Happy Birthday, Big Daddy Kane!
Big Daddy Kane gets the job done. The Brooklyn legend is 49 today.
On the short list of greatest emcees to ever do it, the King Asiatic Nobody's Equal certainly has to rank pretty high. Kane emerged in the late 1980s as arguably the most formidable of Marley Marl's famed Juice Crew. He dropped his classic debut, Long Live the Kane, in 1988; and followed it with the stellar It's A Big Daddy Thing a year later.
Kane was part of an elite wave of late 80s emcees who set the standard for rhyming as a new decade dawned. Alongside luminaries such as KRS-One, Rakim, Kool G Rap, Slick Rick and LL Cool J, Kane was near the head of the class amongst the best of his generation.
His critical favor took a downturn with 1990s A Taste of Chocolate and a commercial slide would soon follow, from which his career would never fully recover. Well-publicized controversies via his notorious appearances in Playgirl magazine and Madonna's infamous SEX book in 1992 also overshadowed the admittedly mediocre music he was now making.
"I was able to tour the world and see what was happening in other places, like Los Angeles and London. I had a broader perspective and I was able to really paint it in It’s a Big Daddy Thing," he recalled in 2016. “After that, I was unhappy with the label, so I dropped two trash albums to try to hurry up and finish up my 5-album deal so that’s why they were coming so fast after that. I was trying to hurry up and get out of the deal. I guess Warner Brothers caught on after Prince of Darkness and they just stopped me and made me freeze for a year. I was glad they did because at that point in time I started realizing that the streets were saying ‘Yo, they say you fell off. You wack.’"
Kane made his missteps, but his legacy is etched in stone as a pillar of hip-hop greatness.
Watch Big Daddy Kane's Video for "I Get the Job Done":
Watch Big Daddy Kane's Video for "Ain't No Half Steppin'":