Smokin' and prayin':
Layzie Bone
When I finally catch up with Krayzie bone, he's quiet sitting on the floor jotting down his shout-outs for the new album on a piece of yellow notebook paper. Krayzie is the group's most rounded talent, musically speaking. He started doin' tracks around the end of recording Eternal, after picking up the keyboard and messing around with it. he officially cut his teeth on the Family Scriptures album and has since completed 10 songs for his own solo joint, although it'll probably be a year before it's released. (Bizzy, who's missing because he's back in Ohio tending to his ailing father, has been voted the first Bone to go solo.) In the meantime, you'll find Krayzie and Da Brat exchanging lingo on the Jermaine Dupree-produced "Let's Get High."
You can read the intensity in Krayzie's face as he speaks. His eyes never seem to blink. And at times you'd swear he's almost shaking. It's no wonder Layzie's description of him--"the silent killer"--fits to a tee.
Krayzie can't remember how the trademark Bone flow-the harmonic, speed of light, speakin' in tongues delivery-came to exist, but he started it. What he can recall, however, is his affinity for music even at an early age.
"I used to have my radio playin' on some stations, my mother and them would be like, 'Boy what is you listenin' to?' I'd be listenin' to polka music, you know what I'm sayin'? I'd be listening to everything that come on. I used to love Michael Jackson. After Michael Jackson, it wuz New Edition. After New Edition, it wuz Run-DMC. I just love music."
At 15, Krayzie and his partners got their first big reaction at a local talent show. "We wuz like the youngest niggas up there. Everybody wuz tellin' us we wuz broke millionaires." No longer broke and now adults, Krayzie and company have had the privilege to not only meet but work with one of their heroes, Run, who appeared on Flesh-N-Bone's T.H.U.G.S. album. "Run said he loved Bone," says Krayzie. "And that's tripped out, man."
As Layzie poses for his shots, War's "Low Rider" thump loudly throughout the studio. Dragged in a hooded outfit, the languid lyricist recalls the cover of "Isaac Hayes' "Black Moses." There's a definite mystique surrounding Bone: the Ouija board tinkering, the skeletal imagery, the hidden identities, the indecipherable lyrics, the deaths of artists who have collaborated with them.
"We changed from Bone Enterprise to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony when we got down to California. Cuz we had a song called 'Thugs-N-Harmony' and we wuz Bone. Eazy-E wanted us to drop our name Bone and just be Thugs-N-Harmony. But we wuz like , "Hell naw. It's Bone Thugs-N-Harmony."
"A lot of muthafuckas is scared to do new shit. They don't wanna try. They'd rather go get some
Wish, who's getting his dome groomed (he's requested some pig tails), ain't done. "If you try in any kind of way to fuck wit' (our style), then you gotta come to us," he reasons. "If you admired it, don't act like you came wit' some new shit. Muthafuckas, don't be tryin' to dog. Steal our shit and you wanna flow against us and don't even know how to do it it right."
Not certain who exactly they're addressing, I throw out a few names.
Wish stonewalls the suggestion. He replies bluntly, "See, that's some shit we don't even really like to talk about cuz we know that there's a gang of muthafuckas that love Bone that are gonna read this. So we choose not to give other mothafuckas fame." But he warns ominously, "Bottom line, if we got problems wit' anybody, we ain't rappin' on
