Rakim

Bio

William Griffin Jr. is Rakim. Before him, the MC was, mostly, a hype man. The MC was the person standing next to the DJ who got the room loud. After Rakim, the MC was the lyric. The MC was the rhyme scheme. The MC was the thinking.

He grew up in Wyandanch, Long Island, born in 1968. His aunt Ruth Brown was an R&B singer with a long Atlantic Records career. His high school physical-education teacher, Mahmoud Abdul-Latif, was the Five Percent Nation figure who steered him toward what would become his lyric vocabulary. He went by Kid Wizard for a couple of years. By 1986, when he was 18 and partnered with Long Island DJ Eric B., the world was about to get the cleanest demonstration of the form's possibilities anyone had recorded.

"Eric B. Is President," released in summer 1986 on Zakia Records, is the document. Rakim raps over a James Brown loop ("Funky President") and an Eric B. beat that essentially refuses to move. The hook is that Rakim does not raise his voice. He does not pant. He does not punch the air. He talks. He fits four internal rhymes into a single line and lands on the end-rhyme like he is closing a door. There is a chess-clock evenness to the delivery that, in 1986, when most MCs were still party-MCing, sounded like science fiction.

Then Paid in Full, July 1987, the full debut. The title track. "I Ain't No Joke." "I Know You Got Soul," the song that effectively introduced the sampled-James-Brown convention to mainstream production. The album is considered, by basically every serious critic, to be one of the two or three most influential hip-hop records ever made. Every MC after 1987 who paid attention to internal rhyme, multi-syllabic rhyme, or calm-over-fast-beats was studying Rakim. Nas was studying him. Jay-Z was studying him. Kendrick has talked about studying him. It does not really stop.

What is interesting about Rakim's subsequent career is how relatively quiet it was. He and Eric B. put out three more albums together (Follow the Leader in 1988, Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em in 1990, Don't Sweat the Technique in 1992) and then the partnership ended in a contract dispute that took years to untangle. Solo Rakim records came out sporadically. The cultural impact had already happened.

He is alive. He still tours. He is, in any reasonable canon, the most influential MC who never had a mainstream pop hit. The way you measure his influence is not by chart position. The way you measure it is by counting how many rappers, when you ask them to name their five favorite MCs, say his name first.