Too Short and E-40 Are Doing Verzuz the “Bay Area Way”

It’s difficult to imagine two rappers whose approaches to a beat diverge more sharply than Too Short and E-40. Tomorrow night, the final 2020 installment of Swizz Beatz and Timbaland’s Verzuz series will pit Short—the Oakland legend who delivers laconic pimp raps in a near-nasal register from deep in the beat’s pocket—against the Vallejo-bred 40, whose voice warps and contorts like an Animaniac. The two Bay Area veterans have known each other since the mid-1980s, and explain that they’re treating the exercise as more of a celebration than a cage match. “I don’t wanna approach this like I’m trying to beat E-40,” Too Short says over Zoom, while receiving a haircut. “I’m approaching it like it’s me and E-40 versus the entire planet.”

In conjunction with their Verzuz event, 40 and Short have dropped new albums––Terms and Conditions and Ain’t Gone Do It, respectively––which are packaged together on digital streaming platforms. (This is not the first time they’ve worked together: there’s the 2012 double-disc album originally called The History Channel, and there are one-off collaborations going back to the Clinton years.) The pair share an easy rapport, and pepper their conversation with the tics from their music: Short with his matter-of-fact, bad-uncle advice spun into parables, 40 with his expressive voice and invented syntax.

GQ: I’m not from the Bay—and, to an outsider, Bay Area hip-hop seemed to begin with you two. Can you tell me what the rap scene was like there in ‘79, ‘80, ‘81?

Too Short: Well, 1979 is the first time rap came on the radio, with [The Sugar Hill Gang’s] “Rapper’s Delight.” I had heard things that sounded like it before that: Parliament rapped on records, saying words to the rhythm; there was that song, [Fatback Band’s] “King Tim III,” that kind of sounds like rapping. But I wasn’t up on those New York mixtapes that came out before 1979; nothing officially was hip-hop before “Rapper’s Delight.” So immediately after that, you got Kurtis Blow, you got Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, you got The Sequence––all this stuff starts coming out of Sugar Hill Records. Every two weeks, there was a new hip-hop record. I’m in Oakland, and all these records are being embraced immediately. It was a party thing right off the rip. In 1979, I was in ninth grade. Before I started tenth grade, I was already rapping myself. I didn’t wait around to see what hip-hop was doing before I jumped in; I did it immediately. When I first heard it, I said, “I can do this.” So in my world––in Oakland––I was a rapper the same way Run and DMC were rappers, the way LL [Cool J] was a rapper.

E-40: Shout out to [Chic co-founder] Nile Rodgers, he’s the man, he’s got a lot to do with hip-hop. When I first heard “Rapper’s Delight,” I was like, [40 raps the song’s hook and Wonder Mike’s opening verse]. It was all that suave spit. Then you had Run-DMC. You had “The Message.” You had Sparky Dee, you had Roxanne Shante. There was a time when we looked up to New York apparel: they had the big gold chains. We wanted to look like them. The shit comes from them as far as hip-hop, [but] we had our own game. We wanted to explain the streets in our own format, in our own way. The Bay Area way. We had some good spit to spit.

40, had you heard Short’s music around Oakland, or around Vallejo, before you met him?

E-40: Hell yeah––he was a nigga spitting straight shit that I could relate to during my becoming-man-ish phase. I was an observer of the game, that fly on the wall who would talk to the OGs. I was comedy too at the same time; I had a sneaky comedy to me. [But] your life starts getting serious around 14, 15 years old. My cousin and them came down from Oakland. Oakland, Richmond, Frisco, were always ahead of Vallejo. But Vallejo had the best of all worlds, because everybody had family from those places. I was living a life, and that [Too Short music] was right up my alley.

Short, what were your first impressions of 40?

Too Short: When I first met E-40 we were the dudes in the crew with a bunch of thug-type dudes, drug dealer-type dudes. 40 had a reputation for getting his hands dirty, and he had the blood relatives, like his cousin, B-Legit. They was known for getting money in the game. We were allies, so to speak––but not in a hip-hop way. That was the ‘80s. Way down the line, in the ‘90s, that’s when we started acknowledging the hip-hop connection and getting closer on those terms.

Right––you didn’t make a record together until [1996’s] “Rapper’s Ball.”

Too Short: From the time we met until “Rapper’s Ball,” you’ve got a seven, eight, nine-year period of… look, I never thought of making a song with Mac Dre. We ended up on a song together back in the day, but it wasn’t because of me and him, it was because of [longtime KMEL DJ] Chuy Gomez or someone at the radio station, you know what I mean?

But, 40, you had already sampled Short on [“Rat Heads,” from the 1993 album] Federal, right?

E-40: [Laughs] You know too much! Yeah, I sampled Short’s shit, and he never sat back and was like, ‘Man, fuck that nigga? I had my own thing, he had his thing, and it happened like it was supposed to happen.

Too Short: It was all game, though. The common link was always upholding the game. That’s a whole different course there. If you don’t know what the game is I’ve gotta sit you down for a while and teach you the meaning of what the game is. But once you get the meaning of what the game is and you start absorbing it, then you get what we doing. The whole time, this whole thing has been educational. It’s not just entertainment, it’s not just funky beats. It’s really school.

That’s something I wanted to ask: your styles hinge in large part on giving listeners game, but what’s some advice you wish you had back in ‘85?

E-40: I would say, if you’re a hustler, you get in and get out. Don’t try to make that a permanent occupation. You can ball for three years and fuck around and have to do 30 in the penitentiary. The numbers don’t add up. Play the white man’s game: get in and get out. Everybody’s got some type of stepping stone to get where they’re at, whether it was legal or illegal. Get some legitimate cash coming in. If you sitting on ten thou-wow, you can put that shit in a barber shop, then that barber shop’s gonna pay for itself.

Too Short: Short: I think it’s all part of the process. Young and dumb is something you gotta go through, but you’ve got to be a student. Don’t get to the point where you think, ‘I learned everything last week,’ or, ‘I learned everything last year.’ You’ll never learn everything. Wake up every day and try to learn something new. And if you do learn something, pass it on to people you think deserve the game. I had to go through a lot of dumbass young shit to get this smart. While I was young, getting money, a hustler, I was sharp. But I never thought I was too smart to learn something new. Keep your receptors open, and don’t get too egotistical to think you know more than everybody else in the room. You’ve gotta be real manish, but you’ve also gotta know when to be humble. I had fun being young and dumb. I don’t wanna go back and be too smart, because it wouldn’t be as much fun.

You’ve each put out dozens of records over––you’re both dropping new ones this week, too. What do you do to keep the work from going stale, or getting repetitive?

Too Short: Once Heinz learned how to make ketchup, they didn’t keep reinventing ketchup, they made ketchup. I make ketchup. If you can’t catch up, you must be on mustard or something. I’ve got the formula, I don’t need to reinvent it. I know how the wheel spins: it goes round and round. I’m gonna uphold what the Bay is, what the Town is, and I know what I gotta do. I know my position. I’m not playing point guard when I know I’m a shooting guard.

E-40: Don’t try to fix nothing that ain’t broke.! If the shit looks like it’s slacking, make some adjustments. It’s easy to do that. During a certain time of hip-hop, you had some stubborn OGs in the Bay Area who were like, ‘Man, I ain’t doing none of that hyphy shit.’ The hyphy shit was real life! All you had to do was spit real life shit over a certain sound. Me and Too Short figured that out at the same time without even having a discussion. It was just: ‘Nigga, make it blap.’ Me and Short love mob music and we love up-tempo slaps. We both was in the [marching] band; we love music. All you gotta do is stick to that recipe, like he said. Spit real game. Real rappers know how to adjust to all that shit without going out of their jurisdiction.

40, I remember having this magazine––I think it was an issue of XXL, maybe about the making of [2Pac’s] All Eyez On Me—and someone said you wrote your verse for that album laying on your stomach on the floor with a pistol beside you. Is that how you were writing back then?

E-40: That was true, but that wasn’t for All Eyez On Me. We did “Ain’t Hard 2 Find” at Can-Am Studios [in Tarzana, near Los Angeles], and you can trust me––I was laying on my stomach but the pistol was not on me. The pistol was in my neighborhood. I’m from the Hillside, but our studio was in Millersville on Solano Avenue. Pac came down, and we were going through some confrontations at the time, so we were on our toes. We had our pistols of course; we were youngsters. If you stay ready, you ain’t gotta get ready.

Too Short: I’ve been in a hundred studio sessions with E-40, man: he wrote a lot of raps laying on his stomach with a pistol next to him [laughs]. With three or four goons. If the wrong person walk in the room, they put a forearm in your neck. Man, I don’t know why he used to write raps on his stomach, must be comfortable.

I’m curious what your processes are like today: a lot of rappers are writing in the booth, or freestyling long takes that they then splice into 16s.

E-40: We mix it up. If I get in the booth I might have something already written in my iPhone, or sometimes I go back to the element of how I first started, and write things down on my paper, or on the back of paper plates, because when you hold those up to read them, they’re sturdy. So I might have some [bars] on a paper plate, some down on my paper, some in my phone, or I might have some in my head. Everything I’ve ever done has been unorthodox.

Too Short: I still write everything I do, but now I write mostly on my iPad, And I write a lot of rhymes in my phone on the go, then I AirDrop them to my iPad. When I go in the booth, I got the iPad with the outline of the verse. I’m not really getting into the new style of making songs without writing things. I’ve gotta write it because I’ve gotta see it and think it through. The beginning of my verse is very related to the end of my verse, so I can’t really come off the head and have this invisible paper thing going on. I’ve gotta really write a story. I can’t freestyle! If you put me in a rap battle, I couldn’t do it; I can’t freestyle for two seconds.

E-40: Me neither, Short. I don’t even know how to freestyle and I take my hat off to those who do––especially those who know how to freestyle and can also put the songs together—real, hit records. And I agree with you 100 percent: the first line of the verse, and the end of any verse is the hardest part.

Too Short: What’s the first thing I’m gonna say, and what’s the last, exactly. You know the problem with freestyling? The word ‘free.’ I need that paystub, man. You want me to start rapping? I need a check. I’m not rapping for free.

It often seems to me that Bay Area artists have a chip on their shoulder, which makes sense: the sounds [from the region] have been pretty influential, but the artists themselves are frequently overlooked by the industry, and by radio.

E-40: Whenever you’re ahead of your time, it’s hard for other people to adapt to it. A lot of people are slow on things! They’re slacking. You can’t be mad at them if they wasn’t brought up in the fast lane like that. They don’t know, so the game goes over their brains. Then two decades later, somebody else says [the same thing], and it’s like, ‘Man, the niggas that you didn’t like, they’ve been saying the same thing!’ The Bay Area been looked over.

Too Short: One thing that is all the way across the board in Bay Area hip-hop, no matter if you’re a Bay rapper coming from an East coast perspective, if you’re bouncing like you’re down South, if you’re conscious, or if you’re doing pimp rhymes like Short Dog, we still have this thing embedded in our culture: you’ve gotta bring something new to the table. Bring a new flow. Bring a new dance. Bring a new style. Bring some new lingo. Bring something that’s yours. It’s embedded in our DNA to do something new, to make you stand out in an area full of slick talkers, characters, full of E-40s and Too Shorts and Mac Dres. There are so many rappers out there who got music that didn’t get to where we got to [nationally], but is equally loved locally. Rappers from down in L.A., out in Atlanta, even on the East coast––I can play you the playlists of everybody who’s making these records that sound like hyphy records. They’ve got that vibe. As a Bay Area artist, you could be frustrated and want people to acknowledge that. But on the other hand, you could be like, ‘If you do what I did last year, watch what I do next year.’

Originally Appeared on GQ