Local hero
Too Short worked hard, dreamed big, and never stopped
rapping – it paid off for him and put Oakland on the rap world's
map.
'I REMEMBER BACK
when it all began / I used to sign dirty rhymes to my eastside fans
/ Back then I knew you couldn't stop that rap / No M.C. could rap
like that." So begins Life Is ... Too $hort," the
title cut to the 1988 platinum album that takes you straight into
a chapter of the world according to Too Short. The language is simple,
and the stories move straight to the point, in a way that's fitting
for someone from no-frills East Oakland, where in 1981, 14-year-old
Todd Shaw – later to be known as Too Short – started to
rap.
Just four lines into
the song – one of his best – he's already aired the themes
that provide the bedrock of his work: nostalgia for mythical days
gone by; nasty, horny women and the pimps who use them; triumph
over enemies who would silence him; and most important, the improbable,
true story of a kid from East Oakland with a taste for laid-back
funky beats and tight, simple rhymes who in the mid 1980s became
the West Coast's first genuine rap star. Too Short – as he
announces again and again – started young, worked hard, and
played his first gigs for captive audiences on AC Transit, in Oakland
city parks, and on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Within a few years,
he became the West Coast's first national rap star. Suddenly, battered,
tough Oakland became "Oaktown," a rap mecca. When Too
Short said, "East Oakland, yeah, that's right," in "I
Ain't Trippin'," people from Oakland said it right along with
him. It felt good just rolling off the tongue.
As a teenager, he was
smart, ambitious, and focused – "But when a dream is all
you got homeboy / you gotta turn that dream into the real McCoy"
("Life Is ...") – but he was forced to ask the same
questions as his fans: "Do you wanna rap or sell coke / Brothers
like you ain't never broke," he asked, and answered with this:
"Eight years on the mike and I ain't jokin' / Sir Too Short
comin' straight from Oakland / California, home of the rock / Eight
woofers in the trunk, beatin' down your block."
Twenty years after young
men and women chanted, "I am [clap, clap] somebody" and
fought to free Huey P. Newton, their sons and daughters jammed enormous
speakers into the trunks of big, old gas guzzlers to deliver their
own generationally adjusted version. People got it, too, like it
or not – when a subsonic boom rolled down the street, rattled
the windows, drowned out the TV, and thumped you in the gut, that
was Too Short calling from East Oakland. He was telling stories
a lot of people hadn't heard before.
Big things
That was 15 years ago;
today Too Short is a wealthy Atlanta resident who has already retired
once and is no longer is driven by the same fires he once was. But
for who don't remember "when it all began," there
is the film (also available on DVD) Life Is … The Life and Times
of Todd Shaw, by director Rene Macada-McElroy (wife of producer
and onetime member of Timex Social Club, Thomas McElroy) and executive
producer, and Tony Toni Toné cofounder, D'Wayne Wiggins.
The down and dirty film mixes on-camera comments by Too Short, pictures,
memorabilia, snapshots, and the observations and memories of former
collaborators and a posse of hip-hop artists, activists, and writers.
DJ, writer, and community activist David "Davey D" Cook
takes a long view of the rapper's career in the film. "He was
one of those Oakland people that really have come to personify an
entire community," he says. "He's proven that you can
come up from the bottom of the barrel and do big things."
When they were still
close to the barrel's bottom, Shaw and his friend Freddy Bea –
both known in the neighborhood for their rapping skills – went
into business. In a 1989 interview, he told the story to venerable
KALX DJ, writer, and label jockey Billy Jam. "I'll tell you
where it started," he told Jam. "It was at a guy called
Al's house on Sunnyside in deep East Oakland. Freddie Bea and myself
would pass through and hang out. And one day we were just rapping,
and Hot Lips was like 'I'm really not interested in what you're
doing. I don't want to hear that shit. But if you had my name in
the shit, then I'd play it.' And the next day we had a tape with
his name in it and $20 bucks in our pocket. So we started making
some money doing that."
Too Short cranked out
personal requests, peddled his tapes around town, and his reputation
spread on the strength of simple, hugely popular dirty raps like
"The Invasion of the Flat Booty Bitches," and "Blow
Job Betty," which were among the songs he recorded for local
label 75 Girls, run by Dean Hodges. "Freaky Tales," from
Born to Mack, his third and last with the label, became his
signature tune, and Hodges along with producer Ted Bohannon (who
supplied the tricked-out ride for Too Short's publicity photos)
groomed their protégé for life as a successful young
playa. "He was a star in Oakland," Bohannon says with
the kind of quiet conviction that demands attention. "I made
him look like one everywhere else."
"Todd always had
a way of getting other people to do things for him," his mother
says to the camera. The support from 75 Girls and Bohannon was helpful,
no doubt, but in the long run, the river ran just one way. After
sales for Born to Mack stalled at 50,000, Jive Records came
calling and Too Short signed. Born to Mack was reissued and
became a gold record. Life Is … Too Short, which came next,
went platinum, and as Too Short rapped in "I Ain't Trippin'":
"One day I was on the bus/ the next day I was on the gas."
Good times
The '80s were a remarkable
era for East Bay musicians like Timex Social Club, En Vogue,
Digital Underground, E-40, B-Legit, Mac Mall, and Richie Rich. Tony,
Toni, Toné, the band Wiggins formed with his brother and
cousin, was another. TTT had a huge R&B hit with "Little Walter,"
from their debut album, Who. During the next eight years
they released four remarkably consistent, big-selling albums that
made them national stars as well as local heroes who, like Too Short,
remain close to their hometown roots.
Wiggins smiles when remembering
the old days. "I was on 80th and Olive in East Oakland the
first time I heard Too Short," he said recently across a table
at Jahva House, the artsy café he opened on Lake Shore Boulevard
several years ago. "I think I'll always remember that. My younger
brother, Desmond was a Too Short fan, and he played it for me. I
was an R&B cat, but I liked Kurtis Blow, and I liked Blowfly too.
When Too Short came along he was like a young Blowfly, tellin' stories
about the town. And you'd see him at Arroyo Park, sellin' his tapes.
I went to Castlemont High, and he went to Fremont, but he was over
on Sunnyside – if you're from there you immediately know he
was part of East Oakland, part of the culture."
Too Short's raps were
simple but subtle, displaying the same economy and focus he used
to launch his career. His stripped-down beats were built around
pared-down, relentlessly propulsive, and incredibly funky drum-bass
patterns. And while New York rappers headed toward massive audio
collages that used elements of jazz and rock, as well as funk, Too
Short's ideas were important to what became the distinct West Coast
style.
There's no question that
the funk bands of the 1970s – particularly the various incarnations
of George Clinton – influenced Too Short. But it's also important
to note that in the early '80s, California's urban black population
was just some 35 years removed from sharecropping and the rural
South. Listen to the laid-back, sparse instrumentation on Oakland
blues musician Lowell Fulson's huge 1954 hit "Reconsider Baby"
– you can hear it in Too Short's beats. The simplicity that
was foreign to sophisticated East Coast ears was particularly important
to a rapper who started out penning custom-tailored raps and who
became a local star before he had a record out or any radio presence.
The proof
Too Short changed the
face of rap – and if the millions of albums he sold won't be
evidence enough, if young musicians 30 years from now aren't sampling
his work, then the film version of Life Is … Too Short tells
the tale. And if Too Short is all about "Freaky Tales"
for you, well, those are "the tales [he] tells so well,"
as he puts it. But Too Short has more on his mind than the pimps
and players of East Oakland; he's an astute observer of the racism
and discrimination that's blighted the area. In "Short but
Funky," from 1990's Short Dog's in the House,
he raps, "There's a serious side in everything I say / Life
is too short for you to wait til the next day / Just straighten
up your life and you can start right here / Drop the cocaine and
the bottles of beer." His reworking of Donnie Hathaway's "The
Ghetto" is his finest moment – bittersweet praise to the
world he came from, built around lines like these: Even though my
sister smoked crack cocaine / She was nine months pregnant, ain't
nothing changed / $600 million on a football team / And her baby
dies just like a dope fiend / The story I tell is so incomplete
/ Five kids in the house and no food to eat / Don't look at me and
don't ask me why / Mama's next door getting high."
The real stakes lurking
behind his freaky tales are on his mind. And though it's a stretch
to say he is worried about his legacy, there's no doubt Too Short
has been paying attention. "In 100 years," he says to
the camera, "[people] might say that the innovator of rap was
Eminem. That's how they might write it down. But they're going to
have to say there was this one motherfucker named Too Short. They're
not going to write Too Short out of the history of rap. I have my
album, Don't Stop Rappin'. I never did."
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