Lil ½ Dead’s 1994 album ‘The Dead Has Arisen’ is one of the best-produced West Coast albums almost nobody has heard
OPINION: The Snoop Dogg and Tha Dogg Pound affiliate from Long Beach released an album full of some of the best music to come out of the whole ‘90s West Coast canon.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
I have a friend who, during college, would buy any compact disc (remember those?) by any artist he’d even remotely heard of. The talent of said artist was less important than supporting the various homies and hangers-on of superstar rappers and singers. As a collective, my friends all used to joke that he was the only person to actually have purchased the debut album from Young Turk (the Hot Boy that isn’t Lil Wayne, Juvenile or BG — no shade), “Young & Thuggin’” — an album title I had to look up. (Which is saying something since those debut albums from Cash Money Records artists back in the ‘99 to the 2000s were an event and littered with bangers.)
Anywho, while I often added a laugh or two to the joke sessions, I could only be so amused; in high school, I was that friend who used to buy albums from all the artists nobody else bought. I couldn’t stop myself; I had such a voracious appetite for music that I needed to hear everything, even if I had no idea who the artist was but they kinda sorta maybe reminded me of an artist I might know — and especially if they were from the West Coast. I was a fanatic for West Coast, N.W.A. offshoot artists. While the listening experience of those albums is much different at this point in my life, albums like Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic,” Ice Cube’s “Death Certificate,” DJ Quik’s “Safe +Sound,” etc. were my absolute favorites to listen to. Each of those albums still maintains spots in my list of favorite albums of all time.
On each of those albums, there were usually artists or groups featured on songs that were cool enough for one verse but whose eventual albums weren’t very good. I know this because, as I said, I bought ALL of their albums, especially those affiliated with DJ Quik. Well, it gets worse; I was so invested in the sound and music of the era that even being mentioned by one of those artists would lead me to purchase an album.
That is how I ended up being in the small number of people who purchased the debut album from Long Beach, Calif., rapper and Snoop Dogg and Dogg Pound affiliate, Lil ½ Dead. I was minding my lil business in October of 1994, either in Sam Goody or one of the other now-extinct music stores in Huntsville, Alabama’s Madison Square Mall when I came across the “The Dead Has Arisen.” I recognized the name Lil ½ Dead from Snoop Dogg’s verse on “Lil Ghetto Boy” from Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” album. I guess I didn’t know if it was the same one, but how many rappers can there be named Lil ½ Dead, right?
Lifestyle
I had the most minimal expectations for the album. For one, I only knew his name; I actually hadn’t heard his voice, much less a verse from him. I didn’t know what I was getting but assumed that it was going to have the same West Coast G-funk sound that was all the rage at the time.
What I heard blew me away.
While Lil ½ Dead is fun, even entertaining as a rapper, the lyrics of the entire album are full of house parties, gang shootings, rampant violence and misogyny; basically everything that most Los Angeles-area West Coast albums were filled with at the time. While that isn’t a good thing, it was par for the course for the era. Lil ½ Dead, as a rapper, is neither great nor terrible, but a serviceable voice and guide over an otherwise true gem of an album.
The production on this album is otherworldly. Helmed in full by Tracy Kenrick and Courtney Branch — two producers who I learned produced tracks on a litany of my favorite ‘90s West Coast albums — the entire album is packed full of smooth, soulful productions I’d never heard to that point. There is not one beat on the entire album that would rate as even mediocre; how Snoop (or anybody from that era) didn’t hear this album and ask to get on every single beat is surprising to me. I’ve sat with this album for 30 years now and I’m still in awe of just how well produced it is.
If Dr. Dre had worked with Tracy and Courtney to mix this album down and run it through the Death Row publicity machine, I have zero doubt that “The Dead Has Arisen” would have been as successful as any album by Tha Dogg Pound or Warren G., all homies of Lil ½ Dead. In fact, one of my biggest questions over the years has been why none of those affiliates ended up on this album. Maybe it was produced and completed on the side and everybody was blown away after the fact.
For instance, easily one of my favorite hip-hop beats in history (and I don’t say that hyperbolically) is on this album: “Eastside, Westside.” This beat is literally perfect. Had Dr. Dre used this beat for “The Chronic,” I feel strongly that we’d be speaking about this song in the same breath as “Dre Day” and “Nuthin’ But a G Thang.” From single “12 Pacofdoja” to the Roy Ayers sampling on “That’s What You Get,” each of the beats manages to hit just the right pocket, perfect for riding in your low rider or your minivan.
I still listen to this album purely for the production quality. It is reminiscent of the same conversations that New York-centric hip-hop heads have about Group Home’s album “Livin’ Proof,” where the conversation often centers around what could have been had better rappers had those beats. The beats on “The Dead Has Arisen” are so good that I can’t help but wonder what this album could have been in the lyrical hands of the more popular talent of the Death Row roster.
But what is life without a little bit of wonder? What I do know is that Lil ½ Dead, a rapper that the vast majority of folks either don’t know or have forgotten by this point, still has one of the best-produced albums of all time, even 30 years later and after thousands and thousands of albums have been created. That is a feat in and of itself; I still go back and listen to “The Dead Has Arisen” because it sounded THAT good in 1994 and hasn’t lost one bit of its musical luster 30 years later.
Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio and host of the award-winning podcast, “Dear Culture” on theGrio Black Podcast Network. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest) but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said “Unknown” (Blackest).
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