Eternal

COVER STORY
Volume 14, Issue 52
Published April 18th, 2007

Hometown Heroes Bone Thugs-n-harmony Return With a Stunning New Album and a Ruthless Determination To Be Recognized For Their Pioneering Style

By Peter Relic

Geography has always played a major role in hip-hop. Rappers represent for their coasts, their cities and their neighborhoods to a point indivisible from identity. Just as West Coast gangsta rap pioneers NWA are synonymous with the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, and the late Notorious BIG loomed large over the pre-millenium New York City landscape, it was Bone Thugs-n-Harmony who gave Cleveland — specifically, the intersection of East 99th Street and St. Clair — its name in the game.



For hip-hop fans, the guys in Bone are living legends, one of the genre's greatest groups of all time. Even Clevelanders with only general pop culture savvy know the group as the most significant musical act to emerge from this city in the past 20 years. But for those who blithely dismiss rap music or remain ignorant of the group's extraordinary staying power in the fly-by-night entertainment world, isn't it enough that Bone — with all due respect to the Kai Haaskivi-led Cleveland Force of the '80s — is the only true championship-caliber, high-profile dynasty Cleveland has produced in the past half-century?

When the unsigned teenage act first left Northern Ohio in a Greyhound bus on November 23, 1993, the destination was Los Angeles. LA was home to Eazy E, a former member of NWA and the mentor who signed Bone to Ruthless Records, the label that in 1994 released the group's epochal Creepin On Ah Come Up EP. That disc sold over 4 million copies off the strength of the smash classic "Thuggish Ruggish Bone" and the Eazy-E feature "Foe Tha Love of $." Thus began an explosion of group, solo and spin-off releases that would eventually account for whopping worldwide sales of some 35 million albums.

Bone's legacy, however, is more than just a Great Wall's worth of platinum plaques, more than the 1997 Grammy award for the single "Tha Crossroads." A decade later, Krayzie Bone has just nabbed another Grammy, this one for his appearance on Chamillioniare's "Ridin'." Today, when hip-hop and R&B radio's ubiquitous format features both singers and rappers on nearly every hit, it's easy to overlook that it was Bone who pioneered this blend of harmony singing and hardcore rhyming. Then there's the fact that Bone, as much as anyone, was responsible for breaking down hip-hop's once-dominant coastal parochialism.

New York-based critic and hip-hop media magnate Sacha Jenkins (co-creator of VH1's The White Rapper Show) wrote some of the earliest pieces about Bone in the national press. Today, Jenkins remembers, "In 1994 I traveled with Bone to Memphis to write a profile for Vibe magazine. I was like, "Who are these weirdos from Cleveland?' At the time Southern rap and Midwestern rap hadn't hit yet at all; Cleveland was nowhere. In terms of rap you were either from LA or NY, period. I remember sitting with them in their bus while they were getting their hair done, and they were listening to their own music and singing and rapping along. They weren't even trying to impress me, the journalist; they were just feeling their music. There was no pretension. There's something very hypnotic about their music. It's otherworldly, and they believed so much in what they were doing. They were really early with that hybrid of rapping and singing, but what made it interesting is that it wasn't a half-way flow. It's not like, "Oh, they can sing a little, then they rap some.' They sing as well as a classic soul or R&B group, no question. Their complex, quick, off-the-tongue, twisting rhyme flow is not something many people can pull off, let alone be in key and have serious melodies! Bone did more than you need to do to be successful. So in an era when a lot of lowest common denominator stuff gets a pass, Bone is still just on another level."

Despite such critical hosannas and a fanatical fanbase, Bone remains under-acknowledged. But now, with the entire record industry in a gnarly nosedive, and albums by normally sure-fire hip-hop hitmakers tanking, Bone find themselves once again signed to a major label — Interscope Records, home of Eminem, Gwen Stefani and Snoop Dogg — and primed to clamber back atop the leader board with their new album, Strength & Loyalty, due in stores early next month.

ON A RECENT balmy Los Angeles evening, Anthony "Krayzie Bone" Henderson, Charles "Wish Bone" Scruggs and Steve "Layzie Bone" Howse have convened to discuss their past, present and future in a room at West Hollywood's innocuous-looking Le Parc Suite, a hotel that, psycho-geographically speaking, holds potent memories for Bone.

"In 1994 we lived in this hotel," Layzie Bone says wistfully, looking around the modestly appointed room.

"We had our low-rider six-four Impalas parked downstairs," Krayzie Bone chimes in. "Mine was tan just like Ice Cube's in Boyz In Tha Hood!"

Layzie chuckles. "Eazy would come through and pass out on our floor. First time we met Tupac was right here. He pulled up in a black 500 Benz, right here in front of this building."

"We was going in and 'Pac was coming out," says Krayzie, beginning to hollow out a splendiferous Swisher Sweet cigar. "He told us, "Y'all song "Crossroads,' I used to wake up to that song in my cell every morning. That's what got me through.' We was like, "You got any weed?' He broke us off and was like, "We gotta get in the studio together!'" The resulting collaboration, "Thug Luv," from Bone's 1997 double album, The Art Of War, is one of the gems in a crown that makes the group the only act to have collaborated with legendary hip-hop MCs 2Pac, Eazy E, the Notorious B.I.G. and Big Pun during their lifetimes.

The tradition of high-caliber Bone collabos comes to the fore on Strength & Loyalty, which features spots from Akon, The Game, Will.i.am, Twista, Bow Wow, Mariah Carey and Grammy-winning gospel singer Yolanda Adams, to name just a few. The reason for the dense guest list is twofold: first, to increase Bone's marketability (their last album of all-new material to go platinum was 2000's BTNHRessurection), and second, to shore up their sound in the absence of stringent high-harmony provider Byron "Bizzy Bone" McCane (who, despite numerous inquiries to former management and record-label reps, proved to be unreachable).

The volatile Bizzy has long been Bone's most notoriously unreliable member, not showing up for videos and tours, and he did not appear on last year's Koch Records-issued group album, Thug Stories. (The guys explain away that album's mediocrity as a result of each member having recorded their vocals separately in their respective cities of residence: Wish in Cleveland, Lay in ATL and Kray in LA.) Yet, in 2005, when a handshake agreement brought Bone Thugs-n-Harmony to Swizz Beatz' Full Surface Records label (subsequently licensed to Interscope), Bizzy was originally in on the deal.


Boyz in tha hood - Bone shooting a new music video with director Rich Newey.

"Then, as usual, he did his Bizzy disappearance," sighs the normally jolly Wish Bone, pensively swilling his glass of cognac. "So me and Layzie went down to Houston, found him in a hotel, and he said some off-the-wall shit like, "I'd rather just be out here doing how I'm doing, do what y'all gotta do.' Immediately, I was like, "Fuck this nigga!' That's been going on our whole career. People look at it like Bone beefing on each other, but it ain't really like that. For some reason, Bizzy always just had different agendas."

Krayzie shakes his head. "It came at a bad time," he says. "Right after we had the whole company pumped up like, "We got Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, all of 'em!' I wish Bizzy the best. But if you ain't about Bone business, don't come around. We know Bizzy was a valuable member of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. But we artists, we can work around that."

Layzie, who in 2004 made a duo album with Bizzy called Bone Brothers, seems the most hurt.

"Bizzy like a little brother to me," he says. "I love him very much. At the same time, you gotta live your life and learn your lessons. After many years of trying, I figured out I couldn't help. It wasn't even bitter. I was mad more than anything. It was like, "Dude, we gotta get back!' But one person don't make Bone by himself, so what can we do? Protect the legacy and keep it going."

THE BONE LEGACY began on the cracked pavement of East Cleveland, in a neighborhood that typifies a once-thriving inner city traumatized by the collapse of Midwestern industry. Like many classic acts who feed on artistic telepathy, the guys have known each other since childhood. "Me, Layzie and Flesh, we cousins," explains Wish. "Our parents went to school together, and I moved onto Remington with my grandma because I wanted to kick it with them."

After Krayzie linked up, and Columbus native Bizzy hit town, the nascent group began gathering around garbage-can fires in sub-zero temperatures to doo-wop all night, singing songs by the Spinners, the Temptations, Jodeci and Cleveland locals Men At Large.

"My mom would tell us, "Y'all singing!'" says Layzie. "And we said, "Naw, that's soft. We rapping!'" After learning each other's rhymes, they'd harmonize over the punchlines, creating their own distinct vocal mesh.

As Wish recalls, "When we started doing talent shows, niggas be like, "Y'all different as fuck!' And by then, it was too late; it was our style."

In combination with such soulfully stacked singing, Bone's rapping deploys hyperspeed elasticized cadences that slide in and out of the pocket and boomerang around the beat. Early on, other claimants of that rhyme style ranged from Chicago's Do Or Die to Memphis' Three 6 Mafia, and beefs with Bone over fast-rap rights were a common thing. Come 1997, though, Bone obliterated all stutter-step comers when they linked up with the Notorious B.I.G. to make "Notorious Thugs," the rapacious collaboration that can still induce more chills than the avian flu.

"When we did our verses, Big hadn't done his verse," Layzie says. "We went in and knocked ours out, and Big was like, "Yo I'ma take this home. Y'all killed it, B!' So we didn't hear [his verse] until the album [Life After Death] came out, and by that time he had died. So when we heard it, it was bugged out! That was the first time that somebody flipping our flow was an honor. Everything before that was like, these niggas ain't giving us our props! But when Big did it, that was flattering. The reigning king of New York did our flow!"

Big's linguistic legerdemain aside, the rapper whose style bears the closest kinship to Bone's flow is Chicago's Twista. Today, Layzie recalls how nearly a decade ago, after the Chi-town MC had come at Bone Thugs with a song called "Crooks County," he took a trip to confront the competition.

"When all the beef was going down about who had started the style," Layzie says, "me and my wife drove there. I'm thinking, anything can happen but it need to stop here." Layzie and Twista wound up spending four days together. "We kicked it like, "Aw man, it's the industry trying to turn us like that!'" The pair made the song "Midwest Invasion," which wound up appearing on Layzie's 2005 album, It's Not a Game. "So from there on we kept in touch." On Strength & Loyalty, Bone and Twista ride again, toasting their respective hometowns on "C-Town" — and Twista sets things off with the order, "Feel the unification of the thugs in the middle of the map!"

During the long gestation of that unification, however, something else was happening in Cleveland's hip-hop scene: No rappers other than Bone were able to break out and have any significant commercial success. While thriving locally, other Cleveland hip-hop artists found themselves trapped between a Bone and a hard place: sound like Bone and be considered a copycat, but if you sounded different, well, the rest of the country would wonder why you didn't have that Cleveland sound.


They tried - Bone sings its new single on a chilly Cleveland afternoon.

It wasn't until 2006, when Ray Cash broke out with his debut album, Cash On Delivery, a bona fide nationwide hit, that another Cleveland MC truly stepped to the fore. In a sign of the torch being shared (if not quite passed), Layzie appeared in the video for Cash's breakthrough single, "Bumpin' My Music." Cash is currently at work in a lakefront studio stockpiling tracks for his follow-up album.

Ray Cash: "The thing with Bone is, Eazy E signed them, and if you got Eazy, then you got the streets on your side. The streets respected Bone everywhere. And Bone took it all the way to winning a Grammy! So guys was like, "How we gonna follow that up?' Bone were five guys and that was their style, no one else could duplicate it, so why should I try? It was so original that everybody coast-to-coast had to recognize it. People were like, "Oh, in that city, that's how they rap.' Then you had Twista coming from Chicago, so everyone assumed that the Midwest is a fast rap sound, that that's how the Midwest get down. It took some time, but now Chicago is recognized as being diverse, with Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West, Da Brat, Common, Bump J. See, a city can have a diverse rap scene. That's what I've proved about Cleveland. I don't have that fast rap style. I'm more conversational rap. There's niggas doing things in Cleveland that's different, that's diverse, and now people are gonna come and start gettin 'em. Diversity is key. Be original, but stay true to your city. Your foundation and base has gotta be where you from, because, after all, it is hip-hop."

BONE FARES BETTER on Strength & Loyalty than some other classic groups (The Commodores without Lionel Ritchie, say, or the Clash sans Mick Jones) who have soldiered on without a founding member. And, really, Bizzy isn't the only one missing. Longtime satellite Bone Thugger (and Layzie's biological brother) Flesh-n-Bone has been incarcerated since 2000 for various gun charges. Again, artists work around it. A song on the album called "The Future" flips an old Freddie Jackson sample behind a previously unused Flesh verse and Layzie states his readiness "to break up Flesh up out of the pen." Such a drastic measure may prove unnecessary, since Flesh is up for parole next year. "Can't wait 'til Flesh get out!" says Layzie. "He walked through hell. He proclaim he a better man than he ever been on the streets."

Before he went in, Flesh dropped his second solo album, 5th Dawg Let Loose, just one instance of a Bone boy going for solo dough. (Bizzy's racked up seven on his own, perhaps instilling in him a sense of self-sufficiency that has contributed to his bowing out of the group.) Krayzie has come the closest to becoming a breakout solo star, on the back of 1999's platinum-certified double-album, Thug Mentality. For a moment there, individual moguldom loomed large, but turn-of-the-century upheavals in the record industry doomed the venture. "When I was really about to launch my label, I was signed to Loud Records," Krayzie says. "I had artists working on projects, they had budgets. But [then Loud] shut down in the middle of everything, and after that, I never got a chance to really get my label launched."

Their lone-wolf ventures notwithstanding, the members of Bone have always returned to the artistic alchemy that comes from togetherness. Wish, the only member of Bone who has never released a solo album, breaks it down: "We can go in the studio alone, but ain't nothing like going in the studio with your dawgs, smoking that blunt, sitting around like, "Dawg, that's what the song title is! Hell yeah, add this and this!' Nothing like that!"

As Sacha Jenkins puts it, "You can talk about group chemistry, but with Bone, it's not even chemistry. It's family. With family, you've got a brother and you don't always hang out with him or even always like him, but at the end of the day, that's your brother. There's an unspoken brotherly love. Bone have had their successes and their failures individually, but collectively, what each guy brings to the table is so unique that it wouldn't work with anyone else. I'm sure them keeping going has something to do with economics, but it isn't forced, it's real. People in hip-hop respect them because of that."

After many years of various label frustrations (their bitter legal tussles with Ruthless Records and Eazy's widow Tomica Woods-Wright are the stuff of legend), Bone are stoked to have both Swizz Beatz' musical acumen and industry juggernaut Interscope behind them. As Wish says, "We relevant; we ain't gone nowhere. Interscope giving us love, knowing we can bring good material to the table. It's undeniable because we got some shit!"

Considering the state of the record industry — if the bottom hasn't fallen out, it's about as sturdy as a piece of soggy cardboard — artists can no longer rely on record sales as their primary source of income. Enter Bone's manager, Steve Lobel, who has worked with the group since he was a promotions man at Relativity Records in 1994. (As Layzie testifies, "Our manager Steve has been with us for 13 years. We've been chasing the dream together the whole way. This is Steve's hard work bringing us back to where we know we should be.")

Lobel's memories of the first time he met Bone at the Newark, New Jersey airport are indelible. "It was right after the release of "Thuggish Ruggish Bone.' Their hair was wild; they were lookin' like bums. Eazy brought 'em to New York and we went to the Tunnel, the legendary club on 27th Street at 12th Avenue. We ran into Ice Cube and LL Cool J, and at the time, there was a lot of coastal beef, because Ice Cube had left NWA and gone to work in New York with the Bomb Squad. I was with Eazy, so I was like, "If it's gonna pop off, I got your back.' He went over to Cube and they talked. It was cool. Afterwards when we got outside, I told Eazy to get in the van. He was like, "Naw, I'm going to walk to the hotel.' It was 10 degrees outside. Eazy was wearing a Pendleton flannel; it's freezing. He went back to California having contracted pneumonia and died of AIDS. I never saw him again."

After Eazy's death, Lobel became Bone's de facto go-to guy. "I was their A&R, their road manager, their stylist, security, everything," he says. "I've been there when they had hits and when they were down, going through problems. Years ago, I used to go on the road with them with five buses, traveling 50 people deep. I had a heart attack. So before we went back on the road, I had to prepare myself. I'd sleep on the floor at my house with a boombox at my head, smoke up the room with cigarettes and eat only McDonald's, because that's what life on the road with Bone is like."

Lobel pauses for a moment, amazed to consider amidst the endless bustle how much he's been through with Bone. "The music industry needs real music again, not this howdy-doody stuff. Bone's still doing 10 shows a month, all sold-out, with no songs on the radio. They have a psychotically loyal fanbase. This is going to be our year. We're going to show the world once again. Bone deserves it. A lot of people doubted Bone, but we got all these deals."

The deals Lobel is referring to are far more than a recording contract. The release of Strength & Loyalty comes with the concurrent launch of Bone's signature model Phat Farm sneaker, a collectible set of Bone dolls, a gem-encrusted Bone timepiece made by Freeze Watches, even a Bone VISA card — all tie-ins hustled up by Lobel.

Aside from the provisional provolone promised by tie-in promotions, Bone are foremost hungry for a degree of recognition they feel they've never quite been given. While Krayzie nearly leaps out of his seat to protest — "Like these muthafuckas didn't take our style! That Justin Timberlake shit that's out right now sound like me!" — the more lucid Layzie takes a long view of their legacy. "Bone Thugs-n-Harmony gave something to music that will always be there from now on," he says. "Sorta like NWA did when they came out with gritty hardcore attitude. Then everybody was like, "Oh, we can really tell it like it is?' When people found out they can sing and rap at the same time, that became the thing to do. That's what solidified Bone as legends."

Source

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BTNH THE WORLD'S ENEMY DECEMBER 22ND

ratty_tattat

Mad fuckin propz. I'm from the CLE and the industry never gave Bone their dues. They make real MUSIC. Not everyone and their mother just rappin bout pushin yay and murderin in every track. The rap game is so watered down its nice to have some real music for a change.

ratty_tattat

Oh and i forgot to mention that their flow is the sickest in the game. End of story.

DemonicSinn

Props...Damn good read...Bone iz goin platinum again I hope

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IDGAF about bein Neg Repped. You can't trade rep points in for money, nigga. LOL

ViolatedProbation

yea ill prolly cop that, just caz bone thugs are legends and they deserve to sell a few records plus im anxious to see if its good. bizzy cracked out though, heard him on an interview on some houston radio station and dude was seriously on crack or somethin else.

Compton\Queens OG

umm aint dis da story form da xxl wit wayne on da cover