"Eric B. Is President" is released

Why it matters

The B-side of the "Eric B. Is President" 12-inch is a song called "My Melody." It is, structurally, a more impressive record than the A-side. Rakim raps in a slower, deeper, more locked-in cadence. The bars are denser. The internal rhymes are even more confident. The line he opens with ("my unusual style will confuse you a while") is the kind of bar a rapper writes when he knows exactly what he is doing. He was eighteen. The two-sided 12-inch (President on A, Melody on B) is sometimes called the most important debut record in the history of New York rap. That is probably right. Both sides do work the genre had not seen before. Both sides are produced by Marley Marl. Both sides have Eric B. on the turntables. The record cost almost nothing to make and reset the lyrical ceiling for everybody. You do not get that combination very often, in any genre, in any decade.