Slick Rick

"News from the east, Sire. Rick the Ruler has returned..." You heard about the song before you ever actually heard it. On the back of the school bus, during lunch period, on the basketball court. It was a rhyme that benefitted from audience participation, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The secret? You had to memorize the rhyme in its entirety, and then, once perfected, teach it to someone else.

"La di da/ We like to party/ We don't cause trouble/ We don't bother nobody..."

While "The Show" could make 100 people spontaneously break out into The Wop until the break of dawn, it was the B-side that really shook the Hip Hop Nation. There was just something that made MC Ricky D immediately compelling even though he wasn't a living drum machine, like his friend Doug E. Rick was different. Unprecedented.

Bronx by the way London, he displayed a different kind of arrogance than most MCs. LL, Run, and Mele wanted to shove the microphone down your throat. But Ricky D was haughty. His arrogance came from a regal place-he was smarter than you, richer than you, looked down from on high and pitied you.

And the rhyme? He spends half the time looking at himself in the mirror, taking a bath, and worrying about his cologne, shoes, and hat. He runs into a scorned lover, and before he can even respond, her mother emerges from the shadows and whups her ass- she wants a piece of Ricky too.

The craziest thing? Even as the story gets crass and widly misogynistic, he relays the tale with such charm you can't not love it. You've never heard a story that's been told in this way, and once he starts singing A Taste Of Honey's "Sukiyaki," he enters a realm that's often been imitated but never duplicated. By the end of the song, you want to hear the story again. And one more time after that. With each rewind, with each retelling, the legend grew.

By the end of 1985, everyone heard of Ricky D. The question was, other than a novelty of rap, what else could he do? Did he have the focus, the commitment for a whole album? Did he just want to have the money, the flash, the attention of the girlies, and live the "Slick" life of a Hip-Hop hustler? Or did he want to be regarded as a man in the game, to remove the Y from his first name and just be "Rick."