Rock likes to talk about how De La Soul's disc Buhloone Mindstate and Public Enemy's Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age have been highly influential on his stand-up -- but he can't quite explain how. "You just gotta listen to it," he says of those records. "Like, on Muse Sick, that song 'What Side You On?' Please. I ripped off that whole thing. And Buhloone was basically the same thing as Bring the Pain -- same themes, different presentation." That's why he keeps coming back to Prince Paul, the man who virtually defined the between-rap sketches on De La's 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising. Rock also appears on Paul's A Prince Among Thieves, playing a wacked-out junkie. And if Paul turns his album into a film, as planned, Rock likely will reprise the role.
"After my last special, I got all this hype, and it was just like, 'Do an album, Chris,'" Rock explains. "Everybody's vying for me to do an album, and I just picked Prince Paul. I don't know why; it just seemed natural. I can't even imagine working with anyone else. Who else would I work with? I was thinking maybe Dr. Dre -- maybe. But with Prince Paul, it's very relaxing. We have the same sensibility. We never have arguments. And Paul is always talking to me like, 'You should do a record, or just produce a record for somebody.' But I don't have any interest in doing that, 'cause most people are good at one thing, and that's a lot to be good at one thing, and it would really suck if I tried that. I did CB4. That's the closest I get to doing a hip-hop record, and even that was a joke. But there is an artistic community I'm lucky to be a part of."
"There's no question that the quality of my artistic life has changed," says Chris Rock, the funniest man alive.
Not fade away: Chris Rock, during his Saturday Night Live heysecond.
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June 26
Bronco Bowl
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Perhaps one need look no further than Eddie Murphy's own recording career to understand the significance of Chris Rock. When Murphy decided to split the grooves between comedy and music, he sought out the lightest, whitest men around: Narada Michael Walden and Michael Jackson. For Bigger and Blacker, Rock's posse includes Ice Cube, O.D.B, and Biz Markie, with whom he turns the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar" into the astonishingly funny "White Bitches." Then there's the Roger and Zapp homage, during which Rock wonders what the disc would have sounded like if Roger Troutman had produced the record. He then begins singing through a digital vocoder: "I'm buying a Cadillac / I'm thinking of pussy." White folks will not get it. But they will love it nonetheless.
