Lord Willin'

Sound DNA

• Hip-Hop
• West Coast

• swaggering
• urban
• bassheavy

About

The boldest, brashest hip-hop debut of 2002 came from the Clipse, two brothers who loved knotty wordplay, spaced-out future-funk beats, and discovering increasingly gymnastic ways to describe the drug trade. Emerging from Virginia Beach—halfway between Outkast’s Atlanta and Mobb Deep’s New York—the Clipse’s Malice and Pusha T were steely, smooth, impossibly witty, and, thanks to longtime collaborators The Neptunes, reinforced by some of the most forward-thinking beats of the decade. Clipse and The Neptunes had readied an entire major label album in 1999 before getting dropped by Elektra. Once The Neptunes became the in-demand hitmakers of the moment, the Clipse was signed as the first rap group to their Star Trak imprint. Though The Neptunes were producing hits for Britney Spears and Usher, <i>Lord Willin’</i> was a completely uncompromising sucker punch of street-level slick talk and avant-garde beat work. The shockingly sparse lunchroom-table beat of the album’s lead single, “Grindin’,” was more minimal than anything on the radio—the rhythm and silences were as stark as anything by Run-DMC, but the glossy textures were teleported from the future. Malice felt it was too minimal, and Pusha T said he had a difficult time finding a way to even rap over such a peculiar beat, going as far as to write the song three times. However, their ice-cold delivery helped propel it to become the group’s first Top 40 hit, and a defining song of the early 2000s. The album’s follow-up single, “When the Last Time,” is ostensibly a club record, but swerves on abrasive synth noises, and features no shortage of the duo's ambitious rhyme combinations like “Obnoxious with the women/Hot tucked in the linen.” Not long after the release of <i>Lord Willin’</i>, the Clipse turned up on the debut solo single from Justin Timberlake, and helped launch a pop-culture phenomenon along the way. Meanwhile, a teenaged Kendrick Lamar honed his craft freestyling to the “Grindin’” beat. For decades, Pusha T stood forth as the critically acclaimed elder statesman of crime rap—and it was the unique rhyme combinations, vivid grind talk, breezy punchlines, and cool demeanor of the instant classic <i>Lord Willin’</i> that gave him his bona fides.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits