The Globalization of Z-Ro
400 years and musicians from three continents contributed to the making of a song Houstonians think of as their very own.
I know only some of y’all are hip-hop fans but bear with me here, this is a cool story about globalization, the folk music process in the 21st Century, and how one of the top ten songs in the Houston rap canon came to be. (If you are completely averse to rap, please share with someone who isn’t….Sharing is good!)
That song would be “Mo City Don,” by Z-Ro, the immensely talented MC from Missouri City. Some would even call him the don of that edge city; thereby we arrive at the title of this song.
He also goes by “the King of the Ghetto,” and it’s true; his rhymes resonate deep in the streets. If you ride the Metro bus on certain Houston routes, you will be hearing Z-Ro bleeding out of headphones or even from the vocal chords of your fellow riders. On at least one occasion, I was collared by a man who was literally selling bootleg Z-Ro CDs out of a trench coat, just like in the movies.
He’s had a slew of local and regional hits — his zone of influence from here to Dallas and Shreveport, east to Lafayette and Alexandria, west to Austin and San Antonio, and south to Victoria; sort of overlapping the Zydeco Zone. His career reminds me of one of those bluesmen from back in the day who never quite made it nationally but were deeply and truly beloved in their region. Slim Harpo or Jimmy Reed, pre-rediscovery by British artists.
Anyway, the one song of his many hits he’s best known for today is this one:
Z-Ro is rapping freestyle there, meaning making it up as he went along. He is one of the best in the world at the art. Substance-wise, on the surface it’s just another “I’m the baddest rapper alive” jam, but it’s so dense and packed with Houston detail and lore — “dunk on a punk like Kelvin Cato” “four-peat like Comets” “(I’m like) Fox Photo, ‘cause I do it in a flash” — it transcends that subgenre, one the one hand because of his skill, and on the other, because it’s impenetrable to outsiders, a fevered incantation only certain Houstonians can comprehend.
“This should be the H-Town Pledge of Allegiance,” said one YouTube fan.
Hundreds knowing every single word. Maybe it already is the H-Town pledge.
Anyway, I came here not just to praise Z-Ro the rapper but also the beat and the sung hook.
Way back on the date of the album’s release, I attended the official party Rap-A-Lot records hosted for its release at the long-gone South Main Soundwaves. This was the first song on the album and I instantly recognized the drum track and the mournful vocal from a long-ago hit from my youth: the “Seven Minutes of Madness” remix of Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full.” I was floored. I turned to a Rap-A-Lot publicist and said something like “Y’all know this is gonna be huge, right?” She just smiled and nodded.
“I know y’all been waitin’ for this,” Z-Ro speaks on the intro. Well, not exactly. I didn’t dream it possible, but once it arrived, it made many thousands of his very happy.
First, check out the first minute or two of the original version of “Paid in Full” here:
Now check out the remix, which adds in some random snatches of spoken-word, and essentially, that haunting vocal:
Like the man says, it was “a journey into sound” especially for the time. Not only was Rakim an absolute game-changer for the art of rapping — he basically perfected the concept of “flow”; gone forever were the stiff, robotic rhymes of the early ‘80s, utterly demolished by his weaving in and out of the beat, the melodic rise and fall of his voice, the emphasis on just the right syllables, the lavish use of internal rhymes. Quantum. You could liken him to Bob Dylan in some ways, in that he redefined what was possible. (Music is in his genes; he is the nephew of early rock and R&B legend Ruth Brown.)
So you had that, but you also had this infectious drum loop, one that had been around the block but somehow didn’t feel tired then, nor even today.
It sources all the way back to 1974. It really kicks in at 3:30 above. Milli Vanilli’s producers jacked it four times, and IIRC Madonna used it too. The Soul Searchers, led by Chuck Brown, were the forefathers of Washington DC’s throbbing homegrown brand of funk now known as “go-go music,” which most famously gave the world the beat to Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love.” But that’s another story. (And so is the story of the bassline, but it’s very brief: it was played by LA session man Paul Jackson Jr. on “Don’t Look any Further,” by former Temptations singer Dennis Edwards.)
And there was that woman singing so powerfully and mournfully in what language only God knew, seemingly singing a melody from beyond the back of time itself. I’d never really questioned it’s source back in the day, and I might never have known were it not for the ease of information provided to us all by the Internet. Lost in the haze are vague memories of utterly erroneous origin stories for it, and fair enough, because unless you are a world-renowned musicologist there is almost no chance you would guess the country from which it ultimately hails.
So after the original “Paid in Full” was released, someone at Island Records had the bright idea to commission an English dance music duo called Coldcut to put together a remix, and so enter the voices of Humphrey Bogart, English actor Geoffrey Sumner, James Brown doing a countdown, and, most importantly, that sung hook which was by…
Israeli pop/folk star Ofra Haza, singing “Im Nin’Alu,” the 400-year-old Hebrew words of Shalom ben Yosef ben Avigad Shabazi, a legendary rabbi from Haza’s parents’ native country of Yemen. Before passing away of AIDS-related pneumonia in 2000, she enjoyed a fair bit of popularity in Europe, and DJ Mark Black of Coldcut happened to notice that lowering the pitch on “Im Nin’alu” synced it up with the “Ashley’s Roachclip” beat quite nicely.
And so there we go. And now we also know what’s she’s singing about:
אם ננעלו דלתי נדיבים דלתי מרום לא ננעלו
Im nin'alu daltei n'divim daltei marom lo nin'alu
Even if the gates of the rich are closed, the gates of heaven will never be closed.
Which gibes pretty well with Z-Ro’s career and his fans — he is the poet of the streets to this day.
So: this most H-Town of anthems sources back to Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv, and 17th Century Yemen. Four countries on three continents and spanning 400 years.
Globalization can be brutal; in this one instance, it was sublime.