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9 “The What”
Produced by Easy Mo Bee
Featuring Method Man
Method Man : My relationship with Big was cool. When I seen him, it was always love. Even if the rest of my niggas ain’t fuck with him, I fucked with him. ’Cause it was like, Well, that’s how they feel—I don’t necessarily feel that way about you and shit. It was always on speaking terms—we smoked blunts and shit. We almost got bagged smoking some weed at the airport in North Cackalacka. Word. The guy came over, we all lit up cigarettes. But that’s a long story right there… He was a funny muthafucka too—make you laugh all fuckin’ day, man.
It was no secret: Rae didn’t like him, Ghost didn’t like him. They thought he was a biter. But if you look at Rae and Ghost, they don’t like nobody! The rest of my niggas had love for Big. It was just Rae and Ghost. The other niggas had no problem. You can’t hate a nigga for doing his thing, it’s ridiculous.
But there were moments where they in the house, and we in the house. And my niggas—it’s like we’re a unit, we moved as a unit. So where if one of my niggas ain’t speakin’, then nobody was speakin’. And we would just roll right by a nigga, walk right past. But Lil’ Cease can vouch for this, and my niggas can vouch for this—I always stopped to give word with Big. No matter what.
There was a show at Shelter, I think that was the name of the place. And he had performed, and Wu-Tang had performed that night, and Yo Yo performed that night too. Outside the club Big approached me and shit. Like, “Yo, I wanna do something with you on my album.” I was like, “Alright, yo, just make it happen. I’ll come through and shit.” I knew Tracy Waples, and she was tight with Puff and them—she works for ’em now—she hooked everything up. I went through that night, kicked it for awhile and shit, talking back and forth about shit—that’s when I found out he was a funny nigga, ’cause he had me crackin’ up. We puffed some blunts, Mo Bee threw on the beat. He was like, let’s just grind this shit out. We wrote our verses. We was both in the same spot, writing our verses together.
The way he ended his verse—he wanted me to start my verse with “T.H.O.D.,” because he ends his verse with, “You can’t fuck with M.E.” So that’s why my verse starts out, “T.H.O.D. Man…” But it didn’t actually come out that way. You can’t hear it, because I came over the top of him. If I wouldn’t have [rhymed over him], it wouldn’t have been on beat.
When I left, we didn’t have no title for the shit, but it was a tight-ass song. I couldn’t care less about the title, because at that time, Wu-Tang songs never had a title that had anything to do with the song. Like, the hook could be, “Yeah, nigga/Kill, nigga…” But the title of the song would be “Death In Current’s Wake Of The Absence To The Third Power,” or some shit.
Easy Mo Bee : I remember Meth came to the studio. I was the producer, but I was being a little groupie, like, Oh shit! There go Method Man over there! Knowing that this nigga’s gonna blow, and we ’bout to be big here. Just taking it all in, man. Just loving it for the moment that it was.
When I heard the chorus [“Fuck the world/ Don’t ask me for shit...”] I was like, Okay, this definitely ain’t going on the radio. Again, like I was saying, I guess there was that whole “sensitive” part about me. There I went again, worrying: “Yo, man, we gonna sell records? I don’t want them to pull it down off the shelf, man. This nigga’s dope, man. We can’t mess this up.” Again, Lil’ Cease was like, “Yo Mo, chill. You sensitive!” That’s Lil’ Cease. My man. He gets the “sensitive” credit!
“The What.” I titled that song! That took me back to two years before, when I recorded with Miles Davis. Because Miles was a hardly-talk, express-his-self-when-he-wanted, the-way-he-wanted kind of guy. You’d be talking to him, and he’d just go, “Hmm.” I once asked Miles what he wanted to name a song—and we had already recorded about three or four songs—and he was like, “I don’t know, name ’em whatever you want to.”
With “The What,” the song was done and everything, and Big, Puff and me was standing there. And I remember Puff in particular was like, “Yo, what we gonna call this shit?” And I told him, “Yo, I nickname all my beats on the disc that I saved them to, so I know what each disc is.” So for whatever reason, I wrote on this disc, “The What.” Puff was like, “Yo, that shit is cool.”
Method Man : A lot of quotes off that record have been used in hooks for other artists’ records. I want my money, y’all bitch-ass niggas! I got paid $2,500 for “The What.” And I had to hunt Puffy down for my $2,500. It took like two months to get it. I was like, “C’mon Puff, stingy bastard, give me my money!”