We have officially entered the Kool G Rap cinematic universe.
Three of hip-hop’s greatest storytellers, Kool G Rap, Ghostface Killah and Scarface, recently came together for a new edition of Red Bull Spiral.
Midway through a verse packed with drug-world imagery, criminal history and movie references, G Rap issues a threat about filling coffins before dropping the line:
“For that dough I go Lizzie Borden, Billy Corben, Illinois Gordon.”
That puts Billy in appropriately disreputable company.
Lizzie Borden, famously accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an ax, became one of the most enduring figures in American crime folklore.
Illinois Gordon is the gangster played by Chi McBride in Bill Duke’s 1997 crime film Hoodlum. Gordon is the cousin and criminal partner of Harlem numbers kingpin Bumpy Johnson, played by Laurence Fishburne.
Borden. Corben. Gordon.
It is a characteristically dense Kool G Rap construction, connecting a legendary murder case, a filmmaker known for chronicling the underworld and a character from a gangster movie in one run of internal rhyme.
The name-check is especially meaningful coming from G Rap. Beginning in the late 1980s, he helped pioneer a cinematic form of street rap built around intricate rhyme schemes and vividly constructed stories of narcotics, organized crime, violence, ambition and consequence. The three albums he made with DJ Polo, Road to the Riches, Wanted: Dead or Alive and Live and Let Die, helped lay the groundwork for the mafioso rap that flourished in the 1990s. His influence can be heard in generations of MCs, including Nas, The Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, Raekwon and Big Pun.
Twenty years after Cocaine Cowboys, hearing Billy’s name surface in a Kool G Rap verse feels like a particularly satisfying piece of cultural recognition.
Not an Emmy. Not a Peabody.
A Kool G Rap bar.