The story behind Method Man and Redman’s ‘How High’
‘How High,’ released in the summer of 1995, marked the beginning of Method Man & Redman as a duo. This was their first single, one that bore the same name as their future cult stoner comedy movie, and it was a hit for them.
But it turns out that the song, which reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was later certified gold, came into being in a fairly laid-back way. This wasn’t the result of some careful planning, but, according to Meth himself, speaking to Complex about the song in 2011, it arrived through playful experimentation. They came up with the hook first, and everything else fell into place.
“We did the hook before we did the record,” Meth recalled. “We were on the road together, thinking of a hook and it just came to me one night. ‘How High? High enough to kiss the sky / How sick? So high that you can suck my dick.’”
Red thought of the rest of the hook. “Doc came up with, ‘Look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane / Recognize Johnny Blaze, ain’t a damn thing changed,’” Meth explained. “Then we came up with our rhymes and shit. That was us just brainstorming and being on the road with each other for three weeks.”
Meth pointed out that his opening line on the first verse, “Excuse me as I kiss the sky,” was specifically designed to evoke Jimi Hendrix, who sang it on ‘Purple Haze.’ “When people got that in their heads,” Meth said, “people who know music and know lyrics, when they heard that, they were like, ‘This n*gga’s either a genius or just a klutz genius.’”
It was a bold move to draw a specific link between himself and Hendrix, but he seemed to stand by it. “That’s how you can tell with Hendrix and all these guys, there’s a method to their madness,” he said. “The same shit was going on with me. There’s a method to the madness, man.”
Meth expanded on why that opening line strikes him as so good. “The beauty of the first line, ‘Excuse me while I kiss the sky,’ is that it says so much,” he argued. “When you take a hit off the weed, and you go to blow the smoke out in a cloud, it looks like your lips are blowing a kiss. That’s kissing the sky. It’s a beautiful thing right there.”
Meth also credited “watching cartoons with Bugs Bunny” and “these Beethoven overtures and shit” with inspiring other elements of the song, which is quite the assortment of influences. But he also brought up one other specific spark for the song, and it wasn’t at all positive. His line, “Dig it, F a rap critic / He talk about it while I live it,” was driven by his frustrations with music critics.
“You get a bunch of people in a room to say your shit is garbage, you’re going to have ten more motherfuckers saying it’s garbage after that,” he said. “After that even if it ain’t garbage, you’re going to have another ten more motherfuckers. The masses can get led by the few. [The rap critics] already tore me a new one five years ago. They showed me who’s got the power. I know who’s got the power.”
Meth had the last laugh over the critics, given the success of ‘How High’ and the Method Man & Redman duo that it helped to launch.