No Girls Allowed

Photo by Mark Salacuse

After being rap’s number-one media darlings for about three years and releasing two impeccable mixtapes, Clipse put out Hell Hath No Fury, arguably the best album of 2006. So why does it seem like you need a penis to enjoy what they do? Back in high school, I remember girls listening to Mobb Deep and Smif-N-Wessun. Now it’s like me and a bunch of dudes dissecting Pusha-T and Malice’s finely crafted, lyrical tales of crack salesmanship while all the shorties do the lean-with-it-walk-with-it. As Malice confirms, the high ethereal sphere of hip-hop excellence is nothing but one big sausage party. Vice: You realise that rap music is now mainly geared toward teen girls, right? Malice: I am very well aware of that. But there’s no way in the world that I could cater to 14-year-old girls. I don’t know how to do anything else but this Clipse shit. My daughter’s into Nick Cannon, Jibbs’s “Chain Hang Low”, “Chicken Noodle Soup”, “Laffy Taffy”, all that snap music. I got to respect it because she loves it. She’s ten, and she doesn’t express any interest in my music. She might come in from the grocery store and be like, “Daddy your song’s on the radio” or, “Your video’s on” but you won’t hear her talking about “Wamp Wamp (What it do What it do).” That’s probably not a bad thing. And what’s crazy is that she’s the exact image of me, she’s got the exact same attitude. She’s just not into lyric-driven hip-hop. We talk deeply about what she sees on TV and the fact that it’s not like the real world, that it’s OK to enjoy it but you’ve got to keep everything in its proper place. I don’t bother her about Daddy’s past. How about your wife? What does she think of Clipse? She listens to tons of gospel. She don’t know nothing about no hip-hop. When I take her to the club, she gives me that face like “Let’s get out of here.” She likes Yolanda Adams, Kirk Franklin—I’ll come in the house and that stuff is bangin’—and I mean bangin’, like, loud as fuck. She don’t even watch rap videos. She’s only into, like, black-and-white westerns or Joyce Meyer the church lady. She hasn’t even heard my new album. It’s not our topic of conversation. She’s been through everything with me, everything I did, the street life. She’s held it down for me and witnessed it first-hand. So now she’s not into none of that. Your grandma was really into the whole drug game though, right? Well, she was the cornerstone of the family. She was everything to us. She actually told me that she didn’t like how I put the family business out there on the first album. You know, an old lady in her 70s don’t want to be remembered like that. So I apologised on “Mamma I’m Sorry.” She’s from Norfolk, Virginia, and then she moved to New York. We had older cousins and uncles that knew the streets. Like, I remember reading in the New York Times that one of my cousins got shot up. They were in it deep, just making money. It wasn’t so much my grandma herself hustling, you know, she just had a piece of change and held it down and all the men in the family did the legwork. That’s why the dope game for me really started in our household. We’d play hide-and-go-seek and find a gang of shit in the house, like scales or residue. We didn’t know what it was until we saw it in the movies and were like, “Yo scrapper, that’s it right there!” Man, do you know any chicks who like what you do? How about your mum? My mum couldn’t stand rap. She didn’t understand nothing about it—didn’t get it. She was always the first one to say, “If you know your homework like you knew that record, you’d be aiight.” Then Pusha got her a Jaguar. Now she’s the number-one rap fanatic in the world. MACHO
Hell Hath No Fury is out now on Re-Up/Jive.