‘You can't wear gold without diamonds!' Hip-hop legend Slick Rick on bling, British roots and his 26-year break
Slick Rick is tucking into a late room-service breakfast in his Park Lane hotel room. He is back in London, the city his family emigrated from when he was a boy, because he's launching a new album, Victory, his first since 1999's The Art of Storytelling, which featured an array of guest artists – including Outkast, Nas and Snoop Dogg – paying homage to one of hip-hop's legendary figures.
Even today, he remains the rapper's rapper, the most-sampled hip-hop artist in history. Ghostface Killah has called him the greatest of all time. Eminem described himself as 'a product of Slick Rick', Jay-Z likened him to Matisse and Mark Ronson once gave a Ted talk dissecting his work. Questlove called his voice 'the most beautiful thing to happen to hip-hop culture'.
So what has he been doing for the last 26 years? He's keen to point out that he's been busy. There was a lengthy battle with US immigration (he was granted American citizenship in 2016); guest appearances on tracks by Jay-Z, Missy Elliott and Mariah Carey among others; collaborations with fashion brands; a real estate empire to tend to. A smart cookie, Slick Rick invested his 80s earnings in property in the Bronx in New York City, the downside of which, 'delinquent tenants and such', is explored in an exasperated track on Victory called Landlord. But it took a meeting with actor Idris Elba 'at a celebrity-type party thing' to bring a new album to life: Victory was recorded at Elba's homes in London and Paris. Uniquely among his catalogue, the results lean into the former Ricky Walters's British roots: UK rapper Giggs makes a guest appearance, as does Estelle, and the accompanying videos were shot in south London.
The bracelet on his wrist is platinum and enormous, his watch definitely warrants the description 'iced out' but, by Slick Rick's standards at least, he's dressed down. The patch that covers his right eye, injured by glass from a broken window when he was two, is just an eye patch, rather than the jewel-encrusted variety that has become his trademark (Sotheby's sold one of them last year for $25,000), and there's no sign of his famous neck chains complete with vast pendants.
On a day when he's feeling more flamboyant, Slick Rick looks as if he's wearing a jewellery store's entire window display around his neck. It's a style he says he borrowed from mid-80s drug dealers in Baychester, the neighbourhood of the Bronx to which his family relocated from Mitcham in 1976, seeking a better life. 'Crack cocaine was everywhere, and people that was getting rich off crack had enormous jewellery and nice cars and pretty girls – it was like they were giants. Once you get past the stigma of it being bad, you can harvest the beauty out of what you saw. When we saw the jewellery looking like that, it was like, 'You can't go back to small. You can't go back to gold with no diamonds on it.'
No, he frowns, he's not dialling his look down now he's reached his 60s. Quite the opposite: he heads to his bedroom and returns with a huge, diamond-encrusted medallion featuring the Virgin Mary. 'You're selling yourself, you know what I mean? Let's say you ain't made a record in 26 years – you're like an old, washed-up, broke motherfucker, do you know what I mean? But when you present yourself like that, it makes people look at you different: 'Oh, I thought you was a broke ass'. The music eventually catches up, but in the meantime, you sell yourself.'
Selling his image is something Slick Rick's proved exceptionally good at: in the US you can buy not just Slick Rick T-shirts, but Halloween costumes, even rugs. Not that there was any danger of it overshadowing his music.
He was like no one else in mid-80s hip-hop. Rapping in a soft, conversational, singsong voice, he sounded less like someone addressing an audience than a man telling a particularly ornamented anecdote, with one eyebrow permanently raised at the absurdity of it all. It just came out that way, he says: 'At the time, I was probably the only English rapper, but I mixed it with an American accent, because I'm trying to be cool.' And indeed there's something slightly disconcerting about meeting Slick Rick, at least if you've spent the last 40 years listening to his work: in conversation, he sounds exactly like he does on record.
He says that moving from Mitcham to the Bronx was a culture shock – 'it was like being in Disneyland or something, more variety of music, food, cultures' – but equally he was in the right place at the right time. In his early teens, hip-hop's first stirrings swept Black neighbourhoods in the Bronx. He can remember seeing the Cold Crush Brothers performing in a local park – 'four or five of them, two DJs, choreographed dance steps, it was just beautiful to us' – and the disappointment of hearing the first hip-hop singles. 'They didn't sound like they did in the streets.'
By then, he had his own group, the Kangol Crew, with their own look – 'the Kangol hat with a little suit jacket, we was popular in school because we stood out'. But really, he says, it was 'just kids banging on the desks and making up rhymes, like competing with each other to make the team laugh'. Still, it was the root of his distinctive approach to writing: rather than just bragging, he took to writing stories, illuminating them by taking on characters and adopting different voices. He says he got the latter idea from the children's records by Alvin and the Chipmunks, on which actor Ross Bagdasarian would manipulate tapes of his voice to create characters, effectively holding conversations with himself, although Slick Rick's characters and stories were infinitely more outrageous. 'That was just me entertaining my age group. Later, critics said it was misogynistic or whatever, but if you're trying to entertain children your age, that's going to come with it. You're not going to nitpick and chip away at it – don't use that word, don't use this word – because you'll mess up the humour.'
His real break came when he entered a talent contest at a local club called The Armoury: one of the judges was Doug E Fresh, already making a name for himself as 'the original human beatbox': they teamed up and started making tapes together. 'Then someone leaked the tapes to the radio and they just got so popular that a record label thought they should put it out, and then … it went international.'
It certainly did: credited to Doug E Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew, 1985's The Show sold 1m copies in the US and reached the Top 10 in Britain. But it was the B-side, La Di Da Di, that cast the longest shadow: a lengthy shaggy dog story and showcase for MC Ricky D (as he was then known), packed with endlessly quotable lines, it's subsequently been sampled more than 1,200 times, by virtually every major rapper – from 2Pac to Kanye West, Run-DMC to Tyler, the Creator – and a dizzying array of non-hip-hop artists: La Di Da Di is probably the only thing the oeuvre of Miles Davis shares with that of the Vengaboys, or indeed BTS. It's provided the hook for the Notorious BIG's Hypnotize, the chorus for Miley Cyrus's We Can't Stop and a melancholy counterpoint on Lana Del Rey's Doin' Time. It rumbles in the background of Beyoncé's Party, was covered in its entirety by Snoop Dogg – whose vocal style owes a considerable debt to Slick Rick's – and Robbie Williams borrowed its lyrics on Rock DJ. 'It draws people in,' suggests Rick of its longevity. 'It's like watching a half-hour comedy special or something. And it taught the kids that they could go in another direction – '[other hip-hop] is just braggadocious, you can go this way too'.'
His solo debut album The Great Adventures of Slick Rick was a platinum seller, spawning more heavily sampled classics in Hey Young World and Children's Story, which subsequently formed the basis of Montell Jordan's This Is How We Do It and TLC's Creep, respectively. Then everything went wrong.
A cousin, hired as a bodyguard, attempted to extort money from him: when he was let go, he threatened to kill the rapper and his mother. The situation escalated, shots were fired, and Slick Rick was convicted of attempted murder, serving five years (he was given a full pardon in 2008). He recorded two more albums, 1991's The Ruler's Back and 1994's Behind Bars, while on bail or day release. He doesn't want to talk about his jail time today, nor does he mention either of those albums in the list of achievements he enumerates on Victory ('They were rushed, made on bail. I didn't reach my full potential. I don't want to undercut my audience with filler tracks,' he shrugs) although Behind Bars in particular has some stellar moments. The heartbreaking All Alone (No One to Be With) presses his classic storytelling into the service of a song about a single mother's life going haywire, and the chilling title track is, as he puts it, 'a child's imagination of what everybody perceives jail to be – dangerous, you might get raped, you might get extorted'.
It is undoubtedly a peculiar situation: an artist who has exerted a vast influence on hip-hop, while only releasing five albums in a 41-year career, two of which he disowns. But Slick Rick seems noticeably more interested in showing me his design for a platform-soled version of the Clarks Wallabee shoe – 'it's modern, it's perfect,' he enthuses – than he is in discussing his legacy. 'It doesn't matter. You just live your life and then let it resonate how it resonates, let it inspire how it inspires. I'm not really looking for a legacy or nothing like that. Just let it happen how it happens, OK?'
It's probably an easy thing to say when you know your fellow rappers have spent decades calling you a legend, but no matter: the great Slick Rick shakes my hand, and returns his attention to his sausage and eggs.
Victory is out now on 7Wallace/Mass Appeal
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