In late ‘93, I was 13 years old and had just finished playing Friday night hoops in my rec league. After one of our games, I needed a ride home so jumped in with Stefan. Stefan was actually our referee for the game and was in high school. My older brother was cool with him and he just seemed like he was always onto something new so I watched his moves. We hopped into his whip and he pulled his detachable face case out of his back pocket. He snapped that case open and pulled out his detachable face and snapped it into his dashboard. The lights lit up and that cassette deck was pristine.
Stefan popped out the tape that was in the deck already. I didn’t want to stare at the process because then it’s like I was jacking his style. You had to show respect in these situations. But if I were to guess, in the early 90’s what he might have been listening to it would be something like this.
I’ll have to save Compton’s Most Wanted for another day….
Stefan proceeded to pull out the Case Logic and that unzip reveal was always something. When he hit that first corner in the unzipping process I could get a glimpse of what he was listening to lately. But I played it cool… Again, not trying to jock style.
Then he grabbed a cassette case, opened it, and took a cassette out. Threw the cassette in his deck and turned that volume dial quickly so this could bump… He knows I’m up on game with rap…. so you know he’s bringing heat.
And in the next few moments my life was changed when he played a track for me. Back in ‘93, you could hear new music on the radio, on music videos, and at good record stores. Word of mouth was everything with music and you always had to have your music homies. The ones who would put you on an artist early and you could do the same for them. For Stefan, he knew that Brotha Lynch Hung was special and he knew I hadn’t heard it yet. So he wanted to put me on to what the San Diego streets were starting to bump…. Once I heard “Had 2 Gat Ya”, I was addicted.
I needed that song in my rap collection. I had to have my parents drive me around to different music stores nearby so I could try to buy the album on cassette or at least the cassingle. Those options for record stores near us in San Diego were The Wherehouse, Tower Records, Sam Goody’s, and Music Trader. If my parents didn’t drive me, I would walk 3 miles to the mall so I could sift through their new cassette tapes heading right to that “B” section in the rap area. I looked to see if I could quickly find it and saw the spine of the cassette tape which said, Brotha Lynch Hung, 24 Deep, Black Market Records. The album artwork for the cassette was some of the hardest shit I had ever seen. I’m 13 years old coming off of falling in love with “Had 2 Gat Ya” and then I see this cover for an artist I had never seen before. Yup… no internet back then. So when I saw this dude laid up in casket with a sawed off shotgun and some locs I saw my new alter ego in my mind starting to take shape.
All I knew from Brotha Lynch Hung was “Had 2 Gat Ya” so when I ripped off that plastic and threw that tape into my walkman… I didn’t know that I was going to be hit with an intro like this and as I opened the liner notes I saw Lynch’s face for the first time with the words telling me about his life. In late ‘93, I just found out that my new favorite rapper was already dead? What?? I was just getting into the intro and now I’m finding out that he died? Fuck… This is some deep shit.
I don’t think I took this cassette out of my walkman for a month. It’s all I listened to. Do you know how much street cred I gained from the kids in school when I had the Brotha Lynch cassette tape? Instant credibility on campus for being a gangsta rap head. There was only a small group of us who were on Lynch at that time and knew how special he was. He made his own beats, he wrote all of his raps, he had an amazing voice with a legendary flow. While “Had 2 Gat Ya” was my first favorite song from Lynch, the bassline on “24 Deep”, and the layers and structure of the beat caught me. Lynch raps his ass off on the track telling hood stories and near the end of the song, we get to hear X-Raided actually on a pay phone from jail… I thought it was the coolest thing. To me it wasn’t any more street than this. And that’s why 24 Deep remains one of my favorite gangsta rap projects of all time.