Music

In the fifth episode of The Ringer’s No Skips podcast — the one about DMX’s debut album It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot — the show’s hosts make an unsettling, insightful, and surprisingly comforting observation. Shea Serrano, author of The Rap Year Book and superfan of the film Blood In, Blood Out (his Twitter profile picture is Damian Chapa’s Miklo, which still causes no shortage of confusion among that app’s users), points out that DMX’s baseline for concern is the threat of death. In other words, nothing phases the Dark Man; any insinuation of potential loss or harm pales in comparison to the thought of his ultimate demise.

Co-host Brandon “Jinx” Jenkins, a veteran journalist who most recently profiled J. Cole for Slam magazine’s June/July 2021 cover (the first time an entertainer has accomplished this feat, although technically Cole also counts as a pro hooper), is blown away by Shea’s observation, and the two embark on a long aside in which they contemplate several hypothetical iterations of this newly discovered maxim. It’s thoroughly entertaining, it’s instructive, it’s funny as all hell; it’s everything a podcast should be. I am not a podcast guy by any means, but I have been locked in. Every Thursday when a new episode drops, I am locked in, eager to hear what sharp witticisms or goofy tangents these two intriguing hosts are willing to share.

The show is, ostensibly, about hip-hop — specifically, the albums that helped make hip-hop what it is today, the seismic, landscape-altering, culture-defining meteorites that seemed to fall from someplace beyond our atmosphere to throw up massive mushroom clouds of cosmic dust and rearrange everything we think we know about The Way Things Are. The two hosts, who couldn’t be more different, yet have this one thing in common — a deep, lasting love of hip-hop and an overlapping existence with its most explosive era — explore the impacts of albums like Lil Kim’s Hard Core, Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, MAAD City, and most recently, Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt, but they also joke about basketball, movies, and being kids in the ’90s, all while roundly abusing their effects-laden producer Kerm (Jonathan Kermah) and taking cues from Deena Morrison, who presides over silly debates and drops gems of wisdom throughout each episode while keeping them in line.

When I was given the opportunity to interview Shea and Jinx about the show over Zoom, I leaped at it; after all, the thing they have in common with each other, I have in common with them. The result was, as expected, every bit as hilarious and insightful as their show, with all the deviations, non-sequiturs, in-jokes, and surprising, sharp insights that make their show such a joy to listen to. Check it out below.

So guys, thanks for sharing this time with me, and taking the time out of your busy schedules. I know you guys are both doing a lot. Let’s get right into it. So, No Skips. From soup to nuts, can someone please explain to me, how the show came to be?

Shea: Ew! What is that? What is that saying? “From soup to nuts?”

It’s a real saying, Shea!

Shea: That’s not a real saying, people don’t say that. Who says that?

It’s an actual saying from when they used to have soup at the beginning of dinner, and they would have a port or a sherry with warm nuts at the end. Like, dessert.

Shea: Is that a real thing? Brandon, have you ever heard of that?

Yes, I just looked it up. I specifically wanted to say it just to see what you would say.

Shea: Well, you got a reaction. Because that’s gross. That’s gross.

I don’t know how it went for Brandon. I know on my end, the idea of doing a music version of The Rewatchables had been floating around in the Ringer universe, in Slack for a while. A couple of years. TD hit me up one day and he said, hey, we’re going to do this show, No Skips. It’s like rap Rewatchables. Do you want to do it? And I was like, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to do that. Who else is going to be on it? And they said, “Oh, we’re going to try and get Brandon Jenkins.” And then I was like, Yeah, I want to do it now. Sign me up.”

Jinx: That’s pretty much how it went for me. As soon as they said it, I was like, alright. Because I think everyone that’s a fan of The Rewatchables has sort of imagined, What would this be like for music? I was like, all right, yeah. I’ve been DM-ing Shea for like four years.

So walk me through the construction of an episode, from the conception. Like, deciding the album. How do you guys decide on the album? And then what goes into the process of making the episode?

Jinx: Before even the paperwork was done, Shea and I both went to our respective corners. We both showed up on DM like, “Yo, I made a list.” He’s like, “Yo, I made a list too.” And we both had a lot of overlap. So we’ve kind of picked a big pool of albums that we want to rock with. And then Shea, Deena, and I, and then the rest of the production team, we all just started to list out what we thought would be a dope impact. We’re basically sequencing episodes how you’d sequence an album.

Shea: We lean on Deena for a lot of that stuff. For me, I always feel comfortable being very specific in a very small window. But I’m not good at getting a big picture and being like, “Well, here’s how you make a whole thing good.” So I lean on Deanna a lot for that: To be like, “How do I make that?”

If it was just me, we would’ve done like a two-year stretch of windows of albums that came out that I only cared about. And that would be the whole thing. And Deena was like, “No, no, no, let’s build it this way.”

In a prime incident of great minds think alike, I was actually about to ask, what is the story that you’re trying to tell with each episode and the sequence?

Jinx: Shea says this thing a lot, of these moments that used to happen on the internet more frequently and less frequently now, where everyone cared about the same thing. So when we’re picking albums, it’s thinking like that. That was a big moment, when Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ came out, everyone cared about this album. And we think about trying to structure episodes like that. Like, what’s going to be the things in these episodes that everyone’s going to care about or talk about? And it might not be every category, but we’re thinking about looking at the albums like that.

So when you get Lil Wayne’s The Carter III, that’s a totally different tone than Get Rich Or Die Tryin’. Completely different. Or you get an album that’s a little slower, like Good Kid, MAAD City has a whole different ethos, tone, content. And sometimes these artists are talking about the same thing, right? Growing up or coming of age, but from these different corners of the world, different times. So for a lot of it, what we’re doing is knowing that no albums the same. So we’re not trying to approach each one in the same. Like, The Carter III is going to be a way more insane episode than Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, MAAD City, because Wayne’s music is so much more insane.

Shea: Yeah, that sounds right. The primary goal is to just celebrate stuff that we like. And then the secret goal, the background goal is, probably, if we get to do all the albums that we want to do, we will have pretty much covered the history of rap. I think that’s, for me, the coolest part of the show is teeing it up in the beginning. Because for the middle hour and 20 minutes, it’s just me and Brandon making some jokes and having fun and doing whatever.

But in the very beginning and at the very end, it starts and Brandon does this thing, and I think that he’s the best person on the internet at doing this thing, where, in a two-minute stretch, he’s able to build out what was happening in rap at the time when this album came out and what was happening with this person when this album came out. So he does that for two minutes. And then at the end, we’re like, “Okay, this album came out 12 years ago, what has changed since then? What’s the legacy look like?”

If you were to take all of those pieces that he’s done, it’s like he’s building a map. And you’re like, “Oh, here’s the Lil Wayne section. Oh, it kind of overlaps with this Kanye section.” But just Venn diagram a little slice of it. He’s doing that with all these things. And by the end of it, he will have covered the entire history of everything. I think that’s a big-picture goal that I would like to see happen with it. But that’s what I look forward to the most because I don’t see that part when he does it. He just shows up and I’m like, “Alright, let’s go.”

One of the things I really love about this show is that you guys have a very classic, comedic duo chemistry, like an Abbott and Costello, or like Magic and Kareem, or Penn and Teller — on Nick, N-N-N, N-N-N-Nick… Just kidding. So what do you guys do when you can’t agree on an album to do, or when you can’t agree on what the perspective, or how to make this thing come together? Because you are coming from two different backgrounds, two different locations, age groups, all of that.

Shea: I don’t know that we’ve had that happen yet because the point of the show is not to agree on everything, the point of the show is to just talk about the thing that you like. I think that’s sort of what makes it the most fun is we both show up ready to celebrate a thing. The Kanye West Graduation episode will be out [after this interview]. And we show up and we start talking about it, and Brandon is like, “Oh, guess what? I really like ‘Drunk And Hot Girls.’ It’s an underrated song.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s a terrible opinion to have.” And so we’re arguing about this thing that we like, but we’re arguing because we like it in different ways. And ultimately it feels good. But it’s okay to not agree, it’s okay to just be like, “F*ck you, that’s wrong.”

So one of the things that you guys said during the Lil’ Kim episode, which really stuck with me. Jinx was really fascinated by the line that she says, “The rap Pam Grier’s here.” And that was the first moment that he knew what she was talking about. And then Shea was like, but it was a lot more fun when you had no idea and just made up wild shit. But was just how we grew up. And then kind of contrast that with, we have a world where Genius is a thing now, and kids can just look it up and they just kind of take it for granted.

Jinx: Man, that part was fun. Yeah, it’s sort of gone now. Me and Shea were actually talking about this. Yeah, just having that open field where you don’t know shit and that’s fun. Like how you used to argue sports stats and then be dead wrong. And now, there’s got to be a kid now who just pulls his phone out and you’re like, “Alright, I guess we’re all friends now.”

But I remember adding mad significance to lines. I remember interviewing Jadakiss one time. And he has this line on his second album. I think it’s on “Still Feel Me,” but I could have it wrong. But he says, “Hugged the kite and swallowed the stamp.” I know that a kite is a letter for someone in jail. But why would he eat the stamp? And then Jada’s like, “No, he’s not really eating a stamp. It’s just more like, he’s holding a letter close to his heart.”

It’s metaphorical.

Jinx: Yeah. And I was like, “Oh.” And then he’s just sort of like, “Why the f*ck are you interviewing me?” Like, you don’t get that. But it’s hearing rap, especially some of the albums, I mean, Shea talked about, we were a lot younger. So sometimes you hear this stuff, you interpret it based on what you know about the world, and then you don’t really revisit it because you move on to new music. And hearing a lot of these albums, I’m going back and being like, Oh, there’s a joy in kind of f*cking it up. There’s a joy in not having art explained.

Shea: I remember that being a thing just before the internet came out where if you didn’t know a thing, and none of your friends knew the thing, then whoever said an answer with the most confidence you were like, “Well, I guess that’s true, that must be the written…” A rap version of that is: We were just talking about Lil Kim and there’s a part in the episode where, where we were talking about some predictions that she made in the song, she has a line about “Money ruined this money ruined that, whatever money came between us…” In the mid-’90s, there was this whole big thing that happened with the Seattle Supersonics where this guy got a contract that the star didn’t get. And the team fell apart and you’re like, “Oh sh*t, I think she’s talking about the Seattle Supersonics right now.”

…And she wasn’t. Or there was a line that Raekwon had, where I found out later around the line is, “remember, I go deep, like a Navy Seal.” But he says it in that Raekwon voice where it sounds like, “Remember I got teeth like a baby seal.” And you’re like, “What? I don’t understand, I don’t know what this means. Why is he talking about a baby seal? Why he’s talking about my teeth?” And you’re trying to figure it out because, by this point, the Wu-Tang Clan was out there and everything they did had nine different meanings and you’re trying to figure it. And you’re just digging through whatever you can dig to try to figure out, Why is he talking about baby seal teeth? It was just like a fun time to listen to rap. It’s just great to not know.

So one of my favorite things about the show is the segment Flagrant Foul, which you guys renamed about three episodes in out of nowhere because you guys love to just throw a curveball.

Shea: Brandon came up with that. That was Brandon. That was all Brandon’s idea.

Do you guys have a favorite Flagrant Foul so far? Because our favorite rappers are very flagrant.

Jinx: I’m trying to think of one that really stands out. I think Lil Kim’s honestly. She has crazy stuff. She was like drying herself with a gun.

Shea: No, that was Lil Wayne. “The gun is my towel.” A big Lil Kim foul was when she said she was getting people from the Harlem Boys Choir performing oral sex on her or something like that. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

The Flagrant Foul thing is maybe my favorite category on there. And it was one of those things where we Brandon and I, over the course of a month or two, were work-shopping ideas and said, “Oh, we got to do this, and we got to do that.” A lot of the time, we would argue back and forth about a thing or talk back and forth about a thing. But when he said, “Oh, we should do this,” There was no argument at all. It was like, “Oh, that’s exactly what we should do. Exactly how you pitched.” It was just such a good, smart, fun idea. It just made me very happy. That was, that was all Brandon right there.

I do have to say you guys bully Kerm relentlessly. I need to know the origins of this. Why is Kerm constantly the target of the bullying? What did he do to deserve this?

Jinx: Look, I just met Kerm. But the thing with Kerm is he played ball. The first time we were like, “Yo, Kerm, maybe you should sing ‘One Skip.’” [This is sung to the tune of Ray J’s “One Wish” and it’s a screamer] And he was down. And then after that, it was like, “Alright, Kerm, maybe you should sing those skips like Ray J, maybe you should sing ‘One Skip’ like Lil Wayne singing like Ray J.” And so it just gets crazier and crazier, but Kerm is starting to turn on us. He’s starting to fight back in some ways, but Kerm’s great. The stuff he does in the show really takes it to the next level. Being able to bring in musical notes, he really gets the humor of the show. There are times where we invent a category essentially for the episode. And Shea’s like, “Kerm, give us these noises, give us these noises,” and Kerm goes, and they’re better than what we’re saying. I’m like, “Kerm, gunshots.” And he comes with a real noise.

Shea: But when you get on there, I know that Brandon is going to have his sh*t done. Deena is going to have hers done. Kerm is going to have his done. I’m going to have mine done. And it just works. But that’s like a good example. With the silliness of the gunshot noises, there’s real actual work that Kerm has to do for that. He works very hard on all that stuff. We cut out when y’all were talking about the bullying thing. I don’t know if y’all settled on an answer for that.

Jinx: But the funny thing is that Kerm is building his own Kerm-hive. And then they start to turn against us. So we need to play our cards right. Because I feel like Kerm is amassing an army that’s supportive of him.

It’s what happens! It’s the Fat Amy effect.

Shea: Then I’m like, what the hell? I’m busting my butt over here. Kerm comes in for 30 seconds. And that’s all anybody wants to talk about. Kerm can go to hell. That’s the title of this article when you can post it on Uproxx. “Kerm Can Go To Hell.”