The iconic hip-hop group Lil Durk got his style from: “My influence”
Following his arrest on a conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire charge a year ago, Lil Durk’s place within the cultural imagination has decidedly shifted into a very dark place. His music is, sadly, no longer the story. But in the years leading up to this point, he was considered to be a musical pioneer, a figure taking drill music to mainstream heights that it had previously never reached.
Back in 2018, things were looking good. He was 25 years old and rising as an artist, releasing his 12th mixtape, Just Cause Y’all Waited, and looking ahead to the next phase of his career. He’d recently left Def Jam Records, but he seemed optimistic about what was to come. It’s strange to reflect on this positivity now, in light of the bleak turn we know now that his life would ultimately take in the coming years.
A few weeks after Just Cause Y’all Waited dropped, Durk gave an interview to Billboard, in which he discussed his career up to that point, his plans for the future, and also his early musical influences. There was one hip-hop group in particular that he highlighted as especially important: Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Durk loved them, particularly for their classic track ‘Tha Crossroads,’ which he had gestured towards with his own song ‘Crossroads’ that features as the penultimate song on Just Cause Y’all Waited.
“Yeah, that’s where I got my style from,” he told the magazine, speaking of Bone Thugs’ ‘Tha Crossroads.’ “I used to think about how they would sing and rap. When I started doing it I remember Lil Reese and them would be like, ‘Man, you’re singing and shit man?’ I was like, ‘Shit, this is my style.’ This when I didn’t know how to put the quality in my music so the ad libs would be loud and the tunes would be strong as hell too. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony came through the gate with it, my influence came from them.”
It’s easy to understand how pivotal Bone Thugs were for Durk—they, like him, were especially skilled at bringing softer vocal melodies into hip-hop. ‘Tha Crossroads,’ a song dealing explicitly with death and dedicated to their lost loved ones—one of whom was Eazy-E—helped to establish the style that Bone Thugs would become known for: softer, melody-driven rap that helped to expand the genre past its initial boundaries.
The song was an instant hit, becoming the highest-debuting rap song to ever hit the charts, reaching number two in the US immediately upon its release. It eventually climbed to number one, picked up a Grammy award, and eventually took up its place within hip-hop’s greatest ever songs.
It demonstrated what could be done with hip-hop, presenting a more palatable sound to mainstream ears that, over the next couple of decades, would be developed upon by artists like Lil Durk. Without Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s contributions, the course of hip-hop history may have taken another turn entirely.