It is my duty as a hipster dad to introduce my kids to all the classics of 90s rap, and they have been especially taken with this one.
We’ve been enjoying making up our own lyrics to the hook. First we kicked flava in ya nose, then ya mouth, then ya eye. From there we moved onto kicking all kinds of things into all kinds of places. My four year old daughter especially enjoys kicking boogers in ya face. It’s a truly versatile phrase.
Catchy though it is, Craig Mack’s hook is not simple. The third line in particular is extremely tricky. Below you can see my best effort at transcribing it. The pitches are necessarily approximate. I’m confident about the overall melodic shape, but the exact pitches slide around too much for me to really do them justice. The rhythms are as accurate as I could get them, but also don’t convey all the nuances.
Ableton Live is an invaluable tool for transcribing these kinds of rhythms. I can zoom in on a particular beat, slow it down, and loop it while I puzzle things out. If my ears fail me, I can always cheat and use my eyes, looking at where a given peak in the waveform falls on the grid.
Craig Mack had this one hit in 1994, and then pretty much vanished from hip-hop. He died a couple of years ago, after having become religious and renouncing his rap life as decadent and sinful. Seems like there’s a story there.