The story behind Schoolly D’s ‘PSK What Does It Mean?’
In 1985, the pioneering old school rapper Schoolly D released his song ‘PSK What Does It Mean?’, and hip hop was forever changed.
This track is one of the most important rap songs in history, as it set the tone for so much music that was to come. It essentially marked the creation of an entirely new subgenre that, in the coming years, would become utterly dominant. It is generally considered to have been the first ever gangsta rap song.
Sex, guns and drugs form the crux of the song’s lyrical content, which would not be the last time such subjects found their way into rap music. This was the beginning of something new in the culture, and ‘PSK’ was even one of the first rap songs to drop the N-word; it wasn’t really a thing before this point.
‘PSK’ was Philadelphia-native Schoolly’s third single, but it was his first to gain popularity. It propelled him to fame in the rap game, with its gangsta themes and distinct, spacey sound capturing listeners’ imaginations. There had never been anything quite like it.
Speaking 30 years after its release, in 2015, Schoolly looked back on the song’s creation during a conversation with Billboard. He noted how important the studio itself was in terms of achieving the track’s distinct, reverb-heavy sound. These were “classical studios”, he said, so they consequently had “fucking huge rooms”.
The track was laid down live, which, in combination with the large studio space, imbued the song with its distinct sense of space. He and his collaborator, DJ Code Money, had landed on some strange alchemy that pulled the work together nicely.
While the specific quality of the reverb in the song was, in part, a consequence of the studio space, it still was a creative decision to lean into it. That decision, though, was helped along by a little something extra.
“That’s just us smoking tons of fucking weed, saying, ‘more reverb’,” Schoolly explained, “Like you know the fucking ‘more cowbell [SNL skit]?’ I swear to God it was like that. ‘More reverb. More reverb’”.
Schoolly ordinarily hated reverb, and, after the track had been released, he regretted adding so much. He even wanted to change it, but by that point, the song had already spread and become hugely popular. He was stuck with it, and it came to define his life and career forever; it arguably defined hip hop itself.