The one lyric Big Daddy Kane is most proud of
Big Daddy Kane was one of the finest lyricists to emerge during hip-hop’s golden age, but, of all the clever lines he ever came up with, one in particular always stuck out to him.
Kane is known for his ability to rhyme extremely rapidly, which, given the fact that he is an asthma sufferer, is an impressive feat. During an interview with HipHopDX in 2010, he explained that he manages to achieve these fast bursts of rapping by choosing the right moment to take a breath.
“I’ve seen a lot of people try to do fast songs and then, when they perform live, they can’t even say their own lyrics and I think that’s embarrassing,” he said. “So I try to make it where I have those spots where I can catch a breath here—I might slow up the flow for two bars or say something real sarcastic real fast so I can take a deep breath, so that it can run through because I’m not gonna look like that. Like I’m on stage and can’t perform my own songs.”
In addition to his ability to spit really quickly, BDK is renowned for the actual lyrics he uses. During this same conversation with HipHopDX, he elaborated on his approach in this regard, too, explaining how he used to write his verses.
“Honestly, it differs, depending on the mood,” he said of his approach. “There’s the type of thing where I’m really trying to target a certain subject. I might sit down and just think of all the types of twists and turns and different events that can happen in the situation, and I might just jot those down and then put it into rap form.”
Other times, his ideas were less concrete. A verse might be propelled by a specific rhyme, rather than a coherent story, and this, too, seemed to work for him. “And then there’s sometimes where I’m just trying to write a rhyme,” he said, “a regular rhyme, and I’m just jotting down little hot, little slick lines that I thought of and then I just put it in the rap until a whole verse forms.”
Kane credits the fact that he has a wide vocabulary with helping his rapping, but he concedes that not every rapper needs to have one. By way of example he mentions Biggie Smalls, a “great rapper” who “didn’t use a large vocabulary.”
Biggie’s wordplay, BDK explained, was “really simple. He just put his words together a slick way and it worked real good for him. But in my opinion, I think it is good to have a large vocabulary, but that’s just for me, I can’t really say that for everybody.”
As for his own songwriting, Kane mentioned the best line he ever came up with in another interview with Outline that was published in 2017. It featured in a song called ‘Mortal Combat,’ which was on his second album It’s a Big Daddy Thing, released in 1989. The line, as he recounted during the interview, was “you little son of an o-bit-uary column.” Simple, yet clever.
“It sounds like I’m gonna curse,” BDK said proudly, “and then I switch it around.”