3 November 1995
Stevie Wonder spent the ’80s trying to turn ’80s kids like me off his music for life, so in 1995 I didn’t know the track of his that’s used so heavily in ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’. Even now, Coolio’s track exists separately in my head to Stevie’s ‘Pastime Paradise’; I don’t feel the need to compare them. Part of that is because in principle I’m cool with sampling and even with wholesale interpolations like this. Part of that is also because on its own terms ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ is really, really good.
We’ll soon see some number ones that virtually leech off their host samples and contribute minimal creativity. ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ doesn’t do that. The sample, originally a rather weedy analogue synth, is here beefed up dramatically. In fact, everything about this track is dramatic and, yes, over the top: the strings, the choir, and especially Coolio’s lyrics. That opening Biblical line (“As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”) sets the life-or-death tone, and some of his own lines are just as evocative. “I’m an educated fool with money on my mind”; “Death ain’t nothing but a heartbeat away”; “I’m 23 now, but will I live to see 24?”: as much as rap lyrics, these and more are great pop hooks.
I’m of the view that ’90s gangsta rap probably turned as many young people to murderous crime as Eric Clapton singing ‘I Shot The Sheriff’ did. Our society is already saturated with pop culture that glamourises warrior life and death, even normalises it; let’s not cherry-pick one genre of music and ignore, say, James Bond films or army recruitment ads. For what it’s worth, ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ interrogates the thug life as much as romanticises it. Even on the latter point it’s more that it conveys how romanticised it already is for kids in those social circumstances: “Power and the money / Money and the power”. Coolio’s first-person teller isn’t so much narrating as explaining, and when you’re explaining you’re losing: “If they can’t understand it, how can they reach me?” L.V. is the chorus singer here, and his yearning vocal brings home the true cost of this violence: “Tell me why are we so blind to see / That the ones we hurt are you and me?” If you take the rap at face value, then you have to give the same weight to the chorus. The gangsta’s paradise is a fool’s paradise.
After years of gimmicks and novelties, ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ is our first serious rap and hip hop number one. Movie tie-in marketing, for the Michelle Pfeiffer drama Dangerous Minds, certainly turbo-boosted it to the top of our charts, and that’s no bad thing: they owed us. The enforced lack of swear words, one of Stevie Wonder’s terms and conditions for using ‘Pastime Paradise’, also helped. Maybe it’s latent ill-feeling over certain ’80s number ones I’ve had to revisit recently, but I actually prefer Coolio’s track to Stevie Wonder’s. There, I said it. Kids, say no to ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’.
