The story behind Three 6 Mafia’s ‘Who Run It’
Three 6 Mafia had become major hip-hop stars by the turn of the new millennium. With the release of their fourth album, When the Smoke Clears: Sixty 6, Sixty 1, they helped to popularise a crunk sound that would prove hugely influential in the years to come.
The album’s lead single, the posse cut ‘Who Run It,’ is infused with a strange touch of darkness which, according to group member DJ Paul, was very of its time. ‘Who Run it’ was created as the year 2000 approached—and Y2K fears were pervasive.
“It was back when everybody thought the world was gonna end in 2000 or whatever—the new millennium,” Paul reflected to The Fader in 2018. “We had a tub full of bottled waters because they were saying there wouldn’t be no water around. It was a weird time but it was cool though.”
The darkness within ‘Who Run It’ was perfectly suited to the strange paranoia of the era, but, weirdly, it came to complement DJ Paul’s personal life, too. After work on When the Smoke Clears had finished, the producer suffered a loss.
“My father passed away right after we made that album,” he reflected. “I had just bought my first big house. My daddy came by and seen and liked it. It was one of the first times he told me he liked anything that I bought. Then we went on the road and he passed away.”
The song, which ultimately proved so successful for the group, had initially sounded very different. Paul had originally created a track with “keys and scary music in it,” and, he claims, “everybody loved that version.” But he nonetheless felt moved to rework it.
Paul realised that his new version clearly had something going for it, so he showed it to his bandmates. “We were going to a show in Mississippi,” he remembered, “and I came on the tour bus and played the new version for everybody from a cassette tape. They went ape shit on the bus.”
This version of the song was ultimately what they decided to use. ‘Who Run It’ served as the lead single for When the Smoke Clears: Sixty 6, Sixty 1, which itself brought Three 6 Mafia a great deal of attention and success. The group members would soon succumb to personal turmoil, but the band itself was never more popular than around this period.
If anything, the Y2K darkness served the group very well on ‘Who Run It.’ It’s part of what made Three 6 Mafia so appealing. “The kind of music we made—we made horror music,” Paul stated. “That’ll never leave, that’ll never go nowhere. People always love music with feeling and we put the feeling in our music. It goes from the emo kids to the straight hip-hop kids.”