Yesterday we discussed Mac Dre’s massive influence on putting Bay Area Hyphy music on the map. In re-listening to that album it brought back a ton of memories surrounding Bay Area hip hop during high school and sent me off on a quest to find a lesser-known rapper I couldn’t immediately place but knew was there. And after scouring the internet I eventually found him– Mac Dre’s close friend and occasional co-collaborator, Andre Nickatina.
And honestly the album hit me in a much different way than it did when my friends and I would sit in our cars and freestyle over his beats. It was wildly more intense. More on that in a minute.
But first a bit on Mac Dre and Andre Nickatina’s shared history– they released a posthumous album after Mac Dre’s death in ’04 called A Tale of Two Andres that included previously unreleased material as well as their collaborations when Mac Dre was still alive. Their styles couldn’t be more different– whereas Mac Dre’s flow and beats were frenetically upbeat, Andre Nickatina’s beats and flow were lo-fi and had a real rawness to them. It was a perfect match.
Nickatina’s rawness is found in every inch of Conversation With A Devil. Classified as “cocaine rap”, Nickatina put out a trilogy of albums dedicated to the usage and culture surrounding the drug during the late 90’s and early aughts (Conversation With A Devil being the final addition). But unlike Clipse and their excellent 2002 cut Lord Willin’ which detailed moving product on the streets of Virginia Beach alongside the bubblegum sweet production of The Neptunes and Pharrell Williams, Nickatina’s brand of drug storytelling feels like a real punch to the gut. It’s raw and loose, religiously avoids overproduction, and lacks any real hooks throughout the album– nearly every song is just Nickatina blasting through verse after verse for three straight minutes like someone wound him up and just let him go. His flow is stunted, even labored at times, and yet it all finds a way to work.
One listen to the dark tale Nickatina lays out in “Soul Of A Coke Dealer” and you feel the full weight of this experience– the narrator describes the immense shame he feels for his actions, but sandwiches them between bursts of machismo and calls to violence. It creates this disorienting reality that feels just so goddamn off the rails. It’s incredibly raw. It’s incredibly depressing. It’s incredibly human.
And that’s the point I missed about Nickatina all those years ago. This isn’t a fun-loving album with some great beats to flow over like I remembered. Conversation With A Devil feels like you’re listening to a man devolving into madness, struggling with his addiction, and succumbing to the internal and external violence that permeates the culture associated with it. This is punctuated in the last minute and a half of the album’s final track “Show Gone Wrong” that lands so damn hard after going on the whole journey the 49 minutes beforehand.
Conversation With A Devil is an incredible ride with massive highs and massive lows. Pun both intended and unintended.
Standout Songs: “Conversation With A Devil”, “Dice Of Life (The Battle)”, “Soul Of A Coke Dealer”, “Ayo For Yayo”
