The Jacka Ampichino Never See U Again Lyrics
5 Years Subsequently His Decease, The Jacka's Collaborators Remember His Complex Legacy
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One of the Bay Surface area'south most respected lyricists, The Jacka gave voice to the complexities and contradictions of post-obit a spiritual path while doing what it took to survive. (Still from The Jacka'due south forthcoming "Ask God" music video)
In the weeks earlier his untimely passing in 2015, the Jacka was in a fluid, focused artistic mode that his longtime collaborator RobLo tin can only describe every bit "God catamenia."
"Whatever Jack went through that day prior to his session with me, he lived that life and put information technology in his lyrics that twenty-four hour period," says the producer. "As fast as I came up with the music on the spot, he wanted to deliver the lyrics. Nosotros called that real-time writing. … I wanted him to express his feelings on the mic without having to use a pen."
Just days before the Jacka's life was taken in an East Oakland shooting on Feb. 2 of that twelvemonth, he, RobLo and another of the Jacka's longtime collaborators, Husalah, had made a music video in Oakland for a new track called "Sink Deep Into It" with Houston rap legend Paul Wall. Over angelic synths that shine similar sunbeams through the bass-heavy beat, the Jacka raps nigh his life's suffocating pressures in half-whispered bars. The rail is emblematic of the pensive style that made him ane of the Bay Area's most honey lyricists.
The Jacka is almost closely associated with Bay Area mobb music, a street rap motility that percolated in the late '80s and early '90s as gangster rap took off in Los Angeles. In the late '90s, the Jacka was a immature artist picking upwardly the mantle, and he joined the group Mob Figaz under the mentorship of Sacramento's C-Bo, a pioneering gangster rapper who had collaborated with Tupac on the album All Eyez on Me.
In the West Coast street rap scene, the Jacka stood out. He didn't take a flamboyant persona like the Bay Expanse's elder statesmen, E-40 and Too $hort; nor was his flow aggressive or gravelly similar peers Keak Da Sneak and J. Stalin. Instead, with a melancholic timbre and lush, heartrending instrumentals, his music made space for sadness amid realist dispatches from the East Bay's criminal underworld. With his lyrics, he embraced life'due south gray areas, and gave voice to the moral quandaries in which he constitute himself while trying to follow a spiritual path and also do what it took to survive.
An Unreleased 'Full Body of Piece of work'
"He wanted touch people [who were] like him," says the Jacka's longtime manager, PK. PK became function of the rapper'southward inner circle when the 2 met as teenagers. The Jacka used to cut PK's pilus, and they maintained a close relationship until the Jacka'southward terminal days.
"Those are people who are in the struggle," PK continues. "Those are people who are lost. Those are people who don't know who they are, where they come from, don't have coin, haven't figured it out, are in jail, are in the streets, are in a life of crime, don't know their mother, don't know their father, weren't raised in a proper home. ... All that. He had a lot of experiences of those things."
Since the Jacka'south death, PK has spent the past v years collecting unreleased tracks he recorded at studios in Oakland, Richmond, Seattle and Miami. He'southward spent countless hours listening to the music, hammering out details with the Jacka'south numerous collaborators and making executive decisions based on the many days he spent by the Jacka's side as an executive producer and A&R consultant. The culmination is a long-awaited forthcoming anthology called Murder Weapon.
"It's as close to what I could present to the globe as something he would've done," says PK, adding that he helped the Jacka choose beats and features for career-defining albums like 2005's The Jack Creative person and 2009's Tear Gas. "I had to add some features, or some of the beats were a piffling messed up and they had to be finished or polished up. … This was a full body of piece of work from him that's like, this is how he would've wanted it to be."
Murder Weapon includes features from rap heavyweights like Freddie Gibbs, Paul Wall and Currensy, along with the Jacka's longtime East Bay collaborators Husalah, Fed-10, Rydah J. Klyde, Dubb twenty and Street Noesis, among others. Infused with the Jacka's Muslim spiritual beliefs and political consciousness, at times the album feels eerily prophetic: on one track, he muses, "I won't exist here forever, better cherish me."
The songs on Murder Weapon shed light on the Jacka's mental state in the years before his death, when he became increasingly interested in esoteric knowledge that sometimes bordered on conspiratorial thinking. He'd spend hours each 24-hour interval on YouTube, PK recalls, watching documentaries about aliens and aboriginal civilizations.
"He's in a room, he has a bunch of people over, he's on YouTube, he'due south playing stuff, anybody'due south entertained by it," PK says, describing a typical scene. "But what's going on in his caput is he'southward downloading and learning and downloading and learning, practicing. ... It's content for raps and for life."
Forging a Brotherhood
The Jacka was known as a street rapper first and foremost, yet his voraciousness for new data guided his creative process in expansive directions. 1 of his last albums, 2014's What Happened to the Earth, features soundbites from news clips near Occupy Oakland and the law killing of Oscar Grant.
"A lot of the afterward music is jewels, and that's why people loved Jack," says Husalah. "It was knowledge, it was wisdom and agreement. Information technology was every different type of upliftment for the people, considering one time you're a street person yous can't abandon that. … In Islam information technology's called giving Dawah, or education."
Husalah met the Jacka when the two were young teens in Pittsburg, the Contra Costa County suburb 30 miles east of Oakland. Husalah grew upwards in Pittsburg's El Pueblo projects. The Jacka, whose parents were but 14 years old when he was born in Arizona, spent his early years moving between Los Angeles, Stockton, Oakland and Richmond. By the end of his middle schoolhouse years, his family settled downward in Pittsburg, a town that to this twenty-four hours claims him as one of its biggest cultural icons.
The Jacka and Husalah clicked instantly over their shared dearest of sports and music, and their friendship e'er had an chemical element of brotherly competition. They followed similar paths: both good Islam, and both got involved in illegal street activities from a young age. Starting in middle school, they began recording their first raps at RobLo's house, where they had access to professional equipment because RobLo'due south begetter worked in the music industry.
"We developed a friendship, a brotherhood," Husalah says. "Through each stage of life, we found ourselves around each other."
An Expansive Creative Vision
The Jacka and Husalah idolized C-Bo and Tupac, but their influences came from other unexpected places: they loved reggae and dancehall, and studied tapes past Sizzla and Yellowman. British trip-hop band Portishead was in heavy rotation, and, surprisingly, the Jacka was a big fan of pop-punk teen idol Avril Lavigne, Husalah remembers.
"Nosotros thought more on a wide perspective as far every bit creating and being dope," Husalah says. "Information technology led us to and then many unlike genres of music and understanding how dope people were in different cultures."
Along with Husalah and the Jacka, Mob Figaz also included FedX, Rydah J. Klyde and AP.9. After the release of C-Bo's Mob Figaz in 1999, the crew never officially carve up. But momentum slowed on their piece of work as a unit because someone in the group would ever be in some kind of legal trouble, Husalah recalls, including the Jacka, who spent time behind bars prior to the debut album's release.
Meanwhile, C-Bo was arrested for parole violations because of lyrics from his 1998 anthology Til My Catafalque Drops, prompting outcries from civil rights groups and free speech advocates. Post-obit the 2 Live Crew'southward obscenity trial and Newt Gingrich's campaign to pull advertising from hip-hop radio stations, the ordeal was just one of the many ways rap was politicized and censored in the '90s.
As solo artists, the members of Mob Figaz remained close collaborators, and the Jacka and Husalah's friendship endured when Husalah went to prison house for drug trafficking betwixt 2005 and 2009. "He took the music when I was in prison to a level I never realized," Husalah says, recalling that he was released around the time that the Jacka's biggest commercial hit, "Glamorous Lifestyle," was in heavy rotation on the radio.
When Husalah came home, the Jacka brought him back into the fold. "We never really relied on music as our income, nosotros didn't do music for money," he says. "Merely when I went to prison, he made information technology lucrative."
Passing Downwardly the Wisdom
The Jacka's mainstream buzz quieted downwards in the years later Tear Gas, but in the last years of his life, he continued to feed music to his loyal followings in the Bay Area and other regional markets with appreciations for underground rap. In improver to spending a lot of time recording in Seattle, he put out a joint album with Pennsylvania rapper Thruway, Highway Robbery, and recorded Devilz Rejectz 3 with Akron, Ohio's Ampichino. (Devilz Rejectz three came out posthumously, in 2018).
Known for his tranquility, tough and generous personality, the Jacka spent his later years mentoring many aspiring rappers. Oakland artist Street Noesis, who was just starting his music career in the late 2000s, remembers living at the Jacka's business firm in Oakland with at least 10 other guys. The house was like a preparation ground to see who was serious plenty to sign to the Jacka's label, The Creative person Records. "He was everybody's mentor, non just me," Street Knowledge says, adding that few rappers made the cutting. "It's just a matter of if you was gonna heed to him. He would tell you a bunch of shit you don't wanna hear, but you need to."
Yet in that location were times when the Jacka became frustrated with his career. In 2014, after the release of What Happened to the World, Pitchfork called the Jacka "i of the decade's strongest writers—both inside and outside of hip-hop." Simply PK remembers him feeling like he hit a ceiling inside the manufacture.
"He put out actually good music and he gave his all. And when I say his all, I don't just mean the energy with creating the records, but the sacrifices with his family, whether it was his kids, his mother, his sister, simply not being around," PK says. "Or himself—sacrificing himself and not doing certain things."
Then there were the Jacka's struggles with addiction. He had kicked a heroin habit he caused every bit a teenager, but towards the end of his life, he became a regular user of lean, or the opioid codeine. "I know those things had a pretty serious grip on him," PK says, adding that the Jacka didn't open up upwards to him about information technology much. "He had a very stiff personality. He wasn't the one to really ask for a lot of assistance."
Still, despite his personal battles, the Jacka remained an inspiration and a mentor to many. RobLo thinks of him as a spiritual leader. "He got me and my friends, I hateful all 20 of us, to go hop in the van and go to the mosque," he recalls. "A friend that gets you closer to God is a friend worth having."
To this day, the Jacka's murder remains unsolved. Only through the artists he inspired and the music that he made, his presence continues to be deeply felt in the Bay Surface area and beyond.
"Nosotros're keeping it lit for him," Husalah says, "living in his case."
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Source: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13874024/five-years-after-his-death-the-jackas-collaborators-remember-his-complex-legacy
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