As long as E-40 continues to actively release Revenue Retrievin’ albums in pairs every year, like the current editions of Graveyard Shift and Overtime Shift, the book on the honorable Earl Stevens won’t be closed anytime soon. But when that day finally comes, a lot of us will fondly look back at his debut album, The Mailman. Before the streaming MP3 rip was en vogue, you either had to live in the Bay Area or find a generous person who was willing to dub a cassette copy of the album for you. For many, the hilarious “Captain Save A Hoe” was the jewel of that 1993 album, but much like every E-40 offering, there was at least one song with some serious social commentary masked by 40 Water’s humor.
“I had a song back in the days called ‘I Practice Lookin’ Hard,’ and that’s what we used to do when I was coming up,” 40 recently said in reference to track number four from The Mailman. Not that the track number mattered, since you weren’t fast-forwarding anything on The Mailman anyway. “You’d practice with the mean mug and everything. We sold a whole bunch of records without no radio play or none of that, man. It was just all word of mouth. But my thing is now, I don’t even practice looking hard no more. I practice looking silent.”
There’s just so much of this video to like. It’s almost tempting to call director Dwaine Terry’s opening sequence stereotypical or even cliché; it features someone draped in Karl Kani pouring out a 40 ounce over the chalk outline of a murdered peer. But revisiting situations like the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant is a reminder that not enough has changed since this song was recorded nearly 18 years ago. And there’s a sad irony in how the camera pans over to 2Pac as E-40 is rapping about people getting murdered over a glare.
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The cameos from Boots Riley, Spice 1 and the late ‘Pac speak to the camaraderie you still see in Bay Area artists today. And if you’re close to or past the 30-year-old age marker, the references to parents playing Bid Whist, 22-ounce bottles of “crooked I” and “leaving your screen-door open” bring back some old school memories. Skip ahead to the 2:18 mark, where E-40 is rhyming about a bleak job market, and the lack of upward mobility in most impoverished communities, and one thing becomes pretty clear. Earl can spit about drinking, smoking and fucking with the best of them, but despite its now dated, analog look, “I Practice Looking Hard” was way ahead of its time.
Related: E-40 Revenue Retrievin’: Overtime Shift, Revenue Retrievin’: Graveyard Shift.
