The one song Lloyd Banks wishes he wrote
Every listened to a song so good, whether it’s the beat, the production, the lyrics, or even just down to an indescribable vibe, that you wish you had come up with it yourself? Imagine how much more annoying that feeling would be if you were a musician, where making good hip-hop is your actual job.
To prove no one musician is peerless in their ability to appreciate the output of their colleagues in the industry (celebrities, they’re just like us) magazine XXL asked a collection of hip-hop artists what songs they wish they had written and produced. Some were classic rap classics; Kidd Kidd, for example, said his was In Da Club by 50 Cent.
“Real talk. That’s one song I always wish I wrote. [Laughs] You gotta think about it. That one song started the whole movement. It started everything. It started why we are in this mansion right here,” he said. But for 50 Cent’s old collaborator, East Coast rapper Lloyd Banks, the answer isn’t even within his own genre.
“That’s a crazy question because you get that [feeling] a lot, but overall that [song] ‘Am I Wrong.’ Nico & Vinz. It’s been a lot of those kind of records,” said Banks, referring to the 2013 single by Norwegian duo Envy, the group’s name before they changed it a year later.
The song charted across Scandinavia, peaking at number two in Norway that summer, number two in Denmark and Sweden a few months later, and number five in Finland by autumn.
Yet the song, a fusion of Afrobeats and reggae pop, didn’t reach the British and American charts until the next year. And then when it did, it was near inescapable; a true contender for 2014’s song of the summer, it peaked at number one in the UK and number four in the US.
“Like, even the record that [Eminem] had, it was Em, Wayne, and T.I., ‘Where You Belong.’ It’s been a few records like that. But this record [“Am I Wrong”] is out my box,” Banks elaborated.
Banks, of course, is no stranger to the charts himself. A member of G-Unit, the East Coast rap group formed with childhood friends 50 Cent and Tony Yayo in the late 1990s, the group released their debut album Beg for Mercy in 2003 which sold over 2million copies across the US.
Banks also enjoyed a successful solo career with the release of his first solo album The Hunger for More in 2004. He was awarded that year with the Mixtape Artist of the Year award at the Mixtape Awards, and was nominated a year later for a Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance.
Continuing his noughties streak of success, in 2006 ‘Touch It [Remix]’ was nominated for Hip-Hop Video of the Year and won Best Collaboration at the BET Awards, an award he shared with collaborators Busta Rhymes, Mary J. Blige, Missy Elliot, DMX, Papoose, and Rah Digga.
Dipping their own toes in the pool of hip-hop, Nico & Vinz went on to release an EP in 2015 called Cornerstone, in which the first single ‘That’s How You Know’ featured rapper Kid Ink alongside singer Bebe Rexha. The song peaked at number two in both Norway and Australia. And, hopefully, Banks’ house itself.