How Heltah SkeltahÔÇÖs ÔÇÿLetha Brainz BloÔÇÖ Showed Just How Great Sean Price Would Be

Duck Down

In hip-hop, 16 bars can change how you fundamentally see the game. It doesn’t matter where you hear them, you’ll stop what you’re doing and take a moment to yourself. It can be in your ride, your headphones, at the club…well maybe not the club, but you get the point. For me, it was in my bedroom listening to Heltah Skeltah’s Nocturnal for the first time and not being able to get past “Letha Brainz Blo.” That song got so much play on those JVC speakers that if it was a tape, it would’ve popped. That one song not only made me a lifelong Sean Price fan, but permanently etched him in my top 10 list.

This wasn’t my first time hearing Ruck but that night in 2003 was my first time listening to him. I only copped the Heltah Skeltah album because of the Boot Camp Click connection and if Dah Shinin’ was a gem, this had to be as well. The very instant I heard that voice say, “First of all…” that was it. I was hooked. What followed was one of the best MC performances put to wax. In any era.

“N****s don’t know jack my flow’s fat so fat my gat Flaps at n****s who claim that my sh*t’s wack You don’t know I thought you knew it Too late b*tch you blew it now I’ma bang your your sh*t up like I was Lennox Lewis 1,2,3,4,5, 6,7,8 n****s oh sh*t where’s my 9?”

Reading those lines don’t do them justice. They have to be heard.

It was the wordplay that sparked his resurgence in ’05, the flow that remained on point like ice sickles, and the just the penchant for rhyming that was just as potent in ’96 as it was 10 years later. It maybe commonplace now but at the time, I hadn’t heard someone put words together like that. And not on some rapidity rap steeze either. There’s putting words together just because you think its cute and then there’s doing it to make a point. This was firmly the latter. “Chump chill ‘fore my pump kills” dopeness with a purpose.

Eventually –after maybe an hour–I got to the rest of the album. Whether it was “Therapy,” “Undastand,” “Soldiers Gone Psycho,” or…screw it, the whole damn album, and all it did was reinforce what I already knew. Ruck was never leaving my list of favorite emcees and he was insanely slept-on.

Monkey Barz was the wake up call but even before then, I was evangelizing for this dude like no rapper before or since. “Letha Brainz Blo” was all the proof that I needed. Two verses. 26 bars changed my expectations for other cats in the game. Hearing him say his “crew rolled thick like Hasidics” changed my diet and anything less than that couldn’t be stomached.

Discovering music is always fun but there’s something special about the joints you uncover as a teenager. Especially if you’re the precocious and insufferable type. “Letha Brainz Blo” is the reason I wouldn’t shut up about this guy that no one I knew had heard of or remembered. It’s a pretty big stitch in the hip-hop quilt, it’s the first inkling that he’d be a problem on the solo tip, and it’s the first song that made me realize a CD can scratch if you play one song way too many times.

The “raw rapper, jaw-tapper” will forever reign supreme.

How Heltah SkeltahÔÇÖs ÔÇÿLetha Brainz BloÔÇÖ Showed Just How Great Sean Price Would Be : UPROXX