In 1995, one of LA’s biggest stars, 2Pac, was shot by a pair of muggers while in New York, the day before being found guilty of sexual assault. The rivalry between the two coasts’ hip-hop scenes was, however, far from healthy. Released on Sean Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment label, that album’s hit singles “Juicy,” “Big Poppa” and “One More Chance” (which matched Michael Jackson’s “Scream” for the highest-ever debut on the pop charts), led to the album shifting over four million units, turning Biggie into a major star. The following year was just as strong for local talent, with Nas releasing his monumental debut, Illmatic, and Notorious BIG issuing his first, hugely successful, solo venture, Ready To Die. 1993 saw the release of A Tribe Called Quest’s incandescent third album, Midnight Marauders, and the arrival of Wu-Tang Clan, whose groundbreaking debut album, Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, heralded a new era for gritty East Coast hip-hop.
However, while New York was struggling to compete commercially, its scene was far from stagnant. With Death Row Records releasing a succession of hugely successful G-Funk records by artists such as Tha Dogg Pound ( Dogg Food) and Snoop Dogg (whose 1993 debut album, Doggystyle, entered the Billboard charts at No.1), 90s hip-hop saw the West Coast usurp its Eastern counterpart as the dominant force in rap music, its artists becoming huge stars and establishing themselves as part of the mainstream. His revolutionary production style – christened G-Funk – was a canny mix of deep rolling bass, P-Funk-indebted grooves, and soulful vocals that smoothed the jagged edges of gangsta rap into a more accessible format which radio stations could get behind. Dre, whose own solo career would change the course of hip-hop history.įorming Death Row Records with Suge Knight and The DOC, Dre used the fledgling imprint to issue his stratospherically popular debut album, The Chronic, at the tail-end of 1992. Ice Cube had left in acrimonious fashion the previous year (releasing his debut solo album, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, to critical and commercial success), followed by Dr. By that point, however, the group had started to disintegrate.
The album moved way beyond its urban heartland and into the bedrooms of suburban youth, becoming the first album by a hip-hop group to hit No.1 on the Billboard 200. NWA’s 1991 follow-up, Efil4zaggin, showed the tables were beginning to turn commercially. The first few years of the decade saw 90s hip-hop classics from the likes of Public Enemy ( Fear Of A Black Planet), A Tribe Called Quest ( Peoples Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm, The Low End Theory), De La Soul ( De La Soul Is Dead) and Main Source ( Breaking Atoms).
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On the plus side, artistically, hip-hop was in rude health. To make matters worse, Gilbert O’Sullivan’s successful court case against Biz Markie, in 1991 (he’d used a sample of O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” without consent), threatened to change the very way the art form was constructed no longer could producers use multiple samples, for fear of litigation. The success of gangsta rap groups such as Los Angeles natives NWA, whose 1988 debut album, Straight Outta Compton, detailed street violence in an uncompromising and explicit style, led to many radio stations pulling effective boycotts against hip-hop’s more aggressive artists. Yet, at the dawn of the 90s, hip-hop faced something of a crisis.
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