![]() ![]() “It gave the listener a mental vision of what it was like for him growing up there in Brooklyn.”įrom the blunt, unforgiving song’s opening line – “I’m from where the hammers rung /News cameras never come” – Jay describes a place where “life expectancy is so low, we making out wills at 18.” It’s the inverse of “Imaginary Player,” where decadent luxury takes a backseat to day-by-day survival. “He painted a grim picture about Marcy Projects,” Lawrence says. The result is one of Jay’s most candid and intimate tracks part memoir, part cultural and socioeconomic critique, part distillation of his surroundings both past and present. “It gave me a vision to make the track sound more dramatic based on Jay’s flow,” Lawrence says. But when Jay-Z heard what would become “Where I’m From,” the rapper, inspired, immediately began recording his personal verses two bars at a time. Producer Ron “Amen-Ra” Lawrence was record-hunting in 1996 when he found soul singer Yvonne Fair’s “Let Your Hair Down” and tried, as he tells Rolling Stone, “giving it a sinister soundtrack feel.” The track, which Diddy originally passed on, was still in rough form – no sound effects, no extra percussion. Image Credit: Anthony Barboza/Getty Images It culminates in one of the most haunting choruses of the rapper’s career: “Can I Live?” Dre on N.W.A.’s “Express Yourself.” “I’d rather die enormous than live dormant,” he raps. “The hustler has armor – money, ambition – that makes his pain less visible, less ‘quick to see.’ But just like a drug addict’s ‘brain on drugs’ the hustler’s brain is similarly fried, preparing for inevitable rainy days (precipitation), planning takeovers, stacking and climbing.” As the penultimate Brooklyn hustler, Jay’s stress over street politics manifests in fears of getting “toasted” by rivals, catching “amnesia” over the crimes he has committed and meditating “like a Buddhist” akin to Dr. “The pain of a drug addict is visible,” wrote Jay when he explained the “Can I Live” lyrics in his book Decoded. In 1996, it seemed as if Isaac Hayes’ early Seventies masterworks were everywhere, whether powering the Platinum soundtrack to the movie Dead Presidents, or informing much of the electronic-oriented hip-hop experiments known as “trip-hop.” On “Can I Live,” Hayes’ sensual reimagining of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “The Look of Love” serves as an elegiac counterpoint for Jay-Z’s anguished comparisons of a hustler’s lust to a drug addict’s paranoia. Image Credit: KMazur/WireImage/New York Post “Instead, I found the mirror between the two stories – that Annie’s story was mine, and mine was hers, and the song was the place where our experiences weren’t contradictions, just different dimensions of the same reality.” ![]() “I knew from the reaction I was getting that it was really working.” Eventually Jay asked too, and thus began this monster hit, a vivid, melancholy look at his rise from “from lukewarm to hot sleepin’ on futons and cots/to king size.” “I wasn’t worried about the clash between the hard lyrics and the image of redheaded Annie,” Jay wrote in Decoded. “Fans were running up saying, ‘How did you get the Annie song behind the drums?’ It was mostly white people coming up to me,” Capri told Grantland. He gave a dubplate to Kid Capri, who was DJing Puff Daddy’s No Way Out Tour. ![]() An intense and ultimately heartbreaking goodbye from Cobain, the final song of the night ends with Cobain’s soulful scream, bringing Nirvana’s performance to a haunting close and leaving listeners wondering what might have been.For Jay-Z’s first single to break into the Top 15 of the pop charts, producer Mark “The 45 King” famously flipped an indelible tune from the Annie Broadway soundtrack – he copped the record from the Salvation Army for a quarter after seeing an ad on TV. But it’s the cover of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” that makes this record worth owning. The Meat Puppets’ Cris and Curt Kirkwood joined Nirvana for renditions of their own songs “Plateau,” “Oh, Me” and “Lake Of Fire,” while the band’s take on David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World” has become more well known than the original. Nirvana originals “All Apologies,” “Dumb” and “Something In The Way” suit the gloomy acoustic setting, but it’s the covers that really convey a sense of intimacy previously not associated with the band. Joined by guitarist Pat Smear and cellist Lori Goldston, the show was remarkably recorded in just one take. Ignoring the blueprint of previous performances, Nirvana ditched the hits (“Come As You Are” is the only radio single played) for deeper album cuts and a collection of interesting covers. The first Nirvana release after the shocking death of Kurt Cobain, MTV Unplugged In New York captures another side of the Seattle grunge pioneers that hints at Cobain’s troubled state of mind. ![]()
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