If you were a teenager in 2002, you probably balled your fist and banged out the beat to “Grindin’” on the lunchroom table. If you were a teenager who lived in Virginia Beach, Va., in 2002, as I was, you likely did the same, but also on the bleachers in the gym, on your locker, on your desk, on the school bus, on the basketball court, on the hood of a car (whether it was yours or not), on a pew at church. We made that beat everywhere we went, and not just because it’s the greatest beat in hip-hop history (don’t @ me). Nah, in Virginia Beach we had a different kind of response to Pharrell announcing that “the world is about to feel something that they never felt before.” Clipse did what, to me, seemed impossible—they put our backyard on the map.
I moved to Virginia Beach when I was 7 years old, and I always hated having to say that I was from there. Both of my parents were from Washington, D.C., and that’s where all my cousins lived. They got to claim a city that people around the world had heard of, one that got discussed with seriousness, that people traveled to because of its historical importance and continued reverence. And when I told people where I was from, I was always met with the same question: "And how far away from D.C. is that?"
I hated Virginia Beach because I didn’t recognize it as having its own identity. There was no go-go and mumbo sauce like in D.C. What we did have—skateboarding and surfing—didn’t appeal to me because they seemed to be the domain of every annoying white boy I knew. We had the beach, a summertime recreation staple, but there’s nothing beautiful about the murky, shit-green colored waters of the Atlantic we swim in down there, and even less beauty in that big-ass statue of King Neptune. There are no professional sports teams in Virginia Beach. We never got a mention in the national news unless a hurricane was headed our way. For a time, our biggest local “celebrity” was a guy who competed on “Survivor.”
By the time I was a teenager who wanted nothing more than to be cool, Virginia Beach wasn’t doing me any favors. Cool people didn’t come from Virginia. Cool people came from New York, Cali, Atlanta, Miami, Philly, New Orleans… basically anywhere I could name that a rapper had shouted out on record. Rakim said, “It ain’t where ya from, it’s where ya at,” but most hip-hop I listened to made it sound like the exact opposite was true. It was where you were from that made you who you are, that gave you the authority to stand and deliver.
I would have killed to be from any of those hip-hop destinations at that time. Virginia Beach wasn’t about shit, as far as I was concerned. Granted, by the new millennium, Timbaland and the Neptunes’ Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo were established super producers, but you don’t become a hip-hop hotbed, and therefore cool, just because you make hot beats. You need an MC to get the respect. Clipse gave us two.
It’s been 15 years since Clipse’s debut Lord Willin’ dropped on August 20, 2002, and while “Grindin’” has been properly ensconced in hip-hop lore, the album is treated as somewhat of an afterthought. Hell Hath No Fury, Malice and Pusha T’s 2006 follow-up, holds the distinction of being rap critics’ favorite Clipse album, the one heralded as a classic, and for good reason. Not many albums are more tightly constructed, simultaneously pure and grimy, while featuring multiple MCs at their peak powers of rhyme.
But Lord Willin’ speaks a regional dialect in a way Hell Hath No Fury doesn’t. When I listen to Lord Willin’ now, I feel the place it is from. I see it, the way I saw Ready to Die unfold when I first visited Bed-Stuy. It’s one of those albums that sonically captures everything that’s unique about the environment in which it was produced. Dare I say, I get a bit nostalgic for the hometown I never wanted to claim. The planned communities with cookie-cutter houses and names like Rock Creek, Landstown Meadows, and Green Run. The wide highways with incompetent drivers. The emptiness of the strip by the beach in the fall, and the unbearableness of the tourists in the summer. The excessive number of 7-11s. The hoodies and shorts no matter what the weather.
Lord Willin’ isn’t the first hip-hop album to come out of Virginia. Skillz, a Richmond native, put out From Where??? six years earlier, in 1996. It’s not even the first hip-hop album from Virginia Beach. Missy Elliott’s debut Supa Dupa Fly dropped in 1997, and even though she’s from nearby Portsmouth, it was produced entirely by Timbaland, a Virginia Beach high school graduate, in his Virginia Beach studio. It’s a classic record, but insofar as it represents the feel of Virginia Beach as a distinct community, it’s missing something. For starters, the first two voices heard rapping on the album, Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Kim, are from New York. But Missy and Timbaland did give us the bounce—that breezy, infectious, and unmistakably Virginia Beach sound of relaxed joy. It isn’t as aggressive as crunk, but it draws on some of that same Southern energy and centers it around the forgetting of hardships.
You can hear the bounce on Lord Willin’, too, on tracks like “Young Boy,” “Ma, I Don’t Love Her,” and “Let’s Talk About It,” but the album also captures the sinister thing sitting right beneath it, which Malice succinctly describes on “Virginia”: “Ironic, the same place I’m making figures at/That there’s the same land they used to hang niggas at.”
No one would ever describe Clipse as a political rap group, but their vivid descriptions of the local drug trade exposed the side of their state that gets obscured by its longstanding tourist slogan, “Virginia Is for Lovers.” “I’m from Virginia, where ain’t shit to do but cook,” may not be explicitly true, but it asks us to reckon with the fact that in an area where the only real industry is the military, there is little other economic opportunity, especially for the young black men Malice and Pusha were speaking on behalf of. In fact, the only other industry that Virginia Beach has built up—tourism—is the reason the drugs are in-demand, abundant, and lucrative. But you won’t find too many Virginians ready to discuss that.
With Lord Willin’, Clipse made an artistic achievement out of representing Virginia Beach in its entirety. They became actual stars. They were from around my way. At the time, I didn’t appreciate it the way I should have. I pounded my fist and stomped my feet to make the “Grindin’” beat like everyone else, but I figured it wouldn’t last. There was no way for anything classic, meaningful, creatively challenging, or genre-defining to come out of Virginia Beach. We had our hit. It would fade. And the world would go back to ignoring us until another hurricane threatened to wipe out our power lines.
The industry treated Clipse much the same way. Hell Hath No Fury got the critical respect it deserved, but it wasn’t able to achieve the same commercial success. The brothers lost close friends and associates to prison. They gave us Til the Casket Drops, another stellar album but not enough to revive platinum- and gold-level status. And then they were no more.
Malice lost his faith in the music that made him famous and renewed his faith in Jesus. Pusha T is still delivering those crisp cocaine rhymes we have come to love, though it’s just not the same. I don’t expect it to be; I’m certainly different now as a 30-year-old man than I was as a 15-year-old boy. But back then, Clipse released an album that to this day sounds like my hometown. Regionalism doesn’t hold quite the same importance in hip-hop as it once did, but it meant something to have a document of the place that shaped me. I doubt Clipse and the Neptunes will be teaming up anytime soon to create another one. But I’m grateful that, one memorable time, they did.