Ja Rule's Venni Vetti Vicci and the Summer of '99

Throwing this up here because I just re-downloaded this album and it brought back some memories. I forgot just how much I loved this CD. Say what you want about post-50 Cent Ja Rule, but Venni Vetti Vicci gets classic status for me.

I was just about to turn 17 when this came out in June of '99. I was getting ready to spend all of July in Tucson, AZ for "future minority corporate drones of America" (don't ask) type stuff at the UofA. This was the time in the Tri-State when the Holy Def Jam Trio of Jay-Z, DMX and Ja Rule absolutely dominated the globe . . .or so I thought as a kid from Jersey. This was just as the internet was becoming a household thing, and a little before Hip-Hop went from being a collection of regional delicacies to a full national sport. Call it East Coast arrogance, but I just assumed that everyone in America was listening to the same shit! My radio gave me no reason to believe otherwise. As far as I knew, hip-hop began and ended with the 5 Boroughs. Shit, emcees from Jersey couldn't even get airplay...how was I supposed to know that some dude in Louisiana had the biggest song in the country at the time (more on him in a second)?

I was as big of a Ja Rule fan as you could find. Even before he finally released an album, he was HUGE on local mixtapes. To this day, the back-and-forth stuff he did with DMX in the late 90's is some of the best "unofficial" / unreleased street hip-hop I've ever heard. Needless to say, I was AMPED to get a proper, full-length album, and it was on heavy rotation from day 1. I packed a boombox with me to go out west, and I just KNEW that everyone else was gonna be on the same shit I was on.

Then I got to Arizona . . .

To say that I was "unique" among to group of kids that were out at Univerity of Arizona would be a HUGE understatement. Not only was I the only kid from the Tri-State . . .I was the only kid from anywhere east of Ohio. 95% of the kids were from Cali or Texas.

I can remember playing Ja's shit on full blast and my roomate from LA coming in with a look on his face that said either "Who farted?" or "WTF is this shit?". I think that conversation I had with him, me discussing the sheer largeness of Ja, Jay and X, and him looking at me like I was speaking French, did about as much to shift my perspective on music, hip-hop culture, and the country in general than any 5min. ever has since.

I remember being in the opposite role, when a friend I made from Oakland what schooling me on the virtues of Too $hort (who I had seen a couple times on Yo! MTV Raps), and some circus clown of a rapper named "E-40" (it felt like my brain had been raped by a 5-dicked walrus). But the most skull shattering moment came when the boys from Texas got ahold of me. They had 2 jams that they SWORE were the biggest shit ever. I greeted both with the typical Jesey "Get da fuck outta here, yo!". And let me tell you...my use of "yo" and "son" was the source of HIGH comedy for everyone else. First they hit me with this joint:

To this day, I still keep this in my collection and laugh everytime it pops up. Those Texas boys LOOOOOOOOOVED this song and looked at me like a space alien because I had no idea what they talking about. I didn't even know they rapped in Texas, son! By the time we left AZ, I knew all the words to this song and rocked right along with 'em. Who know that an Al B. Sure sample had so much power?

Their other song got me more "Dawg, y'all don't know 'bout nothin' out there" than the first. When I say that this was their shit . . .I mean This. Was. Their. Shit. Me not being all over this (let alone the fact that I onl understood half the lyrics and never heard of any of the people in it) was like somebody walking up to me and saying they've never heard "Can I Get A..."

Listen...I heard this song 10 times a day, everyday. Right now, somebody from Houston is reading this and laughing their ass off at my expense. "Wanna Be a Baller" was the most incomprehensible shit I had ever heard. It took 20min just to explain to me what a "baller" was.

20+ kids jammin' HARD to some stuff I wasn't even convinced was recited in English. It amazed me. At least I had my box and my (bootleg) Ja Rule CD to cleanse the strange southern poison out of my ears.

The timing of that trip to Arizona was incredible, because it happened literally a month before the South had it's first honest and true national #1 hip-hop song. I heard if out there for the first time out there. Of course all the other kids had been on it for months. They knew the artists, and had a few of their albums already. by the time I got back home to NJ, this song was slooooowly starting to creep onto The Box. Remember that?! "Music television you control". The channel where you could pay and have whatever video you want come on? By the end of that summer, it was the biggest song of the year, and singly-handedly opened up the northeast to southern music . . .


Yup! That's the one!
The song that changed hip-hop forever and at the same time reminds me on the Summer of '99. Amazingly almost 10 years have passed and I remember it all better than I remember the summer of '08 (thank you, alcohol).