This article originally appeared in the May 1994 issue of SPIN. 

“I was kind of hesitant about doing this interview,” announces Counting Crows‘ dreadlocked frontman Adam Duritz, “because I didn’t think anyone at SPIN liked us. I don’t really care about that particularly, but I didn’t want to participate in my own execution.”

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Duritz’s Charlottesville, Virginia, hotel room resembles that of a rookie traveling salesman. “My life is so much more complicated since I became a rock star,” he jokes, gesturing at the mess sprawling from his suitcase. I assure him I’m not here to do a hatchet job, but he’s close to the mark about no one at SPIN liking his band. Not that the Counting Crows need our endorsement: Their debut album, August and Everything After, has rocketed up the charts, moving from the bottom half of the Billboard Top 200 to the Top Ten in a matter of weeks, fueled by an appearance on Saturday Night Live and heavy MTV airplay of their video for “Mr. Jones.” As VJ Lewis Largent asked recently by way of introduction to the clip, “Could this Counting Crows album be any huger?”

So what’s not to like? Surely not the Crows’ well-crafted, tasteful, solid, earthy, Ikea rock. Surely not the band members themselves, all of whom have toiled in obscurity for years in the Bay Area music scene, beating their heads against all the familiar struggling-musician walls (apathy, poverty, jealousy) before coming together less than two years ago to form Counting Crows. Since then, things have more or less taken off — signed to DGC within six months, after a heated bidding war, for an advance so large local wags were dubbing the combo “Accounting Crows.” Rave reviews, constant touring, including stints with the Cranberries, Suede, and currently, Cracker. And now, the specter of imminent full-fledged pop stardom.

What’s bothersome about the Crows is that the band’s sudden success seems to imply a kind of musical conservatism on the part of the listening public that we’d rather not have to acknowledge. Even fans of the Crows point to the band’s strong traditionalism, and it really depends on which side of the old-fogey fence you sit whether this stuff attracts or repels you. This division was apparent well before the band had risen to its present empyrean heights; back in the Crows’ Bay Area stomping grounds, San Francisco Weekly critic Eric Weisbard reviewed the band’s debut album as “a sound only aging rock critics could find novelty in,” but, as Weisbard is the first to admit, apparently he was wrong. Dirk Richardson of the Bay Guardian, with whom Weisbard had a testy exchange in print around the same time, describes the band as “an updated version of classic rock. For me, I’m 44, and I don’t mind it at all. There are things they have in common with bands like R.E.M. and U2, but they also have a real solid foundation, obviously, in Van Morrison and the Band.”

Duritz himself approaches the comparisons with practiced aplomb; it’s obviously a question he’s getting used to answering: “I guess they’re fine with me. I certainly love those guys, and I’ve taken lessons from them and a lot of other people. You become more wary of all these misrepresentations of yourself, because they assume much larger proportions as we get bigger. It’s hard not to be nervous about them, even if they probably will all fade away. In a year and a half I don’t think I’ll have to deal with the Van Morrison thing anymore. All I can say is, it just seems like me to me.”

“Here’s how huge I am,” says Counting Crows drummer Steve Bowman, sitting with his bandmates in their tour manager’s hotel room. ”Dave the guitarist and I are sitting in one of our two vans, and a girl walked up. She stuck her head in and looked at us and said, ‘Are you guys the crew?’ And Dave said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘Well, you guys count, too.’ We’re her favorite band, and she doesn’t even know what we look like.” Bowman’s anecdote underscores the journeyman aspect of his comrades, who despite their current prominence still travel by van, still open every night for Cracker, and still (with the exception of the mop-headed Duritz) can’t get recognized by their own fans.

The band members (besides Bowman and Duritz, there’s Matt Malley, bass, Charlie Gillingham, keyboards, David Bryson, guitar, and Dan Vickrey, guitar) range in age from 27 to 32, and are mostly Bay Area natives with long résumés in the music scene there. After years of more or less disappointment, they find themselves reborn as successful working musicians, a title that eludes most of their friends back home and has them feeling pretty damn juiced, although in a mature sort of way.

“Being older makes you a lot more nonchalant about success,” says Gillingham ”Because we’ve all had friends who had good record deals and then got dropped, or been in great bands and been dropped or it didn’t work out, or people who were brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, but just couldn’t seem to sell records at all. So after a while hanging around the same city and being in the same scene — success doesn’t seem so sweet. Being a pop star is not that important.”

Whatever your sentiments concerning the Crows’ music, there is no questioning the wellsprings of sincerity and integrity from which it flows. Baltimore-born Duritz, the son of a doctor, spent most of his young life moving around (Boston, El Paso, Denver, Houston) before settling in the Berkeley area. “I don’t have any real roots,” he says. “The most settled I’ve ever been is with this band.” He began writing songs in his freshman year at the University of California. Looking back, Duritz says, “I can see why [our current success] happened now instead of when I was 21. I could see where there was potential, but I would have had to have made five albums that sucked.” Counting Crows’ ascent is no triumph of marketing — in fact, Duritz deliberately tried to put the brakes on the star-making machinery. “I’ve tried everything to keep it a slow thing,” he insists. “We didn’t release a single, we just went out and toured, and kept the record company off of it. I just thought that was the best way to do it.”

Kind of like the R.E.M. theory of development?

“Exactly. I was basing this whole thing on what it was like to grow up as an R.E.M. fan. At this point today R.E.M. can do whatever they want, because they have such a core of people who are into them for being R.E.M. and their records. Not for a hit. This is what I was trying to do with this band, just to, like, set it up with the touring now, not alienate a lot of people by becoming some big pop phenomenon. I haven’t done anything that I regret.”

Later that night at the local rock club, a capacity crowd of clean-cut, low-key collegians sways and claps politely to the Counting Crows set. Maybe it’s just the cold medicine, but I find myself zoning out halfway through the performance; the band saws away with well-honed chops and obvious zeal, and Duritz is a riveting singer whose somewhat studied mannerisms belie a deep commitment to his wordy, conversational lyrics (“I think my songs are accumulations of details; things people actually would say — that I would actually say,” says Duritz). It’s just not translating, not to me, anyway. I perk up along with the crowd when ”Mr. Jones” starts up; not only is it the most familiar song, but it may be the closest thing to a “rock” song in the band’s gentle, somber repertoire.

Live, Duritz plays with the tunes and lyrics of many of his songs, but none so drastically as “Mr. Jones,” whose melody is nearly unrecognizable tonight and many of whose lyrics have been radically altered. It’s as if Duritz wants to distance himself both from the phenomenon of a “hit” record, and from the sentiment of the song itself, which originally concerned the (patently foolish) longings of a frustrated musician.

“‘Mr. Jones’ really has undergone a change in tone,” Duritz explains later. “It’s become more about someone who’s ironically looking back on his dreams than it is about someone just having the dreams. See, the time schedule’s changed for me, too. As of today we’re No. 10 [on the Billboard album chart]. So the line, ‘We all want to be big big stars but we got different reasons for that,’ is now ‘We all want to be big big stars but we had no idea what it means to do that.’ I’m also singing, ‘When everybody loves me, I’m just about as fucked-up as I can be.’ And ‘Every time I turn on the TV, I gotta see myself staring right back at me.'”

I noticed, too, that instead of the line, “I want to be Bob Dylan,” Duritz sang, “I want to be Alex Chilton,” which changes the focus from wanting to be a big star to wanting to be Big Star.

“A lot of the changes were semi-unconscious, it just started happening over the course of the last month,” continues Duritz. “One day I realized, ‘Why am I singing about Bob Dylan? I don’t want to be Bob Dylan at all. I meant it to be humorous at the time — you have to understand when I wrote that song, I didn’t even have a band. There was no Counting Crows. It just wasn’t happening. I was never going to be Bob Dylan. Now I don’t know who I’m going to be.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the December 1998 edition of SPIN.

It’s been four years since the Offspring brought punk-rock and Mohawks to Main Street. Nowadays it’s getting a little lonely in the mosh pit. Fast-and-furious is about as fashionable as Doc Martens at a Cherry Poppin’ Daddies concert, and most alt-rock hits of late come in one of two flavors: earnest nice-guy pop à la Semisonic and novelty one-shots like Chumbawamba. What’s an unreconstructed punk-rocker to do? “The punk fad might not be the coolest thing in music anymore,” says Mike Peer, music director of New York’s alt-station, K-Rock, “but you have to look at the Offspring as a rock band now. They’ve progressed.”

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One thing’s for sure, the Offspring are due for a hit. Though their third album, Smash, went quintuple-platinum, the 1997 follow-up, Ixnay on the Hombre, sold a less-earth-shattering one million copies. Now, with the November release of the band’s fifth album, Americana, the SoCal punk-pop quartet will find out just how many Offspring fans still want to come out and play. “If we do something different [musically], it’s because it seems fun,” guitarist Noodles says. “I’ve never thought, ‘Oh, man, punk rock’s over. Shit, how are we gonna feed our kids? Let’s do a ska record next.'”

Several tracks on Americana represent a genuine musical departure for the band. “Pay the Man” borders on traditional rock, while “Why Don’t You Get a Job’?” actually mixes in tape loops and horns. Yet the first single, a goofy novelty song called “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy),” has a familiar bratty ring. Kicking off with a grin-inducing sample of the intro to Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages” (“It cost us $10,000,” singer Dexter Holland says. “Hey, it’s art, dude”), the song erupts into a frat-friendly combination of “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” and 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny,” complete with a deep-voiced vocal hook that sounds suspiciously similar to the band’s signature “You gotta keep ’em separated.”

The song mercilessly mocks those guys who, as Holland describes them, “are from, like, Omaha, Nebraska, regular white-bread guys, but who act like they’re from Compton. It’s so fake and obvious they’re trying to have an identity.”

It’s exactly the sort of playground dis that will endear the Offspring to their youngest fans. “I wanted to write a song where people in high school would go, ‘I know exactly who this guy’s talking about: so-and-so in third period,'” Holland says. And if you actually are that guy in third period? “He’ll like it, too. That’s kind of the beauty: making fun of people who don’t know they’re being made fun of.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

When I heard Kurt Cobain’s body had been found and that he had died from an apparent suicide, I was in Detroit on business. Television networks and other press were trying to track me down to interview me about his dying. I knew Kurt well, and he considered me a sort of big brother, who he sometimes called for advice, often marital. He knew I never wanted anything from him, which was rare in his world, and that created a nice, genuine, and non-pressuring friendship.

I didn’t want to talk to the media about this. I didn’t want to be one of those eager TV vultures on a branch, swooping down to peck on the motionless corpse. But then I decided I should do one interview, just to be on the record with a sober appraisal of a special, wonderful, fragile, and tortured man, who I had had the great pleasure to know, and the world had the great pleasure of his music. So CBS sent a cameraman to my hotel, and I sat across from an unmoving camera on a tripod, as an interviewer in New York asked me questions by phone, which I would then put down, out of shot, face the camera, and answer.

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Kurt, I stressed, was a flawed man, but a genius, and a good person, who should neither be mythologized nor condemned but at this time remembered fondly and treated gently, and the sadness of the moment acknowledged.

I drove back to New York from Detroit that day, and that night stopped in Syracuse to sleep, and in my hotel room I wrote the following TOPSPIN editorial for our next issue, which we were reconstructing to be a tribute to Kurt.

[This editorial was originally published in the June 1994 issue of SPIN.]

On a business trip to Seattle a couple of years ago, I arranged to meet Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love for dinner. I had met them in L.A. a few months earlier at Danny Goldberg and Rosemary Carroll’s house and now their office and mine made the arrangements for us to hook up again. When I arrived in Seattle, messages were waiting for me. Kurt had changed hotels and pseudonyms. I called the new place and the operator said no one by that name was registered. I said, are you sure? Sure he was sure. I tried the original code name. Same thing. I called Nirvana’s office, Kurt was definitely there, they told me. I called back and, frustrated, I said, I don’t understand, I’m supposed to meet Kurt Cobain and I’ve got this series of aliases for him but — and the operator interrupted and said, we have Mr. Cobain registered, and put me through. The world’s biggest rock star, as he was then — grunge’s Atlas with the youth world on his skinny shoulders — registered under his own name.

We eventually wound up in a pizza parlor, with a few of their friends from local bands, having first lost Kurt and Courtney who stopped to buy hats for everyone. Not just any hats, extraordinarily stupid ones, which Courtney wanted everyone to wear, and which only I and my girlfriend Karen politely declined. Kurt wore an oversize duck hunter’s checkered cap and, hunched forward from his lifelong back problems, he looked miserable. He wasn’t, but he looked it.

Later, we crossed town, in horse-drawn carriages, to a bar at the top of a hotel. Even though it was sub-freezing, Courtney had spotted this sad convoy passing the restaurant and ran out into the street to stop and hire them. More musicians had joined us by now, including Krist and Dave from Nirvana. The bar led onto the roof and a few of us went out for air. The night was crystal clear and black and the air was cold and rejuvenating. Everyone talked animatedly and nobody felt worse for wear.

At one point, I suddenly realized everyone but Karen, Kurt, and I had gone back in. Kurt was leaning on his arms against the roof ledge, absolutely still, staring out across Seattle. I went and stood next to him and started to talk to him. He seemed to be staring at a point way beyond the horizon. When I spoke, he looked straight at me. He had the most remarkable eyes of anyone I’ve ever met, with the same intensity I’ve seen in photographs of Picasso. An arresting, haunting light that shone from somewhere very deep and, now we know, very troubled.

When we went inside, back into the noise and smoke of the bar, Karen asked me, “What was he he looking at so intently?” I told her that I thought Kurt Cobain was looking for his life.

Tragically, he never found it. Possibly, it was right under his nose, but he couldn’t see it amongst the clutter he couldn’t understand. I came to know him well enough to tell you he was sincere and incredibly honest, to a fault. He spoke without thinking about the commercial consequences. The much ballyhooed Nirvana “backlash” that preceded and enveloped In Utero was the creation of those people Cobain disappointed by not acting the role of rock star. Hell, when you become as successful and gigantically important as he became, you’re not supposed to still be one of us. It’s offensive to some consumer aesthetic or other to try. He wasn’t supplying the requisite fantasy. He genuinely hated the success because he realized, with horror when he reached it, that it involved being an image other people wanted, no longer what he wanted.

That was the part of the job description no one could prepare a guy like Kurt for. He didn’t have the emotional structure to support the incredible weight of millions of people’s expectations. Every artist wants to matter as much as they possibly can, but most take so long to get to that position that they develop their sense of self and perspective on the way. Rock stars like Kurt are catapulted to positions of, frankly, exaggerated importance so quickly that they can no more handle themselves perfectly than an astronaut can calmly get out of his seat and walk around while his spaceship is being propelled into the sky.

His torment was real and so was his genius, another thing he didn’t understand, I believe. He lacked the ego of great genius, the self belief, not necessary to make you create, but essential for you to believe that you should, to sustain you through the travails of being different. It’s like a sealant. Kurt didn’t have that.

We should not, while memorializing him, glorify or in any way excuse that he took his own life, whatever his reasons, or the fact that he was a heroin addict who tried, unsuccessfully, to kick it. But it would be just as wrong to villainize or dismiss him as an irresponsible screw-up. He was a tragic man and we should feel for him, try to understand what we can never know. His death is a tragedy and we should pray that he now finds the peace that eluded him in life.

He was the poet of this generation, that was not an exaggeration. It will be easy in the coming months, especially for older people, to downplay Kurt’s significance and contribution but that will be wrong. Like Rimbaud, he died too young, lived too unflatteringly, and left too little compared to what we hoped for, but it was enough for him to be one of the pillars in the artistic pantheon. The horrible manner of his death and the degree of anger we feel because he destroyed something we loved so much creates a cultural blood clot. Previous generations’ heroes died mythical deaths. James Dean, Hendrix, Morrison, and Joplin flew too close to the flame. Lennon was martyred. But Kurt Cobain blew his brains out. He pulled the plug on his pain and there’s nothing remotely romantic or mythical about that.

He loved his daughter, he loved Courtney; he must have hated himself and how lost he was, probably always was, more. Watching one of MTV’s umpteenth airings of Nirvana Unplugged the night after his body was discovered, I felt I was watching a ghost. He seemed that alive, that charismatic, simultaneously comfortable — swiveling side to side in his chair, wearing the sort of cardigan middle-aged people wear sitting in front of a log fire — and painfully uncomfortable, insecure in front of the audience. Just that, insecure. A musical genius, equal to anyone in the history of rock’n’roll, but more delicate, finally unluckier than most of his peers, singing how when bad folks die “they don’t go to heaven where the angels fly, they go to the lake of fire and fry,” oblivious to the irony that, in covering the Meat Puppets’ “Lake of Fire,” he was singing a twisted version of his own eulogy, or that this neutered format of acoustic grunge was the first opportunity for many people to understand the words he was singing, and see what a great and special light has gone out.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article was originally published in the June 1997 edition of SPIN. In memory of Wayne Kramer, who died on Feb. 2, 2024, we are republishing it here.

“Punk had a different meaning in prison,” recalls Wayne Kramer with a hearty laugh. “It wasn’t anything I wanted to be associated with.” Kramer’s jailhouse reticence is understandable, but as far as the accusation of providing a sonic blueprint for punk rock, he’s guilty as charged.

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Kramer and the late Fred “Sonic” Smith were the dual guitar attack for the MC5, one of the leading exponents of late ’60s Detroit-area horsepower that helped paved the way for not just punk but heavy metal as well. Wedding the out-there explorations of Sun Ra with the down-there exhortations of Chuck Berry, “Citizen Wayne” (also the title of his new album) and the Five performed with a ferocity unmatched by anything except the radical militancy of their political beliefs. Part of manager John Sinclair’s White Panther Party, their ideological tenets included “total assault on the senses by any means necessary, including rock ‘n’ roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.”

It was such a fervent stance, in Kramer’s view, that it got the MC5 “crushed out of the music business.” After the band’s dissolution in 1972, Kramer turned to heroin and alcohol for solace, supporting his habits by “scamming anything that would turn a profit.” He ended up serving 26 months in a federal prison in the mid-’70s for cocaine trafficking, then scraped together various ill-fated band projects before relocating a few years ago to Los Angeles. There he was introduced to Epitaph Records owner and MC5 fan Brett Gurewitz, who recognized that Kramer was still quite capable of delivering the jams so sorely in need of kicking out.

Now sober and happily married, Kramer cracks a wide smile as he describes himself as “a reasonably well-adjusted grown-up.” At 49, his days of teenage lust may be long gone, but Kramer’s guitar playing has lost none of its youthful fire, as evidenced by the thick crunch of songs like “Stranger in the House” on Citizen Wayne, his third Epitaph release.

Live, Kramer’s ability to segue seamlessly from brawny rock rifting to free bursts of fluid and flammable improvising evokes no one so much as the late jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock. “Sometimes it feels like revenge,” says Kramer of his new opportunity to testify. “I get to do what I want to do and go out on stage and blister. Not that many guys get a second chance. I feel really, doubly, triply blessed.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the October 1995 issue of SPIN. In memory of Shane MacGowan, who died on Nov. 30, 2023, we’re republishing it here.

At Filthy McNastys, an Irish pub In London, the sign over the bar says, “OH, LORD MAKE ME PURE, BUT NOT JUST YET.” Gold records by the Pogues hang next to photos of JFK, Elvis Presley, and Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. There, in the flickering candlelight, dwells an icon who deserves similar enshrinement—but for the rather surprising fact that he’s still alive.

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Shane MacGowan, the notoriously unhinged former Pogues singer, now miraculously back in glory as leader of the Popes, is holding court. He’s sporting a sort of fallen teddy-boy look: sideburns, assorted crucifixes around his neck, an earring, a black pompadour, and a white T-shirt with rolled up sleeves. His blue little-boy eyes look incongruously innocent. He has, roughly, one front tooth. “I’m a singer, it doesn’t matter how many teeth you got. Actually, it’s probably easier to sing without teeth.”

After greeting me with a flipped bird, MacGowan finds out I’m an American journalist and quickly makes amends: “Oh, well, fuck you twice then.” Then he settles in for a bit of his favorite beverage: a triple dry martini, Michelob back. (A concession to health. He used to drink pitchers of Long Island iced tea.)

Before the evening is through, MacGowan will offer informed opinions on Jesus, jazz history, and John Woo movies, and declare that Elvis Costello is a “fat, boring, talentless, four-eyed git.” He’ll be funny, insulting, and, seemingly, drunk beyond cognition. But he will never actually be offensive, defusing his rudest cracks with that signature laugh—a sound you can approximate by filling your nose with stout and exhaling through all cranial orifices simultaneously.

“Never underestimate Shane,” cautions Spider Stacy, MacGowan’s former bandmate and friend of 15 years. “Don’t expect some shambling, drooling fool. Because then you’ll find he’s got a very sharp brain indeed.”

“Bollocks!” MacGowan yells toward the bar. “I said a triple.”

The Pogues formed in 1982, shortly after MacGowan, Stacy, and assorted drinking buddies gave an impromptu performance of Irish rebel songs at a West End club. Naming themselves Pogue Mahone, Gaelic for “Kiss My Arse” (or, more literally, “Kiss My Hole”), the crew confounded locals by actually remaining a band. Even more astonishingly, yobbo MacGowan turned out to be one of the finest lyricists of his generation.

On the near-perfect 1985 album Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, MacGowan revealed a gift for buoyant Irish melodies and hilarious, heartbreaking portraits of desperate wastrels. Later, I ask a 20s-ish paddy with a Pogues tattoo what he thinks of MacGowan. “Well, he’s our greatest living poet, isn’t he?”

But the living part, that was the trick.

Never a puritan, MacGowan began revealing his unhappiness with the band’s increasing “progressiveness”—always a dirty word in his lexicon—in ways that often involved nose-dives to the concrete. Finally, in September of 1991, while on tour in Japan, the other Pogues sacked him, citing chronic unconsciousness. “I had been begging them for three years to let me leave,” he marvels. “Then they said they fired me!”

While the Pogues attempted to replace him with Joe Strummer, MacGowan continued to pursue his odd vision of a good time. “After the Pogues broke up,” he remembers, “that’s when I had the most fun. Probably because it’s the lowest I’ve ever sunk. It’s only your friends who are worried about you. I was having a great time.”

Sounds dubious, but the Popes’ debut album The Snake resoundingly proves that, at 37, MacGowan remains in full possession of his marbles. Tales of drinking and heartbreak are rendered with catchy songcraft and foul-mouthed lucidity. “Hands of the barmaid / Bringing off a bald-headed monk.” Who else could follow those lines with the plaintive “I’ll be your handbag / Though I’d rather be your negligee”? Stacy, who plays on the album, along with those Pogues MacGowan can still abide and some newly enlisted debauchees, says, “I think the intention behind the Popes is a return to the way the Pogues used to be.”

On “The Church of the Holy Spook,” MacGowan sings: “Rock and roll / You crucified me / Left me all alone.” I ask MacGowan what sorts of things abetted this crucifixion: a few drugs perhaps?

“No.”

(A MacGowan quote from a British magazine: “Cos in that case it’s a speedball and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Brilliant.”)

Well, how about just for fun?

“No.”

(Another quote: “So I’m shitting myself down in Alphabet City trying to score some crack…”)

You never did drugs.

“Nope.”

(Another: “I was taking about 50 tabs some days. I was tripping all the time.”)

“‘Course, I didn’t say I swear on me mother’s life.”

Well, what if you were to swear on your mother’s life?

“I never swear on my mother’s life. I don’t think it’s a nice thing to do.”

In this post-Kurt-and-River era, MacGowan is leery of endorsing unhealthy behavior. But he seems made of altogether different stuff from these celebrity casualties—more abusive, yet less at risk. His eyes and skin are both relatively clear, always a good sign. For moral support he’s got the perfect array of friends: Joe Strummer, Gerry Conlon of the falsely accused bombers the Guildford Four, and Johnny Depp. Victoria, his lovely girlfriend, says she only beats him up occasionally “when he’s being an idiot.”

“I feel fine,” he says, quietly exasperated. “And if you want a fucking doctor’s report I’ll bloody send you one if I could be bothered, but I can’t. You’ll have to take my word for it.” MacGowan lurches up, almost knocks over a stool, and—drawing one last ceremonious tug off the Michelob—staggers off to the john. There’s a strange, cockeyed grace to that loping trip loo-ward, and both the tourists and the lifers in Filthy’s clap MacGowan on the back as he passes them by. Maybe it’s out of admiration, maybe it’s for a bit of his luck.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the January 1994 issue of SPIN. On the 30th anniversary of his death, we’re republishing this article in his memory.

“It’s really designed, I think, to strip you and blend you. It’s like feeling like the invisible man. You just stand there, and you start disintegrating, and you can’t see yourself, and you feel like you’re being absorbed into this big blob of glitter. I just can’t hang.” —River Phoenix on Hollywood, October 1991

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“Honestly, I can’t stand parties and I hate and I hate bars. You won’t catch me there…” —River Phoenix, in an August 1993 press conference for The Thing Called Love

In the two days following River Phoenix‘s death, phone lines were buzzing. I spoke with dozens of people in the industry, and even the most jaded editors, publicists, agents, and actors were openly distressed about the death of this incredibly talented young man, dubbing him the best of his generation, scoffing at the rumors that drugs played a role in his demise. “Absolutely not. It’s just inconceivable,” more than a few said.

“He was the best actor we’ve had for a long, long time,” said one agent. “There was no one out there that could convey the kind of truth, alienation, and hope that River could. When he was on the screen, you couldn’t see anyone else. And you never felt that you were watching a kid. He was more than that, much, much more.”

Four days later, when I called back some of these same people to ask if they would speak on the record, not one of them agreed. Hollywood, a town that notoriously eats its young, was furiously backpedaling, trying to distance itself as far as possible from the death of Phoenix.

“I’ll tell my client you want to talk to her,” said a publicist I’ve known for years, someone who frequently encourages her clients to speak candidly with me. “But I’ll tell you right now,” she continued, “she doesn’t need this shit. She’s getting good work, and the last thing she needs is to be connected, in any way, with drugs.”

An agent echoed the industry’s hasty retreat. “We thought he was going to be his generation’s Al Pacino,” he told me, “but in the end he turned out to be its John Belushi. What, it’s not enough to make half a million bucks a picture, to be young and beautiful, to have your dick sucked every 15 minutes, to be envied and loved? What the fuck do they need the drugs for? The whole thing just makes me sick.”

Phoenix should have heeded his own advice and stayed far, far from Hollywood. Because the minute they couldn’t make any money off him, the minute he made his own failings public—the minute he died of a fatal combination of cocaine and heroin—he was of no use. It was as if he was absorbed into that big blob of glitter. And, in death, he was fast becoming the invisible man.

The rumor mill is having a field day over what happened the night River Phoenix died. The only thing everyone agrees on is that it wasn’t a very pretty picture. When Phoenix arrived at Johnny Depp’s Viper Room on Sunset Strip on the evening of October 30, he was acting like an asshole, knocking back shots of Jagermeister, slurring his speech, talking loudly, and walking unsteadily. “The Viper Room,” says Kerin, co-editor of the notorious Los Angeles fringe magazine Ben Is Dead, “is a drug den for the stars.”

Phoenix’s companions, including his sister Rain, his brother Leaf, and his Thing Called Love costar Samantha Mathis, helped him outside when he complained that he was having trouble breathing and needed some air.

It was there that he fell to the ground and began convulsing. Rain cradled him in her arms. Flea (from the Red Hot Chili Peppers), who was onstage with Johnny Depp as part of the group P (along with Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes and Ministry’s Al Jourgensen), realized something was wrong when he saw a bouncer bolt out the door. He rushed outside to see his friend writhing on the ground. It was Flea who told Leaf to call 911, a frenzied plea for help that included Leaf’s disclosure to the police dispatcher that his brother had taken “Valium or something.” Rain tried to revive her brother with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but he failed to respond.

Christina Applegate, who had been inside the club, came out and nervously watched Phoenix shaking. When she went to report what was going on to one of her girlfriends, someone said that they were laughing and making fun of Phoenix’s soon-to-be-fatal condition. But Applegate says she was genuinely upset, and that the stories about her laughing are simply untrue.

In the end, paramedics were unable to get Phoenix’s heart going, and he was brought to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Phoenix was pronounced dead less than an hour later, at 1:51 a.m. On November 12, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office said that Phoenix’s death was a result of “acute multiple drug intoxication” involving lethal levels of cocaine and heroin. Also present in his system were traces of Valium, marijuana, and an over-the-counter cold medicine. No needle marks were found on his body.

Phoenix spent his years in Hollywood cultivating an image of ascetic wholesomeness. “I met him at a Fugazi show,” recalls Kerin. “He was the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet.” When People magazine did an April 1990 story about “Hollywood’s New Squares,” he was prominently mentioned, along with Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder, as one of the new breed of actors who go to the movies, shun the clubs, and are happiest at home, fixing dinner for a few friends. “A new generation of actors believes it’s hip to be normal and a little bit square,” the article claimed. “Heavy drinking and drugs are out.”

Later that year, an article in Cosmopolitan complained about how boring celebrities were getting. There was mention of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis and Lamaze classes, of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith at the gym, and of Kiefer Sutherland painting the baby’s nursery. “Causes are another effective way to be boring, particularly for the younger Hollywood set. River Phoenix and Martha Plimpton talk constantly about how they don’t eat meat, don’t wear fur, and don’t abuse their bodies. They’re so sensitive, they don’t even eat honey.”

Much was made of Phoenix’s public service announcements for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and of his anti-fur stance. He also formed the band Aleka’s Attic with Rain, and was seen jamming at clubs around the country. We may have expected him to make a bad movie or two, maybe drive his motorcycle too fast, perhaps put out an album that sucked. What we didn’t expect was that he’d overdose on Sunset Boulevard.

How could it happen that such a clean-living boy became a serious drug abuser? Those who were on the set of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho say that he dove into his drug use head-on. “Everyone was getting high,” says one young actor. “It was the nature of the film. Some of these guys had been through this before, and as soon as filming was over, they gave it up and got back to their work. This was the first time for River, though, and he just went wild. And he wasn’t mature enough to leave it and go back to his clean life. But you can be sure that he didn’t expect it to kill him.”

Van Sant denies any knowledge of Phoenix using drugs during filming: “I never saw any instance of that on the set. But you never know.” He speaks of Phoenix with love and respect. “River was one of the most amazing people that ever lived. He was really wise; he reminded me of Bobby Kennedy,” says Van Sant. “It didn’t seem to me that there was some sort of hidden problem. River was extremely artistic, and there must be some pain in there somewhere. But I don’t think it was the wrong kind of pain.”

Phoenix’s tendency, Van Sant says, to carry the weight of the world may have driven him over the edge that Halloween morning. “It probably stemmed from something that day on the film he was working on [Dark Blood]. I heard it had a torrid set, a lot of fights and disagreements. It was the weekend, and maybe he was just letting loose from all the turmoil.”

A successful young screenwriter who left Hollywood to return to his hometown, and who has more than a passing acquaintance with heroin, said, “To me, River was the most dangerous kind of drug abuser: a dabbler. A junkie wouldn’t have died the way he did. I saw River during Idaho, and I knew he was getting high. But you hope that you get through that stage, that you have friends who can give you a reality check, so that when you turn 25 or 26, you can give up the drugs and get on with your life. For a while, the pendulum was swinging away from hard drugs, but it’s swinging back now, and people are having a field day with heroin.”

Who was River Phoenix anyway? He had, by all accounts, a strange childhood. His parents, John and Arlyn Phoenix, were ’60s dropouts who met while hitchhiking in Los Angeles. After moving around the West Coast and experimenting with psychedelics, they gave birth to River in Madras, Oregon, in 1970. His parents worked at a variety of jobs, including picking fruit, before deciding to become missionaries for the Children of God (a group now known as the Family, which has recently been accused of engaging in sex with minors).

After two years working for the cult in Venezuela, the Phoenix family wanted out, but had no money. By then Rainbow (she would later change her name to Rain), Leaf (originally named Joaquin, but he wanted a name like the rest of his family), Liberty, and Summer had been born. A priest helped the family go to Florida by freighter.

There, John injured his back, and the couple didn’t know what to do about money. “We’d had a vision that our kids could captivate the world,” Arlyn told Life magazine. So in the hippie version of stage-mothering, the brood headed to Los Angeles, the land of dreams. Soon, Phoenix was doing commercials, and then, at the age of 11, got his first dramatic role, in the TV series Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

“Before I came back to America [from Venezuela in 1977],” River told the New York Times in 1991, “I thought features were Kellogg’s commercials and cartoons. Then I saw a western, and I thought that companies paid people’s families money to kill them. I just believed it.”

With the release of Explorers and Stand By Me, it seemed like Phoenix had figured it out. Whether acting was a path he chose for himself or one that was foisted on him, he was, simply, a natural. His work in 1986’s Stand By Me galvanized the film. He was only 15, but his tough-looking, cigarette-smoking Chris Chambers showed that he was no mere teenage pinup.

Running On Empty (1988) continued to showcase his maturing talents, recognized by an Academy Award nomination. This time he was Danny Pope, the son of ’60s radicals who had been on the run since he was two. He brought to the role just the right mixture of tribulation and desire, pulling deeply from his own unusual upbringing, continuing to tap into his innate ability to reach into a character and find the undeniable truth. Awkward and shy, confident and swaggering, Phoenix could do it all, and make it look effortless in the process.

Although he later claimed that he didn’t see any thread in his body of work, his films all spoke of making a normal world out of abnormal conditions. And nowhere did normal and abnormal converge as harshly as in 1991’s My Own Private Idaho. The script may have called for a gay narcoleptic street hustler, but with Phoenix, you couldn’t pretend any distance from the character. In one of the most heartbreaking pieces of work to be seen on the screen in ages, Phoenix showed how a boy/man who had been abandoned by everyone he cared about could still dream of a place where things would be, well, normal and good. He was so human, so engaging, that audiences were left speechless.

We were going to watch River Phoenix grow into manhood, and we were going to watch ourselves grow in the process. That was the promise his craft offered us. He wasn’t Jim Morrison or Jim Hendrix. He wasn’t going to slash and burn. He wasn’t even James Dean, who may have been a rebel without a cause, but who knew instinctively that his bad-boy image was his ticket into Middle America. Phoenix could do something else; he could blend the generous with the immortal, the good with the wicked, in the very same scene. He seemed not to care that his characters were sometimes selfish and needy— I’m just like all of you, he seemed to imply. And we believed him.

Long after the last hours of Phoenix’s life are thrashed over and taken apart, it will be his body of work—his ineffable feel for the hopes and fears of his generation—by which people remember him. Although he had yet to play a real grown-up role (hell, he barely got to kiss the girl!), somehow a line that Martha Plimpton said to him in The Mosquito Coast keeps coming back to me. “I think of you when I go to the bathroom,” she told him tenderly. Judging from the crowd who brought flowers and candles to the Viper Room in the days following Phoenix’s death, she was not alone.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the October 1993 issue of SPIN. In honor of the album’s release 30 years ago today, we’re republishing it.

You can almost taste the mixed emotions in Kurt Cobain’s mouth on In Utero, spat out as if the singer were trying to expel his tongue along with the lyrics. The more extreme that voice gets (the screams of “go away” on “Scentless Apprentice,” the wash of babble on “Tourette’s”), the more music rises to the bait: grinning slash-and-yearn feedback that’s half drunken game of chicken, half accident scene postmortem. It’s only been two years since Nirvana suddenly gave punk the face of profit with Nevermind, but from the sound of the new album it could be two decades. Fame has aged Cobain’s plaintive rasp, as if celebrity were some kind of public dungeon that turned his shout into a prisoner’s, looking for an echo in solitary confinement.

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The songs of In Utero are fractured, spasmodic, wrenched out of shape — notes pulled inside out, meanings stood on their pointy little heads and spun for kicks. Pushed to the brink, Cobain’s mercurial guitar, Dave Grohl’s self-contained drumming, and Krist Novoselic’s split-the-difference bass have never been as cohesive. The sinister, inexorable momentum of “Serve the Servants” leads straight into the bottomless riffs of “Scentless Apprentice,” a playground dissolving to reveal the mouth of a volcano.

This sound — an inclusive black hole — was taking shape on Bleach and the best leftovers that Incesticide collected, only now the scaled-down contradictions of “School” and “Aneurysm” have been blown up (in every possible sense). “Smells Like Teen Spirit” taught how much revulsion and excitement Nirvana could cram into that four-minute format, but it left the rest of Nevermind looking like stock gestures, flimsy excuses, a failure of nerve. But despite the rumors that had In Utero being rerecorded or otherwise toned down (two tracks are acknowledged as having been remixed), and the subconsciously melodic hooks embedded in the noise, this is as reckless as anything since the early ’70s Cleveland punk prophets Rocket From the Tombs went down in flames.

The album’s starting point is the old stardom-as-martyrdom routine, most vividly announced in the back-to-back “Rape Me” and “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle.” The former opens with a snatch of these now generic “Teen Spirit” chords, gutting them to hint at media vampirism. “Frances Farmer” is an allusion turned into a slick pun by “Rape Me” — in honor of the hometown actress who was persecuted, institutionalized, and eventually assaulted while undergoing “treatment.” Driven by the music, self-pity is purged and the sense of violation expands, returning as a curse on life itself, “She’ll come back as fire / To burn all the liars / And leave a blanket of ash on the ground.”

Set loose on In Utero, that spirit is able to make all sorts of invisible connections, bringing the ruptures of history to bear on the present. Perhaps that’s how ghostly echoes of “Apokalyptickej Ptak,” recorded by the banned Czech group Plastic People of the Universe in 1975 (and not released until 1992), could have passed through borders of time and place to emerge from the guitar carnage on “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.” Maintaining this fugitive spirit, it’s not liberation but its absence that gets illuminated in Nirvana’s songs. Instead of barbed wire and secret police, there’s paralysis.

In “Penny Royal Tea,” as bitter and empathetic a song as Nirvana has attempted, the nominal subject is abortion. The title refers to a homemade recipe for inducing one, but it’s not a song likely to comfort people on either side of that issue. With a nod to the Beatles’ “I’m So Tired” (Lennon is surely Cobain’s deepest source as a singer), it’s about the ugly scars any difficult choice leaves. Officially sanctioned guilt bleeds into private despair, false consciousness merges with real pain. “Penny Royal Tea” gives us repression and denial as conditions on which nobody has a monopoly. The song’s not a righteous placard of a fetus or a bloody coat hanger, but a desperate, unresolved awakening to how much of ourselves we’re required to kill and maim every day.

Listening to “Penny Royal Tea” and the rest of the album, I thought of a nearly forgotten punk masterpiece of 15 years ago. Magazine’s hopeless, exhilarating Shot by Both Sides. That’s Nirvana’s motto here: surrounded, lost in a hostile crowd, gagged but trying to talk back anyway. With In Utero, I suspect Nirvana intended on some level to summon up the specter of punk in order to give it a proper burial — drive the final nail in the heart-shaped box and leave behind a fitting tombstone. Setting out to make the last punk album, it made what sounds like the first one instead.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the January 1997 issue of SPIN.

The Fugees‘ Wyclef Jean leaped from the grandstand stage and climbed a chain-link fence, reassuring a panicky military policeman, “It’s cool, it’s cool, I do this every day, I’m from Brooklyn.” Then he vanished into a crowd of 15,000 delirious Trinidadians. Lauryn Hill scolded local cops holding Rottweilers at the leash (“Yo, that’s some civil-rights-movement-flashback-type shit!”), and hitched a ride on a fan’s shoulders. Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, the group’s third member, turned over the turntables to a teenage-ish local DJ, who thumped soca jams while Jean’s disembodied voice thundered under the muggy sky. “Free the dogs! Go massive!”

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And we’d only reached intermission. The Fugees were playing their first-ever West Indian gig, in Port of Spain’s Queen’s Park Savannah, and Haitian-Americans Jean and Michel were hyped. Jean, who takes “MC” to literally mean “Master of Ceremonies,” later organized an “Apollo Theatre Dance Contest,” Trinidad jump-and-wine style (even butt-vets 2 Live Crew would’ve blushed). And when a couple of boastful boys bum-rushed the stage, he welcomed them slyly: “You know, if you guys ain’t the bomb, they going to stone you.”

Then… well, I’m not sure exactly what happened next, since I was prone behind the sound man, but I’d guess friendly fire consisting of every water, rum, and soda bottle within 50 yards. Calmly strolling back onto a stage now speckled with shards of tinted glass, Jean announced, grinning, “All right, all right, that’s enough.” Police stood dumbfounded, walkie-talkies buzzing lamely.

All this after an hour-and-15-minute set of no-frills hip-hop that translated fluently to the West Indian throng (dancehall superstar and opening act Super Cat, asked if he’d join the Fugees onstage, replied, “This is too good, mon, I can’t afford to fuck it up”) and the “Refugee Spelling Bee,” co-hosted by Lauryn’s mom, Val (a junior-high teacher back in Newark), won by an adorable eight-year-old who liltingly, and quite appropriately, spelled “chaos.”

“Could you believe that shit?” says a smiling Jean afterwards, exhaustedly flopping into a folding chair in a corner of the group’s bustling tent. Hill, relaxed in an orange Armani T-shirt, denim skirt, and Timberlands, sips fruit punch nearby with her mom and her assistant Miriam, while Michel, wraparound shades propped on his elaborate cornrows, attends to the spelling-bee prize money ($300 U.S., $1.500 local currency). Between munches of callaloo stew, Jean reviews the show: “Nothing fake, nothing violent, even those cats that got stoned with the bottles were into it.” Dressed in red overalls, black briefs (which he flashed during the dance contest) and red creepers, he has the wry wink of a cocksman, but like all the Fugees, he’s got a more ambitious agenda: the humanizing of hip-hop.

“All I can say is that when I meet black kids or Chinese kids or white kids, I try to show them the universal. Any kid can be intelligent if he’s given some awareness of the world. See, I could talk about guns all day, but what am I teaching anybody? At the end of the day, nobody gives a fuck. But I feel like what were doing will help a lot of kids. Like tonight, stopping and doing a spelling bee. And. yo, the crowd was into the spelling bee. How dope is that?”

In a 1994 review of Roberta Flack’s new album (the Fugees’ breakthrough single “Killing Me Softly With His Song” was a cover of Flack’s 1973 No. 1 hit), critic Nelson George lamented that hip-hop of the past decade had been mired in “emotional reductionism—anger over romance, materialism over brotherhood, hard over soft.” With their second album, The Score, which has now sold more than five million copies in the U.S., the Fugees reversed that cycle. Unlike so many rappers who came of age in gangsta rap’s shadow, the New Jersey-based trio brashly asserted that hip-hop was pop music with the power to open up and change the world. Marshaling R&B’s intimate, vocal yearn and reggae’s boundless, spiritual pulse, the Fugees liberated hip-hop from its scowling project exile.

“I think the Fugees’ impact on hip-hop is unprecedented.” says Sylvia Rhone, chairman/CEO of Elektra Entertainment. “They’ve reawakened excitement in the genre and expanded the perception of what hip-hop is, especially to mainstream America. They dispelled all the notions about it being a violent, misogynist influence on culture.”

Without a doubt, 1996 was Endless Fugee Summer. “Killing Me Softly,” an instant classic, pumped out of every passing car from coast to coast, with Lauryn Hill’s timeless voice never losing its poignant kick. “The 21-year-old, short, dark-skinned black child,” as she describes herself, immediately went from obscurity to object of desire. The low-rent video clip, which could’ve been shot by so-and-so’s flaky third cousin Eugene, ran constantly on MTV, even winning Best R&B Video. Better still was “Ready or Not,” an eerily ambient flow of confused musings (Jean), confident harmonies (Hill), and immigrant pride (Michel), tapped insistently into your consciousness by a simple snare beat.

The group backed up the singles with a fully conceived album and kinetic live show, featuring a full band: Jean on guitar, Michel on keyboards, bassist Jerry Duplessis, drummer Donald Guillaume, and DJ Leon Higgins. Proving the Fugees’ commercial cachet, Hill’s songbird-swooping cameo on Nas’s hit single “If I Ruled the World” helped keep his album at No. 1 for four weeks. And A Tribe Called Quest, the Fugees’ most obvious progenitors, unexpectedly saw their album also enter the pop charts at No. 1. Hill, in addition to putting on this past summer’s Hoodshock concert series as part of the Refugee Camp Project (a not-for-profit youth organization), will probably record a 1997 solo album on the Fugees’ Refugee Camp label. Jean has released an EP of Creole folk songs in Haiti. And the group is expected to star in the The Harder They Fall, a sequel to the 1973 reggae-breaking film The Harder They Come starting Jimmy Cliff.

While there’s been much rightful moaning in recent years about the segregated nature of commercial radio, the Fugees actually embody a potentially genre-bending format. “They’re totally credible, musically, with our listeners, and they elicit a lot of emotion,” says Lisa Worden, music director for modern-rock radio giant KROQ in Los Angeles. “The Fugees are the only hip-hop group that it makes absolute sense to play on an alternative station.”

But most of all, the Fugees refocused attention on hip-hop’s artistic essence—the eager mixing of any available culture into an original voice that speaks to our mixed-up times. They convinced non- and former believers that the genre wasn’t creatively obsolete. Or as Busta Rhymes, a fellow artist on this past summer’s Smokin’ Grooves tour, summed it up succinctly, “The Fugees showed that hip-hop can be successful without killing one million motherfuckers. They showed you can be hardcore without killing one million motherfuckers.”

Even as a three-year-old, Lauryn Hill was always onstage. Enamored with Michael Jackson, she’d bust out “ABC” dance routines during Thanksgiving dinner at her parents’ house in the Newark suburb of South Orange, New Jersey. At four or five, she caught the Annie bug, warbling “Tomorrow” day and night. She even did a take-off on Brooke Shields’s Calvin Klein commercial, sporting a ballet outfit and delivering the ill punch line, “Nothing comes between me and my tutu.”

“If we had the camcorder out, she was ready,” says mother Val, an accomplished pianist in her teaching off-hours (father Mal, a computer consultant, is a singer whose high-school group had a local club following, while older brother Malaney plays guitar, sax, and drums). “I remember when she was interviewed by a local cable network when she was in 10th grade after she’d done [the network soap opera] As the World Turns. She was very clear about her future, even then.” Soon, a role opposite Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit brought numerous offers, including the lead in the agit-pop Black Panther biopic Panther, which she turned down.

Now, Hill may not only be the first dominant female rapper (with apologies to Queen Latifah), but pop music’s next important vocalist, integrating hip-hop and R&B in a way that naturally expands both genres. “I’m a real fan of female singers, going back to Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan” says Elektra’s Rhone. ‘And this young lady can throw down with the best of them. She’s going to blow everybody’s mind who hasn’t gotten it yet.”

From the moment she discovered her mom’s basement cache of 45s (Gladys Knight, Donny Hathaway), I had soulful visions. “I haven’t slept in my bed since, like, ’86 or ’87,” she confesses. “I got these big-ass headphones with leather cushions and went to sleep on the floor listening to music. I became, like, the musical historian. My family would go, “Lauryn, baby, who wrote that song, that “Hypnotized”?’ And I’d be like, ‘Linda Jones, 1967.'”

More typical of kids in the early ’80s, was also a hip-hop brat snacking on music videos. One minute she was begging mom for fly Filas and fantasizing about flowing like a female Rakim, the next she was transfixed by Simon Le Bon’s hair (“we were down with ‘Rio.’ All that bullshit”). Then her brother’s friend Pras asked if she and her friend Marcy wanted to form a hip-hop group. After Pras’s cousin Wyclef joined and Marcy bailed, suddenly Hill was on the mike, for real. “Lauryn was principally indoctrinated into hip-hop culture by Clef and Pras,” says David Sonenberg, the group’s manager. “But who’s going to argue with her skills today?”

And how threatening is it that a woman is jacking up hip-hop and replacing its sputtering machinery? “Put it this way,” Hill says, clearing her throat and shifting into gender overview mode, “men want to get over—white men, black men, rappers, doctors—regardless. They want to do what they want to do. And a woman sometimes acts as a mirror, so that when a man looks at a woman, he sees himself, he sees how he’s acting and how she’s reacting, and he doesn’t like it…. When men are with other men, they’re not going to question each other. And that’s not just hip-hop, it’s the world.”

Answering suggestions that Jean at times bogarts the mike to her exclusion, Hill says diplomatically. “It’s very important to me that the world see that the Fugees is not just me and two backup singers. Clef loves the stage. and I love to see him open up and let people see what he can really do.”

Lyrically, like Jean and Michel, Hill invokes a dizzying array of references, from childhood games (Colecovision) to nostalgic sorrow (Cochise’s death in the film Cooley High), as well as nodding to all sorts of politically charged figures (Louis Farrakhan, Newt Gingrich). “You reference something usually because its respected or detested,” says the Columbia University sophomore. “Not because you’re a foot soldier but because you want to evoke that power.”

But pop culture is a racial minefield, where references are regularly misinterpreted. This past year, an anonymous caller to the Howard Stern Show claimed that Hill had said in an MTV interview that she would rather see “babies starve” than have white people buy Fugees records. In fact, Hill had only said, in response to a question about her pop success, that she would be happy “selling my hip-hop records to a black audience.” Despite the unfounded charge of racism, the damage was done.

Columbia (the group’s label) and MTV were deluged with calls from angered white kids and parents. “Some asshole obviously twisted what I said because he was threatened by it,” says Hill. “I don’t have hate for anybody. I grew up with everybody and we should all be able to build our own culture,” she says, her voice growing angrily precise. “Unfortunately, in America we have a tradition of not wanting black people to build their own culture.” Of course, a more controversial point might be to suggest that the Fugees speak more intensely to white kids than, say, Pearl Jam. As Hill observes, “That’s when the world starts to come 360 degrees and not just 180. When white kids start feeling what black kids feel, that’s when the powers that be get nervous.”

Wearing a rumpled sweatsuit and gulping a dish of vanilla ice cream, the broodingly handsome Pras Michel is not living up to his rep as a budding Big Willie—Rolex watches, gold rings, omnipresent cell phone. For now, the dealmaking in a limo with Naomi Campbell can wait.

“This is all entertainment,” says Michel, 25, reflecting on the gap between image and reality in ’90s hip-hop. “And gangsta-ism is part of that. But you’ve got to let kids know it’s an act. At the end of the day, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are like, ‘Listen. these are props, that wasn’t a real fire, I live in a mansion, I’m making money.'”

Michel is the Fugees’ soul in the hole, the original member whose underlying, around-the-way-guy manner balances the starchild auras of Jean and Hill. His brotherly affection for Hill is palpable. “I remember when we were doing ‘Ready or Not,’ she was singing the bridge, and she started crying, like, really crying, but she kept on singing. And yo, man, it just hit me in the heart hard…. It was like she was this angel in a cage and somebody, Christ or God, just came and freed her while she was singing.”

In Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, Michel’s fundamentalist Baptist parents banned all things “worldly” from the house, music included. “Haitian families enforce that shit 24-7,” he says wearily. When he was 12, the family—mom a nurse, dad a factory worker—moved to Newark, where Michel attended Vailsburg High (“a real bad ghetto school”) for a year with Jean. But when Vailsburg closed, Michel’s mother sent him to Columbia, a prestigious, predominantly white, suburban public school, described by Hill, a fellow student, as “just like Fame, everybody wanted to be the star.”

Michel shined, eventually scoring 1350 on the SAT and getting accepted to Yale on a bet with his adviser (the wife of infamous baseball-bat-wielding principal Joe “Lean on Me” Clark). “I wasn’t even tripping on Yale,” says Michel. “But I wrote the essay to prove I could do it.” He ended up at Rutgers for two years until the Fugees found success, which his parents (who now live in Florida) have only recently acknowledged.

“They thought I was going to hell with a mike in my hand,” he says, forcing a laugh. “But now, we’re not out there saying, ‘Fuck our parents.’ We respect them. My mom had, like, nine brothers and sisters and she was the only one able to come to America and further her education and do for her family back in Haiti. I respect what she went through for me.”

Wyclef Jean was a child prodigy, but not as a musician. “When I was born I had the gift of the spirit in me, and my father [a Church of Nazarene minister] knew it. Ever since I was little I could take a mass of people and influence them.”

In the late ’70s, when Jean’s family left the dictatorial squalor of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s Haiti for the Brooklyn squalor of the Marlboro Houses in Coney Island, Wyclef’s gift, plus a handful of change, got him a ride on the F Train. So he hung around gangs, at one point lifting money and appliances from his parents’ apartment. The apartment itself was a cramped hostel, with as many as 12 different sisters, brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, et al., passing through. To keep Wyclef out of mischief, his parents encouraged him to take up music. But when his musical interests strayed to the secular, hip-hop became his calling.

“When Jesus roamed the earth he was barely in the so-called church,” Jean now says. “So when I’m singing or rhyming or whatever, there’s always that connection with God. When people look at the Fugees onstage, I want them to go, ‘Oh shit, something is with that motherfucker.'”

Jean’s family moved to New Jersey when he was 13 and his musical obsession deepened—jazz band, concert band, even maintaining a church band. “Clef was notorious as the king of the Newark talent shows,” Hill recalls. Though he adopted the name MC Nelle Nel (“I had a serious Melle Mel complex,” he admits, laughing), Jean was also intrigued by rudeboy-prophets Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Setting up shop in his uncle’s East Orange house along with cousin and current Fugees bassist Jerry Duplessis, he experimented with reggae-inflected hip-hop tracks in what became known as the Booga Basement, where The Score was eventually recorded.

But first, Jean did a stint at Long Island’s Five Towns College, a music and business school on Long Island (“they weren’t too excited about some kid coming in there thinking he was Jimi Hendrix”), led the funk band Exact Change, had a minor raggamuffin club hit (“Out of the Jungle,” which soaked up free-Nelson Mandela sentiment), and watched as the Fugees’ demo tape induced across-the-board yawns from hip-hop A&R types. Even manic, live auditions in manager Sonenberg’s Manhattan office drew duh-uh stares.

“I think it was all too much,” says Sonenberg of the Fugees’ presentation. “Clef, I mean, he’s like a cultural ventriloquist who also plays the guitar, Pras was this hard street rapper, and then Lauryn’s singing a soulful version of ‘Imagine.’ These record-company guys probably thought it was some weird stunt. You could see them thinking, ‘Is it R&B or is it rap?’ when they should have been thinking, ‘It’s both.'”

Finally, Ruffhouse/Columbia’s Chris Schwartz and Joe “The Butcher” Nicolo got it. After a production mismatch sabotaged 1993’s awkwardly hyper debut Blunted on Reality, Jean took control in the studio, and The Score resulted. “The way Clef strips things down, like on ‘Killing Me Softly,’ and leaves the sound so open, yet with such emotion, its genius,” says Nicolo, engineer for Schoolly D, Kris Kross, and Cypress Hill. “It works perfectly with Lauryn’s voice. I mean, every A&R guy is dying to reproduce that sound.”

The Fugees are the history of hip-hop’s future. They take the music back to its West Indian sound-system roots, revisit the Sugarhill era of instrumental backing bands, and recombine Run-D.M.C.’s “Rock Box” hard-posing with the conscious innovation of Public Enemy and the Native Tongues posse (De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest). Animating late-’80s ragamuffin hip-hop, they bring R&B vocal sampling to life, and once and for all, get up in gangsta rap’s face with a righteous, furious wit. For anyone who’s followed hip-hop’s emergence as the most influential pop music of the past 20 years, its damn near stupefying to see that journey so effortlessly condensed on The Score.

But with the Fugees’ commercial appeal, there’s been an inevitable backlash. The contentiously talented Brooklyn rapper Jeru the Damaja recently took some potshots at the group in Ego Trip magazine for covering “Killing Me Softly” (“Fake-ass R&B”) and for reworking the lyrics to Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” (“That’s like blasphemy to me”).

The argument isn’t really over the Fugees’ hip-hop authenticity. Unlike so-called “alternative rap” groups such as Arrested Development and Digable Planets, the Fugees aren’t boho outsiders (“The core audience knows them and believes them,” says Nicolo). The question is whether black cultural expression can be both authentic and universal. Can the Fugees speak to both so-called “inner-city youth” and suburban kids? Can West Indians speak to African-Americans? When will we acknowledge that identities will always be mixed?

“See, you have to remember I have two lives, the West Indian life, and the black American life,” says Michel. “It’s like being the child of an interracial marriage. You’ve got two cultures, two worlds inside you, and that’s what makes the Fugees, because Clef is the same way. Our perceptions can’t help but have more of an edge. We never see things just one way.”

Even Hill’s mom, whose students admire the Fugees and study their lyrics, has faced the issue. “A teacher I work with confronted me recently and said, ‘I know how you raised your family, blah blah blah, how is it that your daughter can relate to ghetto kids? And I was quite taken aback… Lauryn relates because of her humanity. She’s not limited to people who look like her or were raised like her… Why do we think of hip-hop so narrowly? It has to be from the ghetto, everybody’s got to be dysfunctional—who said so?”

A conspicuously blonde voice emanates from a carload of underaged girls with ski-lift tans and more rouge than the law allows. “Are you the lead singer for the Fugees?” I glance over at John Forte, the misidentified Fugee who produced and rapped on several tracks on The Score. Natty in a spotless Nike track suit, Forte shakes a head full of dreads, and smirks, “Is this a trip, or what?” We’re loitering outside the Radisson motel in Park City, Utah, before driving over to Wolf Mountain resort, tonight’s stop on the Smokin’ Grooves tour. Earlier, a different enthusiastic fan had seductively asked a member of the crew, “Hey, you want to come up to my room after the show and drink Jagermeister and play darts?” Welcome to pop music’s wholesome, white underbelly.

It’s hours before showtime, and the Fugees are in ease-back mode — Clef is already at the venue, working on remixes in a mobile mini-studio; Lauryn’s test-driving a scooter Clef just bought her; and Pras is inside the tour bus, busting open a FedEx package of Armani swag. The rest of Team Fugee is in full hustle. It seems the only vice around this group is careerism, from road manager Hassan Shard’s TV commercials to drummer Guillaume’s endorsement deals. Only Wyclef’s brother Sam, lawyer for the Refugee Camp, declines to hype. “No scoop, I’ve got no scoop,” he says, backing away in tabloid retreat.

A recent Teenage Research Unlimited poll surveyed teens about which music acts they were “familiar with” or “liked very much,” and the Fugees topped the rankings, skunking Alanis Morissette by five percentage points, Mariah Carey finishing a tepid third. The Park City crowd bears out those numbers. There’s a high-school-football-game giddiness in the crisp late-August air. And despite my big-city preconceptions, this is no isolated Village of the Mormon Damned. Apparently, the local malls stock loads of Nautica and Hilfiger gear, and everybody’s on their feet chanting “Bonita Applebum” along with A Tribe Called Quest.

The Fugees aren’t hip-hop’s first, or only, band to put on a theatrical live show (see Stetsasonic, Schoolly D, L.L. Cool J on MTV Unplugged, the Roots, Beastie Boys, Goodie Mob, etc.), but they’re both the most choreographed and the most spontaneous. Tonight, Hill’s voice is scratchy and her freestyle rap fizzles, so Clef immediately takes control, playing Busta Rhymes’s “Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check” on guitar, freestyling in Japanese and French, beckoning for a bass line (Grandmaster Melle Mel’s “White Lines (Don’t Do It)”) or drumbeat (Special Ed’s “I Got It Made”) or record (“Where’s that Beenie Man shit?”) to quicken the pace. Pras moves into the crowd during “Ready or Not,” spreading his arms Messiah-like against the mountainous backdrop. The show is salvaged, in style.

Onstage and on record, the Fugees have a group dynamic previously unimagined in hip-hop or pop—Jean’s one-man-band, son-of-a-preacher-man bluster pushing and reacting against Hill’s self-possessed artistic repose, while Michel dispenses straight-up street poetry in the syrupy baritone of a playground sage. Its a complex mix of personalities that manifests the group’s high-minded ideals.

“Everybody’s upbringing was different, so I don’t point the finger,” says Jean, assuming an almost prophetic air. “Like us Haitians got treated like shit by black Americans because they’d been treated that way. But let’s don’t go backwards, blaming kids for things they had no control over.” He pauses, luminous brown eyes fixing me fervently. “Now, with this music, we have a chance to move beyond all that.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the April 1993 issue of SPIN.

Climbing the stairs from Manhattan’s 157th Street subway station on a chilly Saturday afternoon, I hear a young Hispanic guy in front of me chanting “Hip Hop Hooray”‘s hook—”He-e-e-e-y! Ho! He-e-e-e-y! Ho!”—like a mantra. Naughty By Nature‘s new single, with its smooth, rolling beats and infectious chorus, sank itself almost immediately into the mass consciousness of my old Washington Heights neighborhood. Seconds later, I pass a crowded takeout chicken joint on the same block. Inside, a teenage homegirl and her little brother are playing a sloppy game of patty cake as they wait for their snack boxes, using the cadences of “Hip Hop Hooray” to syncopate their hand jive. And, though I haven’t lived in the ‘hood for 15 years, the song has been doing heavy time on my Walkman all day.

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The ‘hood has spoken. Naughty By Nature’s new one is gonna be massive. He-e-e-e-y! Ho!

Naughty By Nature is good-bad, but it ain’t evil. Sure the trio of East Orange, New Jersey, rappers—Treach, Vinnie, and Kay Gee—used to clock (sell drugs), yoke jokers, and pop shit back in the day. They might still knock back a 40 or two of Olde English, but they’re not hard rocks. Not really. At bottom they’re kids, barely into their 20s, in love with hip-hop, amazed and proud to be on the vanguard of the freshest music scene.

Even NBN’s breakout smash, that definitive hymn to infidelity, “O.P.P.,” had a heart, even a moral of sorts: fuck around, don’t get caught, and try to make sure no one gets hurt. On “Hip Hop Hooray,” lead rapper and resident sex symbol Treach addresses a verse to his presumable main squeeze, who’s just called him out on his stepping out. In his confident, fluid style, Treach breaks it down for her: “Hey, I did your partner / ‘Cos she’s hot as a baker / ‘Cos I’m Naughty By Nature / Not ‘cos I hatecha . . . You try to act like somethin’ really big is missin’ / Even though my name’s graffiti-written on ya kitten.” Well, even if those words aren’t likely to placate many women who’ve caught their men cheating on them, Treach isn’t fronting. In fact, there’s something almost charming about his frankness, the absence of malice in his honesty.

Naughty By Nature are homies with heart, happy to have left behind the world of drug dealing to bring their message of hope through hip-hop to a few more ghetto bastards. They’re a bridge between the daisy age and the gangsta era.

The NBN story began at East Orange High School, where Anthony Criss (Treach), Vincent Brown (Vinnie), and Kier Gist (Kay Gee) first hooked up and started rapping for kicks—Treach as lead MC, Kay Gee as DJ, Vinnie as second rapper. A high school talent show convinced them to try to go pro. Christening themselves the New Style—yes, after the Beastie Boys track—they recorded an album for the indie label Bon Ami, Independent Leaders, that sank without a trace.

In 1989, the group began sending out the demo containing “O.P.P.,” to no avail at first. (“Motherfuckers were scared of it,” laughs Treach. “I’ll bet there’s a hundred motherfuckers with that tape still in their offices, kicking themselves in the ass.”) Then the group hooked up with a local girl made good, Queen Latifah, who became a fan. Latifah took their tape to Warner Bros., who appropriated the New Style—renamed Naughty By Nature—for its rap subsidiary, Tommy Boy.

“We got Naughty By Nature signed,” Latifah says, “because the group was so hungry, even though they had problems the first time out. They still stayed strong.”

The boys were so fresh from the ‘hood that they brought their street approach, literally, to the recording studio. “When we were mixing the first album, we would make a cassette, and they’d go out to the car to check the sound,” says Daegal Bennett, owner of Hillside Sound Studio, in Englewood, New Jersey. “They did that every time. It was an old 1970s rustbucket.”

The label got behind “O.P.P.” big-time, and the single went double platinum. Laurel Dann, Jive Records’ production director, remembers the excitement in the industry surrounding the release of “O.P.P.” “Our West Coast A&R guy tossed the cassette to me before it hit the stores,” she says. “‘You’re gonna love this,’ he promised. I did—that hardcore edge in a musical setting that was both accessible and melodic. That’s what separates Naughty By Nature from the vast majority of hip-hop contenders.”

The followup single to “O.P.P.,” “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,” was a scathing autobiographical portrait of the dead-end life of a “ghetto bastard”—both Treach and Vinnie grew up in fatherless homes—hooked with a Bob Marley sample that belied the song’s bleak message and imbued it with an aura of redemption. Included on NBN’s debut album, Naughty By Nature, both “O.P.P.” and “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” cemented the group’s status as hip-hop heroes who could rap convincingly about subjects ranging from sexual appetites to political powerlessness.

The Flavor Unit, the management company that represents NBN and a growing cadre of other hip-hop acts, is housed in a renovated firehouse on a shabby street in Jersey City. Inside, young black men and women buzz in and out of the reception area, navigating around each other with faxes, tapes, cartons of takeout Chinese food. This is rap’s legacy: young black capitalists on the move. Sort of like Naughty By Nature, who turned their negatives into positives when they invested the money they made dealing drugs in studio time, eventually recording the demo tape that included “O.P.P.” and got them signed to Tommy Boy.

On 19NaughtyIII, the new album, there’s a track called “The Only Ones” on which the group proclaims, “Any connection in the drug game / We don’t, we don’t, we don’t.” Treach does, however, have some thoughts about his days as a clocker. “Hey, I did what I had to do on the street so I could get mine and not have to do it no more,” he says. “A lot of black brothers and sisters that are out there hustling now don’t put their money into anything productive. We didn’t put our money into jewelry or cars or anything like that. We put it into studio time. And, once we got signed, we cut [drug dealing] out completely.”

Treach’s advice to blacks in the drug trade is as hard-line and practical as his outlook on making it with the next homie’s girl: “Get your money and don’t spend it on stupid shit. Get some collateral and credit together and open your own business, something legitimate. You don’t have to be a singer or a rapper or an athlete. Put your money behind your own thing. That’s what this country was built on. You can’t expect to be in an illegal business and not get busted up sooner or later.”

I also want to ask NBN about a little ditty that wags have been singing on the party circuit recently: “If you’re down with O.P.P., you’re down with HIV.” While hip-hop artists are generally fairly sophisticated about safe sex—scores of them boast on their records of wearing “jimmy hats”—that rhyme does serve to point up the fact that not everyone is down wit’ O.P.P.

“Those are the people who aren’t getting any who say that!” shouts Vinnie.

Treach: “Being promiscuous is nothing new. Husbands and wives are gettin’ divorced every day ’cause they’re each doin’ what they gotta do. It goes on all the time. We were just blatant about calling attention to it.” He points out that “Hip Hop Hooray” includes a message about respecting black women, as well as the surprising lines, “I love black women all ways / Let’s start our family today.”

So is there a steady woman in his life?

“Naw. I’m doin’ so much traveling and stuff, I really don’t have time for it. Plus, I’m still young.”

Flexing his right fist—which sports a “118” tattoo, signifying 18th Street in East Orange, the block where he grew up, with 100 added to represent 100 “down niggas”—Treach proclaims that the New Jersey rap family comprised of the Rotten Rascals, Redman, NBN, Apache, and the Cruddy Click, a group of NBN protégés from the same neighborhood who were featured on 19NaughtyIII, will be “the native tongues of the ’90s.” He says almost all of the Jersey rappers will be featured on an upcoming single, “Roll Wit tha Flava,” scheduled to be the first release by the newly-formed Flavor Unit record label.

“There’s no real message, it’s just a freestyle thing,” says Treach. “Jersey in the house. People used to come up and say, ‘We didn’t even know there was black people in Jersey. We thought it was all beaches and shores and shit. We didn’t know there was ghettos.’ But there’s always been a lot of talent coming out of our area. Even Whitney Houston is from Illtown [Newark].”

“Flavor Unit has become a trendsetter, because Naughty has opened doors for groups such as Kris Kross and TLC,” says Queen Latifah. “Naughty By Nature crossed us over to the mainstream to allow freedom to do such songs as ‘Gansta Bitch’ by Apache.”

19NaughtyIII features a mess of live keyboards and bass and some choice samples of everything from reggae to bebop. There’s plenty of boasting and toasting (“I’m a pass the mike like a hot potato,” from “Hot Potato”), a lot of—maybe too many—”shout outs” to friends and family, some social commentary (“Daddy Was a Street Corner”), and a lot of funk.

“People who’ve heard [the new album] are saying it’s harder than the last record,” says Treach. “We weren’t trying to make it harder or softer or more musical or more this or that or the other. It just represents what we felt at the time. Everything we do comes out of personal experience.”

NBN may be stars, but they’re still fans at heart, impressed to be traveling in the same circles as their heroes. There’s a measure of awe in Treach’s voice when he talks about working with director Spike Lee—”a living legend”—who directed the video for “Hip Hop Hooray.” And they’re genuinely excited that they got to collaborate with Run-D.M.C. on an upcoming song. They grow defensive of the Hollis, Queens, rap pioneers when it’s suggested that Run-D.M.C. are past their prime, and have been eclipsed by newer jacks.

“It’s like a cycle,” says Treach. “They helped us out by opening the doors, now we’re gonna help them out. The skills—they still have them. They’ll never lose them. Wait till you hear their next album, you’ll see.”

“We toured with them in Philly last summer and I said to them, we want y’all to produce a song. We like Naughty By Nature the best of anybody,” says Run of Run-D.M.C.

“They still have their die-hard fans. I’m one of them,” says Vinnie fervently.

Just as NBN sticks up for their old-school faves, they also refuse to be drawn into controversy about newer groups like Das EFX, who some hip-hop watchers have accused of appropriating NBN’s style a little too completely. “That’s bullshit,” says Treach. “They’ve got their own style, and it’s slammin’. Das gets nothing but peace from us.”

There’s a zealousness in NBN’s embrace of hip hop as a musical form, a stance, a lifestyle that eclipses all else. They’re lifers. Try picturing them in 30 years. I see Treach like Keith Richards; grizzly, wizened but still full of piss and vinegar, able to freestyle fluently at the drop of a beat. Listen for their manifesto, coming soon from a jeep or street corner near you.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

This article originally appeared in the November 1993 issue of SPIN.

It was easy for me to hate Saturday Night Live pre-Eddie Murphy—sometimes even post-Eddie. Garrett Morris needed his personal volume turned up, the skits were corny and arch, and the performers were too adept at being moronic. Those Coneheads and bumblebees and Caucasian samurais—amusing and ironic—told truths through their humor that spoke to their culture and generation, but those outside the circle, like me, watched the show with blank, deadpan expressions, bugging out on the awkward goofiness. It was intriguing, but wack.

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In theory, De La Soul is like Saturday Night Live, pre-Eddie Murphy: corny, arch, and the rest. Except it’s far from wack.

Since 1989’s 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul has been paying for having been perceived as the Extra Cool Crew. It spoke to a larger audience. For a slew of reasons—but primarily because it had a daring, clean-cut look and a melodic, riddle-ridden style—De La Soul crossed over big time, and the music media served it up like freshly shucked oysters, pearly and wet, ready for slurping. De La Soul was stamped “thinking” hip hop we all could get into. The antithesis of Run-D.M.C. and “Hard Times,” De La was lauded for its introspection, codes, and between-song skits. It was (an) alternative. And it was clear from just the title of its muggy second album, De La Soul Is Dead, that the trio hated it.

While Buhlōōne Mind State is perhaps the least wandering De La Soul album, the songs that run the wildest through the tall cornstalk rules of grammar, poetry, and sense are the ones that give the collection its juice. The taunting “I Am I Be,” a more mature sequel to 3 Feet High‘s “Me Myself and I,” slams the record business, black Greek organizations, friendship, and most searingly, that heavy, slippery thing known as “black man’s pride.” Other songs, especially “Patti Dooke,” which has the trio “runnin’ through the trenches,” stop just short of sagging with the bluesy funk of self-examination. Buhlōōne Mind State is black male angst in an evasive manifestation. De La is tripping, maybe hurting, even growing, and it’s saying so, sort of. These are a bewildering set of songs—mazelike, a job to figure out. The tracks are seldom blunt, but often beautiful.

And De La Soul wants the world to know there’s no gun-toting or testicle gulping included in their angst: “I don’t rest in Compton so I don’t own a gat,” they proclaim in “Patti Dooke,” and “I be the in cuz the brother holdin’ glocks is out / I be the in cuz the pusher runnin’ blocks is out / I be the in cuz the kid smokin’ weed shootin’ seed which leads to a girl’s stomach being ’bout half a ton is out,” they explain in “Eye Patch.” But it’s when Posdnuos spits out that “gangsta shit is outdated / Posdnuos is complicated” that the album finds its frozen kernel, the spot around which the rest of the album revolves.

De La Soul is still blowing out nonsensical rhyme games you could easily play patty-cake to: “Can the cat’s tongue slip / Ya do di dah zip / Take the horse into the Jolly Ranch…the good the bad and Uncle Tom / Beat it kid / Show the sheik / Cuz I found a fool.” Prince Paul’s production swells and breaks and rolls up on hip hop’s rocky shore, foamy and cool, but no matter the craftsmanship of the beats or the rhymestyles, the question must come up: What the fuck are they talking about? It’s frustrating. You curse them for doing that cryptic shit on purpose, and you wish that the brothers would just say what they mean. But then a line slips off one of the boys’ tongues that attaches itself to you like a pretty pink starfish: “a Day-Glo nigga gets the red doormat.” That line, from in the middle of “En Focus,” is talking about hip hop and stardom and light-skinnedness and the need we all have for people to look at us and pay attention—all of that, all at the same time.

And so then you see why folks were laughing at Saturday Night Live, talking about it on Monday at work. It’s because they got that shit. No matter the costumes and the make-up, the broad, stupid running gags—they got it. It spoke to people and made them feel a part of something funny. Like sweet favors, De La Soul grants feelings of inclusion. “Did you get it?” they seem to ask, and if you did, you’re in. “Who can be—fresh / Who can be—dope / Who can be—live / Who can be—word / Who can be.” If you didn’t get it, you can act like you know and they wouldn’t care—you could be in, anyway.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.