The intro is sometimes the first part and sometimes it’s the last thing you record, but either way, it’s one of the most important parts of your record. It’s the first thing the audience hears when they crack open the packaging on your CD or spin it up on iTunes, and it’s their introduction to what this whole experience will feel like. To what you’re trying to say. It’s your preamble. Your “all men are created equal.” And artists sometimes get it right, and sometimes they don’t.
If you get it right, it creates an excitement for the rest of your project that can’t be underestimated. It keeps us listening, and keeps us hoping long after the first or fifteenth miscue. For these 11 artists, their intro’s or first songs drew you in to an experience that, hopefully, left you better for it when it was all over.
So, here, we give you 11 emcees who we think got their relative first moments correct before giving you the rest of their albums.
Logic – “Intro”
Project: Under Pressure
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Producer: 6ix
Believe it or not, this one sample’s Kanye West’s “Bound 2,” and it’s sort of perfect considering that one was about love. Personal love, though. Here, Logic chooses to open his career defining debut with all the ideas he’d flesh out on the album. The personal pressures that define a person’s trajectory (of which he has had more than his fair share), not giving up, remembering the Golden Era, but adding your own spin to it. And there’s so much more. Will I go platinum? Will I fail? Will they feel me? All of that running along the spine of him harmonizing, “I’m a get up today, I don’t know how but I’m gonna find a way.” And closing with his own voice manipulated to sound like children with the lines, “You can really do anything.”
J. Cole – “Intro”
Project: 2014 Forest Hills Drive
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Producer: J. Cole
Raw and vulnerable over a piano, J. Cole’s voice rumbles in with the shroud of millennial angst cradling him. “Do you wanna, do you wanna be… happy?” All of us have asked ourselves this question, and how many think pieces have been written about that very idea, that millennials wish to be above all else… happy? Not rich, not famous but… happy? Somehow Cole says all of that without saying so much as anything. So, “Do you wanna, do you wanna be… happy? Do you wanna be free?”
Run The Jewels – “Jeopardy”
Project:Run The Jewels 2
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Producer: El-P
“I’m fittin’ to bang this bitch the fuck out!” Killer Mike opens with what should be Run The Jewels credo. On this list, artists tried a few different things to both create something that feels like a beginning and something that could stand on it’s own. Run The Jewels excels in both categories as they do what they do too well, assault your senses with Killer Mike’s infectious energy and El-P’s rhythms cutting through the fat in your brain to the fleshy parts. “Jeopardy,” begins this album by tearing your face off. Not a bad way to go in.
Mac Miller – “Inside Outside”
Project:Faces
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Producer: Thundercat
Mac Mill’ switched his style up a while ago, and the jazzy Mac Miller is more our speed. Here, L.A.’s very own Thundercat laces Mac’s opener to his 2014 mixtape/album Faces, a 20 something song carnival of Mac’s languorously slow drawl-raps over weary sounding production that smells of an amazing album to come. “Inside Outside” begins the excursion with a soul tinged flourish.
Vince Staples – “Fire”
Project:Hell Can Wait
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Producer: Anthony Killhoffer
Vince Staples is the closest thing Hip Hop has right now to Holden Caulfield. The interview we did with him found the young Long Beach emcee calling out phonies left and right. So it’s no surprise the dark, yet redemptive Hell Can Wait opens with a chorus that mouths “I’m prolly fittin’ to go to hell anyway.” Here, and throughout, Vince knows the house is burning and has no problem letting the whole damned thing go up in flames. Until he changes his mind, of course.
Big K.R.I.T. – “Kreation”
Project:Cadillactica
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Producer: Big K.R.I.T.
“Kreation” opens with a woman’s voice saying “Let’s create.” And it is the beginning of the beginning for K.R.I.T.’s Cadillactica. It’s a fictional land, a universe that lands at the bullseye of K.R.I.T.’s corner turned aesthetic. A place where Outkast and UGK influences harmonize over synthy backends where K.R.I.T. sing/raps “let’s be perfect.” And, in a surprise to no one at all, all this world building ends with the ying/yang duo calling the place Cadillactica.
FKA Twigs – “Preface”
Project:LP1
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Producer: FKA Twigs
Produced by the FKA one herself, this hymnal from some exalted future or some anciently transcendent past featured the best of what we came to love about Twigs. It was pure sci-fi with something primal and human at the heart, and it’s these sorts of blends that separate her from whatever competition there is out there for her. It’s not easy, at all, to do even one thing especially well, but here she is juggling multiplicity with an easy eroticism that was more than a breath of fresh air.
Flying Lotus – “Theme”
Project:You’re Dead!
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Producer: Flying Lotus
For an album that can only be considered something mind boggling like “future jazz,” the “Theme” jumps in perfectly with an avalanche of drums, cymbals, horns, and something sweet and sinister underneath. It shakes you, confuses you to the message. That, “You’re Dead!” and this isn’t the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. In our interview with the heavy feeling FlyLo he had this to say about other worlds:
“It’s funny because I think that I spent so much of my life thinking that when we die we’ll get all the answers to what this was all about. And, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started thinking that that’s not the case. I think that when we die, it’s just another thing where we’re going to be like, “What the fuck is this?” Still not understanding anything, still confused, and still trying to figure out why we exist and all that stuff.”
And all that confusion, all that doubt is shaped in You’re Dead! like FlyLo were some giant galactic blacksmith.
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Common – “The Neighborhood”
Project:Nobody’s Smiling
Producer: No I.D.
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Teaming up with old partner No I.D., Common once again reinvigorated his career by jumping into his old city’s fray with both feet. “The Neighborhood” sets the tone perfectly for a conversation on gnarled hopes, blood and concrete that has been the violent backdrop of Chi-town lately. The Curtis Mayfield sample digs you as Cocaine 80’s and Lil Herb burrow through the beat to get at what’s behind it: this is Common’s love letter to Chicago, and he doesn’t just show up when things are good.
Open Mike Eagle – “Dark Comedy Morning Show”
Project:Dark Comedy
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Producer: Toy Light
The lead track off of Open Mike Eagle’s Dark Comedy is a Toy Light art rap special. It wanders in slow and twingy like something from Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, and the glitches drop and you realize this isn’t something you’ve quite heard this way before. The Chicago native also shows the sheer diversity coming out of the windy city, but, in context, it establishes the palette you’ll be working with all album. Random sounds jutting out from behind corners like pop culture boogie men in your mind. A preposterous range of influences and references you’ll have to sift through to truly grasp something’s meaning — if there is anything there at all. This kind of new Rap scares some, but they’d be missing out on one of the things the Internet generation truly has to offer: a confluence of cascading influences wrapped un-neatly into something that bum rushes your intuition.
Your Old Droog – “Quiet Storm Interlude”
Project:Your Old Droog
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Producer: Your Old Droog
The first track off the once mysterious Your Old Droog’s eponymous EP was our introduction to the grand adventure that was revealing the Coney Island native’s identity. Who was this mysterious figure cutting a NYC shaped silhouette into the Rap blogosphere? He sounded so eerily like Nasir Jones that the comparisons came fast and furious. Producers — amateur and otherwise — were out here slowing down his verses to show how easily Nas could have tweaked his pitch so no one would know it was him. The Internet was in full Sherlock Holmes’ mode as the question on everyone’s lips was “Who is Your Old Droog?” Nas had done this type of identity switch before, could it be him? It turns out it wasn’t, as once and for all the his identity was revealed at his first sold out show at New York’s Webster Hall. The Russian/ Ukranian product took off his hoodie to reveal a fresh fade and an old, crumpled New York swagger. But we’ll always have “Quiet Storm Interlude” and a past filled with questions as that raspy could-have-been-Nas voice crackled, “This that shit you roll a blunt to.”
