Chicago Christmas circa 1993 – I was thirteen years old. While most kids my age were begging for a Sega Genesis or a Super Nintendo I was begging for my first CD player. Trust and believe with how expensive they were then there was a lot of year long begging happening. Thankfully Granny came through for me and got me one. My first ten CDs were very special. I was into old school music, so I had Roberta Flack’s greatest hits, Sade’s Love Deluxe, Natalie Cole’s Take A Look, Tina Turner’s What’s Love Got To Do With It soundtrack, and stuff like that. In the middle of that classic soul moment I also got my first hip-hop album Black Reign by Queen Latifah.
Yes, the same Queen Latifah that popped up on Juice, that Equalizer Queen Latifah.
When I was a young’un on Saturday, cooling in my house looking at some videos at the same time trying to put on my clothes, Latifah was the chick that had had it up to here while being one hell of a rapper. That wicked battle body blow she could rip in a cypher could and would light up any MC on the mic that stepped wrong trying her. If there ever was album that made me want to write and be a lyricist, this was one of the five influential albums that had a direct effect on me and my work later. She succeeded where Monie Love, Roxanne Shante, Yo-Yo, and MC Lyte failed, she crossed over and held her own in an amazing solo career time of gangster rap with a hit album that had nothing to do with any illegal street shenanigans. This was the last breath of hip-hop where it was conscious but critical, political but personal yet the overall message was dripped in love and a vibe of beauty that can only come from a life most lived.
When I took the plastic off the Black Reign CD Queen Latifah and her Flavor Unit had left Tommy Boy for Motown Records, a label not exactly known for producing hip-hop acts without gimmicks. She had also just started Living Single playing Khadijah, making an official transition to acting in lead parts and not just the cameos she’d done in Juice, House Party II, or Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. U.N.I.T.Y. debuted on Living Single, subsequently moving into Rap City rotation. After most of the country and the late night talk shows had their fill of Queen Latifah asking who exactly was calling her a bitch, Just Another Day, Five On The Black Hand Side, and I Can’t Understand followed in shadow momentum, played sparingly here and there.
Radio settled on two songs, U.N.I.T.Y. and Just Another Day. There was a bit of silent flack and indignant resentment; U.N.I.T.Y. which was the lead single had rubbed a few critics and fans alike the wrong way. The promotion came off pro-black feminist empowerment preaching, in the middle of the gangster rap era where female rappers were being hypersexualized and was mocked in circles. While I must agree that Motown should have known better than releasing U.N.I.T.Y as a lead rap single it didn’t deserve the hate that it got.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t like U.N.I.T.Y. when it came out and it still isn’t my first go to listening to the album. Still, it was wrong for an entire hip-hop community to dismiss Queen Latifah’s message in it, and then assume the entire album followed the same rhetoric, which it didn’t. The album cover alone shows a rough and raw Queen Latifah, which even that image of her from Just Another Day was presumed to be her imitating gangster rap. The tragedy of all the assumptions and misconceptions is that the album is probably Queen Latifah’s departure from hip-hop and her swan song to the genre.
Don’t get it twisted though. I frigging love this classic hip-hop album, even with its sore spots. I’ve been rocking it for thirty years and I’m sure I helped send some money her way playing more than my fair share of cuts on repeat many a day in my adulthood. My ultimate fan girl moment is to go on James Corben, leave him at the studio, and go on the rap along rapping the entire song of Superstar with Queen Latifah driving. And if she wants to, we can encore with I Can’t Understand. Trust and believe I’m coming with sixteen bars starting with verse two, which is the hottest verse on the entire album. That is how epic this album is – thirty years later that is still on my bucket list of things to do before I leave the earth.
Since the opening of Five On The Black Hand Side I’ve been in love with this album. There is not a bad cut on it, and even the interludes and the battle tracks still slap thirty years later. It’s the vibe, it’s the honesty, it’s the pain, it’s everything about it. In 1993 Queen Latifah was going through a lot in her life – her brother Lancelot “Winkie” Ownes had been killed in a motorcycle accident – and she was having a moment of truth that had never come out in her albums before. This Queen Latifah wasn’t talking about respecting her Queendom and all that black empowerment tip like Nature of A Sistah;. Black Reign was that realism that during my high school days I could feel but really got down and understood in my college nights. It is an opus of a woman coming into her own that had loved, lost, and walked away stronger in her conviction that defeated by her distractions.
Black Reign is what is happening then and is still happening now. My heart wishes many a day that this Queen Latifah comes back through and drops a lyricist album like this again with the dopest beats and nastiest cypher again, but considering she like many of her peers exclusively transitioned to acting the chances are slim to none. Regardless, Five on The Black Hand Side, I Can’t Understand, Coochie Bang, Rough, Just Another Day, Mood Is Right, and Superstar has gotten me through and then some. Give Queen Latifah her flowers for this album. It is just the right amount of jazz funk hip-hop fusion you wish you could get produced in 2024.
In other words, Black Reign is just another day around the way.
