It also had that occasional clipped siren throughout that sounded like someone’s hairdryer or a Dust Buster recorded with pitch changes. The song’s elements were hypnotically simple: a mid-tempo funky groove carried by that monotonous two-note horn stab that producer Easy Mo Bee had to have sampled from somewhere but whose source is still a mystery to this day. Neither of us had heard of Craig Mack or Bad Boy Entertainment, but I recall we both reacted as if we had just heard the best rap jam in years! Single cover art for Craig Mack’s “Flava In Ya Ear,” released July 1994. I remember being in a record store in Houston that August while visiting my best friend who lived there at the time. It was something I wanted people to enjoy, but it was cut short because he was very religious and wanted to go to church.Do you remember where you were when you first heard Craig Mack’s 1994 rap classic, “Flava In Ya Ear”? “I wanted the world to know the talent he had.
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“Nobody got to understand his story,” Toney said. Toney, who helped produce Project: Funk Da World, told the NY Daily News he was working on a documentary about Mack. “I am grateful to have worked with him,” Missy Elliott tweeted. “You $tepped away from the game & did it your way. “It was a pleasure to know you & rock with you,” LL Cool J added. “I’m devastated over the news of Craig Mack,” Sermon tweeted. Cheeks for “Come Thru,” the first single off Sermon’s upcoming album. Sometimes, people can’t walk back and forth in both worlds.”Įarlier this year, Erick Sermon recruited Mack alongside Method Man and Mr. We can respect that because if any of us is still here, we’d have to go to him, too.
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In this game, man, people don’t realize the music industry only has a one percent rate ratio, so sometimes it’s very stressful and it brings you only to places that you can go to and should go to, which is God. “I don’t think anybody was disappointed,” Combs told Billboard last year. In Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: The Bad Boy Story, the 2017 documentary chronicling the rise of Combs’ revered label and reunion tour, Mack can be heard discussing the possibility of returning to the stage, but declined because of his religious beliefs. “We have somebody that used to be Craig Mack.” “Craig Mack is dead,” Stair tells the congregation. The video, taken at the Overcomer Ministry commune in Walterboro, S.C., shows the group’s pastor Ralph Gordon Stair talking to Mack. Mack eventually became a minister in South Carolina and appeared to renounce his former life as a rapper in a 2012 video. Mack later appeared in the video for Diddy’s hit “I Need a Girl Part 1,” but his solo career never regained momentum. He left Bad Boy Records and released Operation: Get Down in 1997 but did not score a hit from the album. Mack freestyled for Diddy and earned a record contract.Īfter breaking through with “Flava in Ya Ear” and its accompanying gold-certified album Project: Funk Da World, Mack struggled to replicate his initial success. Dre and LL Cool J for the single “Zoom.” Mack eventually met Diddy – who was at that time looking to set up Bad Boy after being fired from Uptown Records – outside the club Mecca in Manhattan. Under the name MC EZ, listed alongside DJ Troup, he released a single 12-inch on Fresh Records in 1988: “Just Rhymin'” b/w “Get Retarded.” The nimble B-side would become a fave among rap fans and was interpolated by Dr. Mack first started rhyming in the late 1980s. “All the time I was getting an education learning about the studio and the road,” he explained. He did odd jobs for the group and did not perform, but Mack still remembered the experience as a valuable one. He became friendly with members of another famous New York rap group, EPMD, and accompanied them on tour. “I knew I wanted to be like LL Cool J and Run-D.M.C.,” Mack recalled. In a 1995 profile in The New York Times, Mack said he was hooked on rap by his cousins at age nine and began to write his own lyrics at age 12.
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Mack, born in the Bronx in 1970, helped make Bad Boy Records synonymous with New York hip-hop, kickstarting the label that would eventually make stars of Notorious B.I.G., Mase, 112 and more.