Easily the best, and easily the most interesting member of the group, Bizzy’s absence from Strength and Loyalty is stunning. Major label (and major beats) aside, the biggest change on Strength and Loyalty is this absence of Bizzy Bone, the only member to never lose that special connection the group had to the spiritual world. It was maybe the smartest and stupidest move he ever made. Bizzy, homeless and nomadic, was contacted by the rest of the group to get in on the deal.
BONE THUGS N HARMONY STRENGTH AND LOYALTY ALBUM ZIP FULL
Swizz Beats, treating them like Golden Age rap-loyalty, offered them a deal on his Full Surface Record imprint. Strength and Loyalty is the same but with even less group effort. This was what Bone had become: less a group than a collection of disparate friends who got together to make money.
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Flesh was quiet, peppering his speech with nervous “you know what I’m sayin’”’s and folding and unfolding his arms. Layzie and Wish just seemed happy to be in on the ride, hungry to get it done and get paid. On the other side, Krayzie was always the mellow one, the business man. In the studio he was a man possessed, eyes closed, body quivering like a seizure victim. On the companion making-of DVD, Bizzy is an absolute mess, either spitting Biblical vitriol while brandishing a knife or trying to fight Wish Bone for smoking his weed. Flesh-N-Bone and Bizzy really held the album afloat, with Krayzie and Wish on only a handful of tracks (reportedly because Krayzie and Bizzy could hardly be in the same room together). The opening half is bolstered by a collection of dark, apocalyptic tracks that belied the “comeback” single, “Resurrection (Paper Paper)”. Their last great album, BTNHResurrection, while made at maybe the height of the group’s feuding, led to some amazing songs. The Bone Thugs on Strength and Loyalty has heart, but is devoid of any mystique. They proceeded to spread themselves too thin with side projects and solo albums, to forget what originally made them so unique in the first place - it wasn’t just that they could rap fast, it was that they tapped into a very real spiritual sadness brought on by a very real impoverished upbringing. Somewhere between The Art of War and BTNHResurrection the group lost touch with that thing that made them special. What I’m trying to convey with all this is history is that the mystery of Bone is gone. One of their best songs, “Days of Our Livez”, opens with the wholly depressing line, “only time will tell who dies.” Now it’s 2007 and Bone are still alive, trying to make money on novelty nostalgia. The guilt of street life was always heavy on the members of Bone. Where they would go from there was left open. Their biggest success, “Tha Crossroads”, was a song about death, but with a hopeful refrain: that the band would someday meet all their loved ones at the crossroads. But for all their flirtation with the dark side, Bone were always spiritually minded. They were, and still are, one of the weirdest groups to attain commercial success (and a Grammy). A slight exaggeration, obviously, but Bone did have a powerful aura. He said that the group’s sound was “mesmerizing and hypnotizing”, that it put him in a strange trance that could only be connected with dark forces. He told a story about his first experience with the group through a video he saw on MTV. In one segment, Lewis held up the same booklet for East 1999 Eternal I held up in the mirror when I was 13-year-old and explained that the backwards liner notes had their roots in a satanic curse and that anyone who read them put a hex on themselves and were left open to the devil’s whims. Craige Lewis, attempts to point out the satanic intentions of popular rap stars.
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In The Truth Behind Hip-Hop, preacher on a mission, G. But it was the sheer ability of the group which made it seem like their skills could come from nowhere else but a higher (or lower) power. We found signs everywhere of their supposed satanic connections: the frequent ouija board allusions, the constant refrain of “Mo Murder”, like a chant, and the skull-n-bones imagery.
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It sounds silly now, but at the time, steeped in Bone Thugs lore, it seemed possible. The devil was going to kill them all simultaneously on January 1st, 1999. My friend heard a rumor that the members of Bone had sold their souls to the devil (a la Robert Johnson) so that they could rap as fast as they did. I remember gathering around the mirror with all my neighborhood friends, reading the cryptic backwards liner notes from East 1999 Eternal. None of them had that mysterious aura that Bone had, either. But none of them touched Bone, especially Bizzy Bone. Obviously, they were all from the Midwest: Twista, early Mystical, Tech N9ne, Crucial Conflict, Do or Die. Maybe its because I’m from the Midwest, but my friends and I would compete to discover the fastest rappers.