Got Soul," a single off Eric B. & Rakim's 1987 debut album Paid in Full. I'd heard it many times over the years, as any hip-hop head has, but this time a short passage at about the one-minute mark caught my ear and made my jaw drop: " I start to think and then I sink/Into the paper like I was ink/When I'm writing, I'm trapped in between the lines/I escape when I finish the line, I got soul."
I've been thinking about that passage the last week or so as I dance around the house listening to Eric B. & Rakim: The Complete Collection, a lovely career-spanning vinyl retrospective just released by Universal's Urban Legends imprint. Take a look at those lines, or better yet, listen to Rakim's deeply imaginative conception of the writing process. It's not just his thoughts that sink into the paper; it's his very being. He's trapped in between each line until it's finished, escaping back into the humdrum real world only when he's done. The conceit is worthy of John Donne and his fellow metaphysical poets. Except Donne didn't have a Bobby Byrd beat to rhyme over.
As this set reminds us again and again, Eric B. & Rakim were as responsible as anyone for making hip-hop modern, and for making it an art form to be taken seriously. They evolved over the course of the four albums they released together from 1987 to 1992, but from the start they were playing a different game than everyone else, a game defined by perfectly chosen beats and calmly innovative but forceful lyrical flow. In a genre that prides itself on self-actualization and aspiration, Rakim was the poet laureate of raps about rapping. His lyrics celebrated the discipline it took to create the music he loved, and his hunger to do it just right.
Take "Microphone Fiend," off the duo's 1988 sophomore album Follow the Leader (which celebrates its 30th anniversary Thursday, July 26). Rakim gets to the point immediately: "I was a fiend before I became a teen/I melted microphones instead of cones of ice cream." Here we have another hallmark of Rakim's trailblazing style: the internal rhyme, in which the rhyme comes within a single line, not just from one line to the next (in this case, "fiend" and "teen"). Nobody was really doing this before Rakim came along. He did it routinely. There's a word for an artist who changes the way things are done. That word is genius.
Eric B.'s contributions often get lost in appreciations of the duo, a natural if unfair oversight when you're paired with one of the greatest MC's to ever grab a mic. But please, don't sleep on the DJ. Eric B. was a master minimalist when Paid in Full dropped, a sonic surgeon with a divine ear. As the duo progressed through the next five years the beats and samples grew more dense and baroque, with increasingly varied tempo.
For my money Eric B. did his best work on their final album, 1992's Don't Sweat the Technique. The title track has a killer one-two sample punch of Kool & the Gang and Young-Holt Unlimited, combined to create one of the jazziest head-nodders in hip-hop history. "Know the Ledge," off the same album, is a speedy beats-per-minute banger that reflects the influence of Public Enemy and their Bomb Squad production team.
The set also includes two CDs of remixes, including the dance floor favorite "Seven Minutes of Madness — Coldcut Remix" of "Paid in Full," and a booklet with liner notes by Brian Coleman and the late Tom Terrell. You can also buy the albums individually, which is a big deal in itself: They haven't been available on vinyl in many a moon, and they've never sounded better.
As Rakim rapped on "I Know You Got Soul," "It's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you/Without a strong rhyme to step to." These reissues mark a glorious return.
