balogun's Full Review: How Ya Like Me Now by Kool Moe Dee
You know you really ticked off someone else when he does everything short of punching you square in the face. For Kool Moe Dee, well, he seemed not to like LL Cool J very much. Indeed, to him, the hip-hop star was the epitome of a younger generation too brash and egotistical to acknowledge the existence of their predecessors. Now couple that with his constant need to shed the perception that rappers like him are antiquated and cannot sell a record to save their lives, and you have one determined shades-donning brother. When his second album, How Ya Like Me Now, arrived in 1987, it came with one heck of an album-cover statement: KMD, half-smiling, in a sort of pugilist pose, while behind him stands a white Jeep with a wheel crushing a Red Kangol -- LL’s trademark hat. Uh-oh.
The title track is hardly a warm-up; in fact, it’s the best song in the entire album -- and one of rap’s greatest battle songs. With a beat constructed from James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” that is a little menacing yet ultimately light-hearted, KMD starts off discharging volleys at certain members of the new rapping generation who were reaping the benefits of the old school, derisively referring to them as “new jacks.” “What is this, Amateur Night at the Apollo?/Get off this stage!/I’m in a rage!” he amusingly barks, outraged by a perceived lack of performance seasoning. Then he turns his wrath to the naysayers brushing the pioneers off as artistically and commercially limited: “Sucker MCs in the place that said I/Could only rock rhymes, and only rock crowds/But never rock records/How ya like me now?” he snaps in response.
And then it gets really good, as Moe Dee’s rage begins to build, the ire wonderfully narrowing to the subject at hand. By the third verse, listening to him bellow, “I’m Bigger and Better, forget about Deffer!” in reference to a certain album released only a few months before, it is definitely obvious who he is going after, although even by the fourth verse, he would not even give him the dignity of mentioning his name, figuratively whipping the “punk, track star and […] thief” like a disobedient child: “…I’m gonna ask him ‘Who’s the best?’ And if he don’t say Moe Dee/I’ll take my whip and make him call himself Toby/[…]/Always talking about battles, but he never had a battle yet/But if we ever did, how could he beat me?/He’s so petrified and scared to even meet me!” Someone’s been a bad boy!
With “How Ya Like Me Now”, Kool Moe Dee drew first blood, thus igniting one of hip-hop’s most riveting lyrical battles. And nope, with this album, the LL Cool J disses do not end with the title track. KMD flings more barbs in “Don’t Dance”, astoundingly compounding rhymes to astonishing effect in one part when the music strips back: “Undoubtedly, obviously, true, you/Wanted to be, another Moe Dee, when you started/Rhyming like me, you had to be, to some degree/An imitation, variation of me!” Funny enough, the title of the song bares a resemblance to that of one of the songs in LL’s debut, Radio: yep, “You Can’t Dance.”
But hey, it’s not all about battle rapping -- and it shouldn’t be. Elsewhere, the confrontational couplets are not as strong, like in the droning “Suckers”. Besides, Kool Moe Dee still had to prove his commercial viability, as his debut was not exactly a hot seller. And he wanted to “Get Paid”, right?
Thus the other great songs in How Ya Like Me Now mirror Moe Dee’s topical creativity rather than add to a 50-minute clobbering of a young audacious upstart. The horn-riddled “No Respect” is a condemnation of materialism and hedonism, with a hilarious skit in the end showcasing a dialogue between two deluded hustlers. And complete with suspenseful synth-bass punches, “Wild Wild West” -- probably KMD’s most famous song hugely due to a Will Smith semi-remake twelve years later -- is a stern denouncement of street violence, a clarion call that is unfortunately unheeded in urban America then and now. Guns? Nah, at least if it’s going to go down, brush up on your pugilism skills: “We fight with our hands and nobody’s a punk!” Word.
Elsewhere, there’s the celebratory old-school tribute (“Way Way Back”) and “Stupid”, which is a cautionary tale about disregard for one’s relationships. “I’m a Player” is a curious inclusion because it sounds like it was recorded before 1987; Kool Moe Dee’s voice is higher here, which helps him inject joviality in the song about playing ladies who want to play him, as well as admit to exploiting society’s sexist double standard. “If a guy has a 100 girls, he’s a hero/A girl with a 100 guys is a zero!” Wow, the crafty bastard.
High voice or not, Kool Moe Dee was advanced in years and technique. He just sounds, well, older than his 24 years (In fact, he’s always sounded older than his years.) And his pristine enunciation, great use of vocabulary, and mechanical precision is still in place, perhaps a little more refined than the first time out. I wish I could heap as much praise on the backing music, though. Granted, How Ya Like Me Now has more sonic flesh than its predecessor, covering the range of keyboard-based sounds to samples culled from the ’70s music scene. It just sucks that Moe Dee (and his three co-producers) strike out with the rock-sampling ones, though. While James Brown, Jimmy Castor, and Aretha Franklin pass in flying colors, Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” (“50 Ways”) gets butchered with two words awkwardly pasted intermittently throughout the marching-drum snares. And how KMD drains the life out of a song as legendarily grand as Queen’s “We Will Rock You” (“Rock You”) -- doing the very same thing he did with Simon -- should be regarded as one of the great untold mysteries of ‘80s hip-hop.
Those clunkers aside, How Ya Like Me Now was no fluke. Going platinum within a year, Kool Moe Dee established himself as the only emcee from hip-hop’s pioneering period to have a successful career in its next musical phase. And that is just as good an accomplishment as “mak[ing] a sick man rock in his death bed!”
TRACK LISTING:
1. How Ya Like Me Now 2. Wild Wild West 3. Way Way Back 4. 50 Ways 5. No Respect 6. Don’t Dance 7. I’m a Player 8. Suckers 9. Stupid 10. Rock You 11. Get Paid
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