What did Big Daddy Kane mean by “no half-steppin’”?
“Ain’t no half-steppin’,” Big Daddy Kane repeats on the chorus of his hit track of the same name. “I’m the Big Daddy Kane.” Indeed.
This was the track, released in 1988, which introduced Kane to the world and secured his place in the history of rap music. ‘Ain’t No Half-Steppin’’ is widely considered to be a defining example of golden age rap. But, besides sounding pretty good, what does the phrase actually mean? What does it mean to “half-step”?
Kane addressed this question in, of all places, Norwich, the medieval cathedral city northeast of London. It’s about as far from the streets of New York that the young Kane learned to rap on as can be imagined, but such is the life of one of hip-hop’s older legends several decades after their initial rise. Their tours as middle-aged performers can be decidedly understated and may take them to some unexpected places. That’s why Kane was in Norwich in the first place—he was scheduled to perform a gig there in 2017, which gave a local magazine called Outline the chance to chat with him.
Referencing the fact that there was a hip-hop night held in Norwich that was named after his great hit, the interviewer asked Kane for an explanation of what “no half-steppin’” actually meant. “Oh,” he replied, “it means that you have to be dedicated to what you’re doing and can’t do a half-assed job, you can’t just start something and not finish, or get involved in something just to be a part of it rather than to win at it. You’ve gotta go for it, and go for it all the way.”
Simple. And, to be fair to him, it is a maxim that Kane himself has lived by. His style as a rapper, as the interviewer pointed out, is fast and intricate, so there was no half-assing it when it came to developing his own style. But, still, by his own admission, Kane believes it came fairly naturally to him after a while. “Nah, I mean after you say something to yourself several times it gets embedded,” he said, “just like learning schoolwork.”
Despite needing to be plainly told what “no half-steppin’” meant when Kane used the term, the interviewer suggested that one of his great strengths as a rapper is that his words are generally simple to follow. Even though he is fast, his lyrics are simple enough to understand. “I thought that it was real important that people are able to really hear what you’re saying so they can relate to the lyrics,” Kane explained. “I was one of those artists who didn’t want the track to control me—I wanted to control the track.”
As for his favourite line that he ever wrote, Kane’s choice came not from ‘Ain’t No Half-Steppin,’ but from a track lifted from his second album, It’s a Big Daddy Thing, which came out in 1989. “It’s probably a line I wrote for the song ‘Mortal Kombat,’ Kane explained. “‘You little son of an o-bit-uary column.’ It sounds like I’m gonna curse and then I switch it around.” In many ways, this illustrates the degree to which rap, in its earliest days, was a much more innocent, playful sort of practice.