Big Daddy Kane was also courted by one of hip-hop’s hottest labels of the 1990s: In 1996, Suge Knight tried to sign Kane to Death Row Records. “Suge flew me out. Me, him, and Tupac went to Vegas and we hung out. He even offered me more money than I asked for,” Kane remembers. “It just didn’t seem right. It was like a situation where I asked for $500,000 and Suge said, ‘I can’t give you less than a million. I don’t know how you’re doing right now, I don’t want to get in your personal business, but if you need something I can have my accountant cut you a check for $100,000 in the morning so you can have something in your pocket.’ That just didn’t sound right to me. I had heard these rumors about this and that. That type of offer just made me feel like,
OK, these rumors must be true, I ain’t getting caught up in the bullshyt. Nah, I’m good.”
Rumors surfaced a few years later that Kane was signing to Roc-A-Fella Records after Jay Z, who toured with Kane in the early 1990s, brought him onstage at Hot 97’s Summer Jam. Hot 97’s Angie Martinez even announced on the air that it was a done deal. It was a great story: Brooklyn’s reigning king backing the legend who gave him his big break. But it wasn’t true. “I was going to correct [the rumor], but then I noticed that everyone was calling me, like, ‘Yo, we want you to do a feature,’” Kane says. “I just ran with it to get that bread.”
Why Big Daddy Kane needed a comeback in the first place is an established part of hip-hop folklore: The Casanova guise engulfed him following his beloved sophomore album, 1989’s
It’s a Big Daddy Thing. Afterward he made
spoken-word love jams with Barry White. He emerged shirtless — bedroom eyes, knowing wink — on the cover of his next album,
Taste of Chocolate. He appeared with Madonna in her infamous
Sex book and posed for
the June 1991 issue of Playgirl.
“Nobody raised that question to me: ‘Do you think there is going to be a backlash?’ It wasn’t until it happened,” says Eugene Shelton, Kane’s publicist at the time of the
Playgirl shoot. “But there was some backlash to it. Burt Reynolds and other celebrities had posed nude in women’s magazines, but many people looked at
Playgirl as a magazine targeted to gay men.”
More issues factored into Kane’s descent. He rushed his next two albums to fulfill his five-album contract. “I just wanted to get the hell off this label, so I made songs with people I liked,” he says of
Taste of Chocolate. “I was a Barry White fan. I was a Dolemite fan. I thought Barbara Weathers was fine.”
And 1991’s
Prince of Darkness?
“
Prince of Darkness? I don’t know what the hell I was doing.”
Kane noticed concert bookings were down. He also heard the whispers that he’d fallen off. So he pledged a return to his roots on his next album, hooking up with emerging producers such as Easy Mo Bee, Large Professor, and the Trackmasters for 1993’s
Looks Like a Job For…. But it was too late. Fans had moved on, and the music had passed him by.
“Production-wise,
Looks Like a Job For… is an incredible album. I think that the weak point of the album was really me,” Kane says. “Had I listened to the radio and saw how much the game had changed, I would have noticed that people weren’t rhyming ahead of the beats anymore. Everybody was rhyming so much slower and falling behind the beat. My style really sounded aged. It sounded old.”
He was comfortable with his place in history, and so around the turn of the century, he retreated from New York, settling in North Carolina. To learn more about Kane’s life in the Tar Heel State, I called the rapper Phonte, formerly of the North Carolina group Little Brother. He remembers seeing Kane in Durham, sometimes CD shopping at the now-shuttered record store Millennium Music or performing at small clubs. One night during a set at Cat’s Cradle, Kane spotted Phonte in the crowd. In between songs Kane announced, “Everybody in here, y’all make some noise for Little Brother.” The group later collaborated with Kane on
“Welcome to Durham.”
“He was my biggest singular influence. I told him, ‘You are the reason I rap,’” Phonte says.
How did Kane react?
“He was Kane,” Phonte recalls. “He was cool, like, ‘Thank you, brother.’”
“A buddy of mine named Josh hung with Kane a lot,” Phonte says. “He had a conversation with Kane once where he was like, ‘Yo, Kane, you still got it. Why don’t you come [back] out? Dude, you can be Jay Z.’ He says that Kane looked at him and told him, ‘Man, I already been Jay Z.’ That was a real sobering moment for me. From my estimation, he’s a guy who has found his peace.”
given Cee's tranny run-ins
