Many Moods

Devin the Dude Abides

originally published October 10, 2007

Devin the Dude is hip-hop's reigning trickster. Where a lot of rappers fall back on defensive misanthropy or exaggerated egotism, Devin deals in knowing charm and prankish independence. Where a lot of rappers imagine themselves invincible, the characters in Devin's narratives usually suffer some sort of comic humiliation and get through on good-natured fatalism.

He's one of the funniest guys on the mic, equally adept as a slow-flow rapper and resonant soul singer. Although he's never been fully recognized beyond the hip-hop cognoscenti, he's carved out an interesting niche for himself.

Devin Copeland began his hip-hop career (although people didn't really use the word "career") in the '80s, as a breakdancer. He had grown up deconstructing the hooks from radio hits, rewriting them to bring them closer to where he lived, and found rap's playful, satirical spirit accommodating. His brother beatboxed, and Devin gradually began freestyling along with him. Devin lived in Houston at a time when an emcee needed New York or L.A. connections to be taken seriously, so he never saw any reason to take himself seriously. But by 1991, he had joined the group the Odd Squad, which released its first album Fadanuf Fa Erybody! in 1994, on the legendary indie Rap-a-Lot. By that time, Rap-a-Lot had broken Houston's Geto Boys, whose dark, deeply misanthropic raps scared the shit out of tough-talkers on both coasts. That wasn't how Devin generally got down - he talked a lot of shit, but he was more about sex, weed and self-deprecation.

Still, Rap-a-Lot slowly developed a career for him. That same year, he sang the hook on "Hand of the Dead Body," by solo Geto Boy Scarface and Ice Cube, which snagged him his first national airplay. His mournful twang gave the paranoid G-funk track some emotional gravity, and Devin has been singing hooks on all sorts of records ever since. His calm, comical raps stole a couple of tracks on Scarface's 1997 compilation My Homies. ("Do What You Wanna Do" remains his signature anthem.) He's worked with De La Soul, Dr. Dre, the Roots and a host of others.

But the Devin experience can't be easily compressed into a few bars. His richest work is to be found on his four solo records, the latest of which, Waiting to Inhale, dropped on Rap-a-Lot last spring. It's the funkiest, funniest and darkest addition to Devin's canon, and flaunts all the paradoxes that make him so much fun to follow. It's not a dance record - one running joke involves a yokel engineer trying to get a "boom" delivered to the studio, and sure enough, there aren't a lot of heavy beats. While it draws from the same rich sonic vocab as Outkast, UGK and the rest of Devin's Southern brethren, it's a storytelling record, driven by his comic persona.

A lot of rappers smoke weed, or at least talk about smoking weed, but Devin breathes and lives the stuff, and manifests both the relaxation and numb depression it can bring. On "Almighty Dollar," he withstands pothead paranoia as he figures out what to do with his little remaining scratch. ("Almighty dollar / It ain't what it used to be / Hobos used to ask you for a dollar / Now the motherfuckers ask you for three.") In "Cutcha Up," he compares one of his plants to an alluring underage girl: increasingly appetizing, expressly forbidden, and the subject of an obsession that's hard to explain to sober bystanders.

Like a lot of hip-hop, Waiting to Inhale cops a cynical, hedonistic attitude toward sex. (At least there's one genre of music that refuses to sanctify its bodily functions!) But alongside the willing groupies, mutual exploitation and ridiculous food analogies, Devin also portrays the pain and confusion that can happen when a relationship develops from confused motivations.

And that stuff is joke fodder, too. Like Dana Dane, Biz Markee and other wise fools from rap's first generation, Devin goofs on himself harder than he goofs on anyone else. His subject matter is just a lot more painful. But, as he said in an interview with the Sound of Young America podcast, his aims are to "live life," to "have fun," and to "let you know that everything is pretty much the same here." Any "clean version" would be a damn sight less humane.

Emerson Dameron

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column.