Eric B. & Rakim - Don't Sweat the Technique (June 23, 1992)

The closing chapter in the Eric B. & Rakim saga, Don’t Sweat the Technique, wasn’t supposed to be the duo’s final album together. The short version of the story finds Eric “Eric B.” Barrier and William “Rakim” Griffin Jr. at a professional crossroads with their record label, MCA, their contract having just about run its course, leading to our hosts fighting their bosses in court over financial matters. The slightly longer, more accurate version, however, finds Rakim Allah in a place where he was curious about what a solo career could entail, which both terrified and enraged Eric, as it was common knowledge back in the early 1990’s that Rakim was more of a draw than the guy he once wanted to run for president, even though they had split everything down the middle from day one.

Obviously, things did not go in Eric’s favor, as Don’t Sweat the Technique was their fourth, and final, project as a team.

Don’t Sweat the Technique showed signs of the duo's fatigue right from the jump. The very first track, “What’s On Your Mind?”, was a holdover from the soundtrack for House Party 2, which had been released in theaters in 1991, a year prior to this album. The first true single from the project, “Know the Ledge”, had also been prominently featured in the movie Juice (hell, its original title was “Juice (Know the Ledge)”). This left only ten original songs to sell audiences on, which, to be fair, is still a fair number, but there was no precedent for an Eric B. & Rakim album to have so much overlap with other aspects of the culture prior to release. (Usually that happened after their songs had been out for a while.)

Don’t Sweat the Technique received high praise from both critics and fans alike, many in each group finding the production, which had evolved from funk and soul into a jazzier territory, especially appealing. (At least this time around, there wasn’t much in the way of production credit disputes – everyone seems to agree that Eric B. and Rakim put in the work here, although producer-slash-rapper Large Professor provided an assist.) As this was Rakim Allah’s fourth album, it stands to reason that any anxiety he may have carried regarding his writing skills had long since dissipated, as Don’t Sweat the Technique includes some of the finest verses of the man’s career to this day. Its four singles were all met with varying degrees of success, and the deeper album cuts, many of which focused their respective energies on social consciousness, also found their audience.

So why don’t I give a fuck about Don’t Sweat the Technique?

**POSSIBLE BLASPHEMY ALERT**

1. WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND?

The first track on Paid in Full was the mission statement “I Ain’t No Joke.” Follow the Leader and Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em both kicked off with their title tracks, decisive exercises in aggression-fueled microphone dominance. So obviously Don’t Sweat the Technique is going to lead with the Information Society cover “What’s On Your Mind (Pure Energy)”, a, um (*checks notes*), R&B-tinted love rap built around Midnight Star’s “Curious”. Rakim Allah pursues his love interest through the first two verses, only for the finale to time-jump several months ahead top provide listeners with some pretty fucking awkward descriptions of sexual intercourse that take place while an episode of The Cosby Show plays in the background, because it was 1991 when this shit was first released on the soundtrack for House Party 2. (“Desire’s yearning, the fire’s burning / You hot ‘cause it’s a lot you’re learning”; “Cut off the lights, use your mind to see me”… yeah, these are actual lines from “What’s On Your Mind”.) On a technical level, Rakim sounds as good as he always have: the man is a gifted writer, treating his subject matter seriously and applying similar levels of gravitas whether he’s talking about lining up fellow MC’s in order to take them out one at a time or fucking, dropping enough little details for this meet-cute to read on the page effectively. The production, while representative of the era, doesn’t hold up upon rewatch in 2019, though, as it just plays like lazy sampling. My point is, this was a weird way to kick off the album. Any album, not just from Eric B. & Rakim. If I started my own album with this kind of shit, you two would immediately shut it off.  So obviously our hosts believed their past work within our chosen genre rendered them untouchable. And those motherfuckers were wrong.

2. TEACH THE CHILDREN

At least the concept was solid here: Rakim uses “Teach the Children” to describe the thoughts running through a desperate man’s head, a gut whose recent job loss has triggered his need to “play Robin Hood”, antagonizing those who are more well-off, for better and for worse, before our host moves to the pulpit to preach the importance of setting a better example for the youth, to not raise our children within a cynical “us vs. them” world. Which is fine. My concern is that Rakim Allah doesn’t seem to buy into his own message, turning in some rather lazy bars at least during the first verse (“Nature’s balance is way off balance”; “Maybe I should ask the President / Somebody get me the President”), and even butchering the pronunciation of the word “abacus” just to cram it into a line. “Teach the Children” is essentially what Nas was going for with his own “I Can”, minus all of the misogyny (I mean, Esco refers to little girls as “princesses” but young boys skip the like and start off as “kings” without having to put in any work? The fuck else would you call that?), but Rakim’s performance hasn’t held up well throughout the years. The instrumental, though, bangs significantly harder than I remembered, so it at least has that going for it.

3. PASS THE HAND GRENADE

I could have done without the instrumental, which toys with its jazzy and funk sample roots a bit too often. Creating entire chunks of time where the track’s momentum is just shot to hell. But Rakim Allah’s three verses (thankfully he felt there was no need for a chorus here) all sound excellent today, even if the title “Pass the Hand Grenade” sounds arbitrary and nonsensical. (Although given the fact that the very next song is called “Casualties of War”, maybe not so much nonsensical.) Rakim’s bars all revolve around how much better a rapper he is than you will ever be, but, as he tends to do when approaching this topic, he pulls it off with aplomb, delivering his lines with a flow that almost certainly influenced those of a The Infamous-era Prodigy. Seriously, you can hear the late Cellblock P’s voice reciting these bars. It’s just too bad that the attached music was the weak link.

4. CASUALTIES OF WAR

Rakim Allah steps away from rapping about rapping and about how great he is at rapping about rapping to tell a story through the eyes of a soldier facing combat in Operation: Desert Storm, one who is slowly losing his mind as the carnage piles up around him, his paranoia only growing more concerning after the war has technically ended. There aren’t really a ton of rap songs about PTSD, and most rappers never bother venturing into this specific arena anyway, but Rakim goes hard, turning in a solid performance that both questions the need for war and how humanity could ever rationalize such an event occurring in the first place. On “Casualties of War”, our host serves as a solid storyteller, and through his bars you’ll truly understand the pain his character is suffering. Eric B.’s instrumental is merely alright, a vehicle to help his boy get from point A to point B without flash or concern for safety guidelines, so I can’t give this one full marks, but it’s worth one spin, anyway. (I seem to remember liking the “Radical Radio Edit” mix better, as the beat is slightly altered to something far more engaging.)

5. REST ASSURED

Reverting back to old habits, “Rest Assured” is all about Rakim’s dominance of our chosen genre and how said dominance has resulted in him being rewarded for his efforts, by which he specifically means sleeping with seven women (“fourteen hands”) at once. After getting his fuck on, he even asks his makeshift harem to “support my thoughts, ‘cause I got a lot of writing to do,”, which is so goddamn hilarious I can’t even do the line justice in this paragraph. But aside from that hysterical imagery, “Rest Assured” is merely alright. Our host’s bars mesh well with the somewhat par-for-the-course instrumental, which isn’t bad but also isn’t good, and Rakim Allah has an odd obsession with referring to himself as “double-oh seven” on here, nearly a full year after Slick Rick beat him to the punch with his own “Bond”, which was weird.

6. THE PUNISHER

Kool G. Rap cosplay in its purest form, except performed by Rakim Allah, which is beyond strange, as “The Punisher” showcases a Rakim who is more obsessed with what his peers were doing with the art form around him than he was focused on what he could bring to the table. Although I’m no fan of “The Punisher”, there isn’t anything technically wrong with it: our host is in top form, spitting his bars as though the careers of both Eric B. and himself were carried on each and every drop of spittle to hit the microphone, but none of his boasts here connected with me at any point. That’s a lie: I chucked at the very end when Rakim shouted, “Wake ‘em up!” before immediately following with what counts as the hook, “Kill ‘em again!” But the rest of “The Punisher” left me empty. Shrug/smirk.

7. RELAX WITH PEP

A strong contender for the most boring song Eric B. & Rakim ever managed to convince a label to release. More so than Rakim, Eric was likely trying to branch out and expand upon his production technique (it isn’t that difficult to “broaden your horizons” when that merely involves “not taking production credits away from the artists who actually put in the work”), but instead of playing as a musical response to the likes of Gang Starr, “Relax with Pep” sounds like… you know those videos from the 1960’s and 1970’s where they’re advertising what the future (the FUTURE!) is going to look like, with the flying cars, the homes that clean themselves, and the president who isn’t an orange white supremacist fuck? “Relax with Pep” sounds like the music they lay in beneath the narration. This was bad, folks, and not even “how bad could it possibly be?” – I’m trying to warn you against ever listening to this shit. Rakim’s three versed are delivered with a slowed flow that skews cautious and considerate, wholly deflating his entire persona as the God MC as he tries to sound calm and, well, relaxed. But honestly, who in the hell was dying to hear Rakim sound this fucking dull? And seriously, man: “Here come the right one, baby, I’m Dr. Pepper”? It was a Diet Pepsi jingle, for fuck’s sake. Nobody was around to catch that before Don’t Sweat the Technique was mastered? You’re supposed to be better than this.

8. KEEP THE BEAT

On which our host wastes a decent instrumental crafting a ridiculous music-related metaphor for boning down. It’s not hard to imagine the phrase, “then I complete the beat”, which ends each passage, as doubling for “and then I ejaculated”, even though our host thinks he’s being clever by not being overly graphic during “Keep the Beat”. The analogy is a reach, but rappers rapping about sex is hardly new - hell, this isn’t even the first time Rakim himself has done it today. My issue with “Keep the Beat”, other than its lack of entertainment value outside of the instrumental, is that our host seems to have both written and recorded his bars with a permanent smirk on his face, a “hey, look at me, I’m so clever”-type of mask worn to distance himself from the material that much more easily should public response not be to his liking. He never goes all-in on the absurdity, and that’s too bad.

9. WHAT’S GOING ON?

On which Rakim plaintively sighs that

“The times is harder, the drugs is heavier,” our host explains while describing just how fucked-up the world (and, more to the point, his home state of New York) has become throughout the years, and his acute eye for detail doesn’t let him (or us) down. Eric B.’s jazz and funk-fueled instrumental, with its dialogue sample embedded throughout, is a motherfucking sleeper, its simplistic boom bap giving our host enough leverage to unfold his observations with ease, and it bangs. Seriously. “What’s Going On?” is a late-career Eric B. & Rakim gem that seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle alongside their other, admittedly much better classic tracks, but it’s deserving of a resurgence, if for no other reason than to hear our host chastise a drug addict with, “You stayed up for days and now your dreams are gone.” That shit just hurts, you know?

10. KNOW THE LEDGE

After a special pre-release screening of the 2Pac movie Juice, Rakim Allah was so inspired by what he saw that he wrote this song and recorded it within hours of watching it. And I literally mean hours: he recorded the first version of what was originally called “Juice (Know the Ledge)” at his own home, choosing the samples and playing the drums himself. (So that ‘Eric B. & Rakim’ production credit is more of a generous suggestion than anything accurate, I assume?) The possible reason it was called “Juice” in the first place, it being foremost in his mind at the time (having been asked to contribute a song to its soundtrack and all), with the subtitle “Know the Ledge” both a clever pun on the word “knowledge” and an inadvertent spoiling of the film’s ending, sort of, could be due to the man depleting his creative resources so quickly to write and record this four-verse tale told from the point of view of a power-hungry gangsta who ultimately succumbs to his obsession. Rakim threw everything he had at “Know the Ledge”, so it’s ultimately a good thing that this shit still bangs today, as his street tales and observations only sound more visceral today. The track also features the rare bit of profanity from our host, whose sparse use of the “n-word” throughout his career (as a part of Eric B. & Rakim, anyway) serves to underline how his narrator views his peers when it’s executed several times here.

11. DON’T SWEAT THE TECHNIQUE

Eric B. & Rakim have released every title track from all four of their albums as singles, and “Don’t Sweat the Technique” is, by and large, the worst of them all. The jazzy instrumental isn’t terrible, but it is blandly repetitive, even more so after our host stops speaking entirely and you realize there’s still a full fucking minute-and-a-half left of music on the audio track to get through. That was egregious as all get-out. Rakim Allah’s three verses (and lazy “hook”) fall back on old habits, rapping about how he’s the greatest and everyone else in the game wants to be just like him, but while he scores a few choice bars, his arrogance tanks the track’s concept, as though he was trying too hard to prove himself to the audience when he’s supposed to just be the best. The first four lines in the second verse don’t help all that much, either. I did not care for this shit today. Sorry folks.

12. KICK ALONG

The grand finale to the partnership of Eric B. and Rakim was… well, this shit. “Kick Along” is a throwaway song that only makes sense being the last song on Don’t Sweat the Technique if you remember that this wasn’t supposed to be their final album in the first place. On here, Rakim encourages listeners to “Kick Along”, or, to put it plainly, to dance to his off-beat rhymes and jazz-inflected instrumental. Lyrically, our host’s pen is fine on here, even if his delivery seems to be more ignorant of the actual music playing underneath than usual, but while his focus may have been to move the crowd, “Kick Along” becomes an ill-advised eulogy, one that won’t ever convince anybody that our host was ever a formidable force behind the microphone. I mean, think about it: if “Kick Along” were the only song anybody ever heard from Eric B. and Rakim, there’s no fucking way Rakim Allah would end up on all of those Top 50 Rappers lists that filled up your social media a few weeks ago. We would have ignored the cat and moved on, right?

FINAL THOUGHTS: Don’t Sweat the Technique is easily the worst of the four Eric B. & Rakim efforts, as our hosts seem content with resting on their laurels instead of actively pushing the culture forward. It is the aural equivalent of an artist spinning his wheels: a lot of Don’t Sweat the Technique could easily be summed up with the descriptor “lazy”, especially when compared to the rest of the duo’s storied output. And yet, it’s still held in relatively high regard. Why is that? Are older hip hop heads reluctant to give a project involving their god of choice, Rakim Allah, anything less than a thumbs-up? Is going against Don’t Sweat the Technique also going against all of hip hop? Or is it merely that the goodwill built up by Paid in Full, Follow the Leader, and Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em enough to allow Eric B. & Rakim to skate by on diminishing returns? It’s likely a combination of the three, but I’m an older hip hop head and I have to say, Don’t Sweat the Technique isn’t very good.

It’s not that this was a horrible listening experience: whenever Rakim feels like stepping away from the love and/or lust raps, which have just gotten worse since “Mahogany” (another song I don’t care for, although I realize I’m in the minority there), there are still flashes of the energy, aggression, and arrogance that have earned him a rightful spot on the Best Rapper Alive lists of the hip hop heads that matter. His writing, especially, has gotten even better over the years, with the first-person PTSD account “Casualties of War” and his theme song for Juice showcasing a pen that has learned and grown, striving for constant improvement,. Even the crappier moments of Don’t Sweat the Technique have some lyrical depth to speak of (see: “What’s On Your Mind?” and the title track). However, the actual music causes the project to tread water, the jazz samples having already been done in a much better manner, and neither of our hosts manages to add enough to the proceedings to warrant the stylistic change. In short, a lot of Don’t Sweat the Technique is boring as shit, sounding dated even back in 1992, and that isn’t even including the objectively bad songs such as “Kick Along: or “Relax with Pep”. Sorry ‘bout it.

BUY OR BURN? Burn this one. The songs listed below are worthy of your time, but the rest of this? Nah.

BEST TRACKS: “What’s Going On?”; “Know the Ledge”; the lyrics to “Casualties of War”

-Max

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