1999: E. 1999 Eternal, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony

By eli day

The Affections of E. 1999 Eternal

There’s an amazing story from the early, pre-Bone-thugs-n-harmony years that I think about often. 

Before they ever signed a deal, when they were just surviving on whatever they could in their beloved corner of East Cleveland, Wish Bone’s mother would have the boys sing for her. The tune was always the same.

 “We used to sing for my mother all the time,” Wish Bone told the Cleveland Free Times. “She'd make us sing a song ‘I Miss You’ [So Alone] by a local Cleveland group called Men at Large. That helped us develop our vocals and then we got comfortable singing and rapping.”

“So Alone” was a chest-swelling ode to the departed, and the only single from Men at Large’s debut album to chart. 

I love this story for what leaps out right away: that Bone was not the first Cleveland group who sang about grief beautifully enough to make crushing loss feel survivable. They would, of course, one day climb to the peak of their own personal sorrow and spill out an anthem about loss that lifted us to the mountaintop with them. But before they sang their own, they sang another’s. 

And I love the story most of all for what this implies: that the basic pieces of what would eventually define Bone were all there, in Wish Bone’s mama’s house. In her kitchen, maybe. Or her front parlor. I’ve imagined it countless times. The young Bone members all piled into a small room, harmonizing for a loved one who is still here and so can still ask her boys to sing a song for those who no longer are. From the beginning, their craft was defined by these two things: making a small symphony of their voices for themselves and those they love most. 

For me, this is a reminder to anyone who cherishes Bone’s singular gifts. That the guys from East Cleveland stood apart, but never alone. A reminder that Bone came from a lineage, of artists who had been to their own personal mountaintops, and a community who knew something of the desire to reach new vistas of their own grief. A community with a vocabulary for loving one another deeply with whatever time we have, and coping with whatever’s left when time marches away with a beloved. 

———————————————

I want to try to accurately trace my affection for Bone Thugs-n-Harmony for you. 

And I want to do that while being honest about the fact that it is a nearly 25-year-old affection, which means there is truly no way that the Pixar-level nostalgia of my 31-year-old brain won't inevitably overcomplicate the simple joy my four-year-old ears got out of hearing Bone for the first time. 

So I want to put this as simply as I can right away: Bone’s music was just plain beautiful to me. Everything else was extra. And it did come with extras.

E. 1999 Eternal, released in 1995 and Bone’s one indisputably classic album, is stuffed with them. Listeners of rap’s greatest doo-wop group, casual and dedicated fans alike, will know what I’m talking about: The rhythmic chanting on “Da Introduction” and “Me Killa.” The avalanche of bars on “Down ‘71 (The Getaway)” and “Land of Tha Heartless,” where one rhyme falls onto the next before the first even has a chance to touch ground. And of course, its most iconic and genuinely spectacular moments, “Tha Crossroads” and “1st of Tha Month” — gorgeous rap hymnals from opening to closing melody. 

What I loved was that while the sonic world Bone built on E. 1999 was often horrifying, and thrilling the way horrifying things sometimes are, they constructed that world with incredible tenderness. E. 1999 Eternal rests at the mountaintop where those two paths meet. It’s what happened when the group dedicated themselves to elevating the entire experience, of devoting yourself to a place that’s nourished you against terrifying odds, to someplace higher. 

———————————————

Bone enters E.1999 in a way we might take for granted now, but had to be chilling to someone who’d never heard them in ‘95: chanting rhythmically about execution. 

On “Da Introduction,” you can practically see them lined up in a row, their faces only illuminated by a candlelight: “Execution double nineeee style, steadily sendin’ them bodies underground.” 

The are the first words from Bone on the album, and it serves its purpose. It’s as if they’re saying, “Welcome, listener, to the Cleveland we know best. The most we can promise is that there may not be a way out.” Nearly 30 years later, it is still just as menacing and hypnotic. 

Bone was revving up a key part of the album’s machinery: weaving the supernatural and natural worlds together in a single thread. They did this by constantly pulling back the curtain and revealing the true source of their troubles — ordinary life in a city that’s been pummeled by the wider society.

The title track opens with Layzie Bone looking backwards: “Thinking ‘bout back in the days, when the year was ‘89/little nigga on the grind, gotta get mine, doing my crime.” He goes on to describe what it’s like living at the edge of constant disaster, pulling graveyard shifts with the guys you love and surviving off whatever the hustle provides while more and more of you are made ghosts. By the end, they’re chanting at you to get away as fast as you can: “Cleveland is the city where we come from so run ruuuun run.” 

This was one of Bone’s greatest gifts as narrators: building a sense of dread in their songs that would slowly tap tap tap at the door before pounding it relentlessly. 

But for all their innovations, as 68to05 creator Hanif Abdurraqib once pointed out, so much about Bone goes unappreciated. Between “Damn, these dudes are rapping FAST” on one side and their famous crooning on the other, people forget that Bone were masters of breath and space. Listen to anyone anywhere on “Crept and We Came,” or “Land of Tha Heartless,” and you’ll hear the guys climbing up and down vocal registers at will, dropping the pace from full on gallop to a stroll in an instant before leaping back into a sprint with Olympic-level breath control. This is why they almost certainly put you on skates if you’ve ever tried reciting their lyrics. They were constantly carving out extra room in DJ U-Neek’s beats, who produced the entire album, that it’s hard to imagine anyone else finding.

And it was often done in service of each other. So much of the album feels like a series of short horror stories, where the entire group has to make it to the other side of some rapidly closing portal that isn’t necessarily safer, but at least means they’ll survive another day. Bone was always holding the door open long enough for everyone to make it through. 

I especially love the spot in “Down ‘71” where Bizzy and Layzie Bone meet. Bizzy’s last bar isn’t even over before Layzie is halfway through his first one, making it feel not so much like the handing off of a baton as it is one voice braiding into another. 

In an interview with the Source Magazine before the album's release, Layzie put it more clearly: “We sit down. And get high as fuck. And we damn near become the same motherfucker.”

———————————————

In 1995 I was four years old, which means E. 1999 dropped around the same time that memories and feelings started to stick around in a lasting way for me. 

But there is simply no way to account for what a tune like, say, “Thuggish Ruggish Bone,” the group’s breakthrough single, did to my 4-year-old brain. How songs like that can overpower everything in their path when they’re played. If it spilled out of a stopped car while I was on the playground, I’d most likely run to the fence and wrap my tiny hands around the chain links, backing up Shatasha Williams’ soaring vocals with everything I had, though she absolutely deserved and still deserves more. 

I was just two hours away in Detroit. Because I was a small child and had very little to offer at the time, I mostly survived on the generosity of others. This is how I came to know Bone — through a small act of affection. 

My older sister would let me sprawl out on her bedroom floor in whichever corner of the city we called home at the time, thumbing through what felt like her endless leather-bound collection of cds. Each page held up to eight albums total, front and back. She’d insert the album booklets on top of the cd, so that the first thing you saw of an artist was the artwork meant to represent their sound. Long before I ever listened to E. 1999, I was mesmerized by that cover.

Layzie, Bizzy, Wish, and Krayzie stand at the intersection of “E.1999” and “Eternal,” their backs to a row of apartment buildings. The lot immediately behind them is a boneyard of whitened skulls and rib cages. The sky is a clash of reds and yellows and everything is on fire. It made it look as if E.1999 wasn’t just the group’s debut album. It was a struggle against their own personal apocalypse. 

This matches with what people tend to remember about the album. All the harrowing, bone-chilling stuff. The constant chanting. The occult symbols. The pleas to a ouija-board for answers about how violently they might go out. Things perfectly calibrated to freak people the fuck out in the 90s.

But if you look closely at the cover, in the window of a fourth floor unit, you can see the ghost of recently-deceased mentor and Ruthless Records founder Eazy-E. (Eazy had signed the group in 1993 after a legendarily poorly planned bus trip to LA, when the guys caught a greyhound out west, and posted up in an apartment for days trying to get an audience with him. When they finally got a chance to rhyme for him over the phone, Eazy was all in. But in order to sign them, they’d have to sprint to meet him at his next show: in Cleveland.) 

Because of Eazy’s watchful shadow, an album soaked in dread is given some ancestral cover. Eazy becomes a stand-in for all the loved ones beyond the grave, still standing devotedly at the group’s backs. Making sure they too aren’t any lonelier than they have to be.

It’s a small thing with enormous force. Yes, the hounds of hell may be closing in, but there is still a city and a people here who have loved us and kept us above the dirt. And how could we run from that. 

———————————————

In one sense, E. 1999 is an album about barely surviving everything that might kill you, but surviving nonetheless. In another, it is about clinging fiercely to the ones who make it worth surviving in the first place. There is the ocean of rising losses, yes. And there are also the lighthouses to swim towards.

“Tha Crossroads” and “1st of Tha Month” are hymnals in every black neighborhood I know. The first, after all, is a tribute to the affection they offer, and the almost-certain grief that comes with loving anything and anyone so deeply. The second is an ode to the brief salvation one can find there between whatever grief awaits, as long as you can pass the time surrounded by those you love.

There is so much that is magical about “Tha Crossroads” that I am reluctant to even touch it. What I will say is that it is the first song I believed to be perfect, and one that I have only come to rely on more as time passes. 

Sometimes, in high school, I would skip the bus home to walk instead and listen to Crossroads on repeat, because it is the perfect song to play the fuck out if anyone you love is dead or if you’ve ever imagined what the cavernous heartache Bone sang about might feel like. The Schaefer bus ain’t always have room for that. And it wouldn’t have room if the impossible happened. My feet would need to be on the ground for that. I can still see it now: a staircase of clouds dropping from the heavens when that opening synthesizer rose from the mountains that were real only in my imagination, carrying those first, holy words with it: “Bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone…”

What I love most about Crossroads is that it surrenders entirely to Bone’s affection for the lost, and how absolutely wrecked they are by their no longer being here. 

Bizzy opens the song with a partial roll call of the dead: 

Dead souls, nigga, this for Wally

Eazy, C’s Uncle Charlie

Little Boo, but God's got him

And I'm gonna miss everybody.

The last line is one of the song’s many that would echo loudest across the years. I think that’s because “And I’m gonna miss everybody” is so bluntly honest about the immense grief that awaits if any of us stick around long enough and love enough people along the way. 

I appreciate a song that contemplates vengeance as much as anyone, and as E. 1999 approached, Bone had endless reasons to do so after facing a string of devastating losses chronicled in the song.  Eazy to complications from HIV. Wally, Uncle Charlie, and Little Boo all gunned down in Cleveland. But Crossroads only had room for the people we’ll mourn until we join them. I will miss too many, the song pleads. Give me a place where I can see them all again and where loneliness can’t reach us.

A couple verses later, Wish Bone gives us the song's pound for pound most iconic moment. 

Why they kill my dawg? 

Damn man, I miss my Uncle Charles, y'all

And he shouldn't be gone

In front of his home.

No one could’ve predicted Uncle Charles would become such a massive fan obsession, but how could it not? There is bootleg Uncle Charles merch, a Key & Peele skit, Youtube explainers, memes, and more. It is a perfect line in a perfect song, and stands in the best of the Black music tradition by laying all of its crushing weight down in plain sight: I miss someone dearly and I shouldn’t have too.

What I never told anyone is that when dear homies have passed, first in 2007, and then twice in 2016, and again in 2018 and 2019, I have reached for “Tha Crossroads” more than any other song. Not to pull me back from the brink, but to join me there for just three minutes. For three minutes, the view is nearly as beautiful as everyone I miss. Everyone that I now must believe exists outside the reach of mortal hardship and who I’ll someday have another chance to sprint towards and chase loneliness away from. What a gift to have somewhere to turn to. An anthem for our immovable grief.

And, of course, there is a song that reminds us what that reunion might look like. “1st of Tha Month” is about welfare checks arriving, yes, before Clinton destroyed the program and sent extreme child poverty skyrocketing. But it is more accurately about the brief flicker of rhapsody that comes from having a few more bucks to throw around with those you love. For life’s necessities, sure. But everyone here has either worked too hard, too long, or too many graveyard shifts to stop there. And so there must also be enough for whatever will bring us all closest to euphoria. Enough for the cookout. For an extra brew. And enough bud to help the crew touch the sky several times over.

Bizzy gets to the heart of it: 

Yeah, we havin' a celebration, love to stay high

And you better believe when it's time to grind

I'm down for mine, crime after crime

Fin to creep to the pad cause moms got the grub on the grill

And we got the 4-0, you know it's the first of the month

And my nigga, we chills for real

It’s all there. The celebration. The warning about what might follow when our backs are against the wall again. But then, the offering. While we still have a little more to go around, I know there’s something to eat and something to drink at a table where I’m loved. And that’s where I’ll be.

It is true that much of E.1999 sounds like a group that knows disaster is closing in, but “Tha Crossroads” and “1st of tha Month” are the album’s center of gravity. Everything revolves around this: the group’s love for one another, and for everything East Cleveland has given them, in spite of the world’s best efforts to take it all away. For me, it’s this affection that gives weight and depth to everything else. The waiting cemeteries and catastrophes are so disturbing because Bone knows what the world might be if the neighborhood were free to fashion its own destiny. 

A neighborhood that, if you listen closely, always seemed to give them at least one more set of arms worth running into than it did reasons to run away. 

Eli Day is a writer from Detroit who considers himself lucky to be loved so fiercely and robustly by the city.

Twitter: @ elihday