.$hort Cuts

A new Too $hort doc illuminates one of Bay Area rap's biggest icons.

A few days ago, a car rolled down Ashby Avenue in South Berkeley, a loud, bass-driven beat announcing its arrival a full block away. The make of the vehicle wasn’t important — it could have as easily been a Camry as a Cadillac. But an unmistakable song saluted passersby from the trunk, immediately recognizable to any West Coast rap fan. The distinctive “dun-da-dun-dun” bassline could only have belonged to Too $hort’s “Freaky Tales.”

Yes, “Freaky Tales” still serves as something to ride to, fifteen years after its initial release. Though countless turf anthems — from NWA’s “Gangsta, Gangsta” to 50 Cent’s current hit “P.I.M.P.” — have come and gone, $hort’s lost zero street credibility over time.

Too $hort’s career is unique and unparalleled within rap music. Currently on his fourteenth album, he’s had more releases hit either the gold or platinum mark than any rapper in history. A Bay Area legend even before his 1988 song “Life Is …” introduced him to millions of hungry hip-hop fans nationwide on Yo! MTV Raps, he’s seemingly always been a player, although he’s never quite played the music industry game. He started out as an independent entrepreneur, and has maintained his DIY attitude even after signing to a major label, Jive, thirteen years ago.

$hort’s artistic influence has been profound. For starters, take the phrase feminists love to hate: “Biiiiiiiiiitch!” The saying has since become ubiquitous among Snoop Dogg and countless other rappers, but it originated with $hort. Likewise, he also pioneered the West Coast practice of selling homemade rap tapes on the street, now adopted by everyone from E-40 and the Click to Mystik Journeymen. (True, East Coast hip-hop pioneers like the Cold Crush Brothers and the Furious Five self-marketed their music throughout the Tri-State region before $hort, yet few of those early cassettes ever crossed the Rockies.)

$hort’s longevity is matched only by his tenacity and resilience. Since beginning his career crafting personalized raps for East Oakland drug dealers in the early ’80s, the rapper has displayed the kind of business acumen commonly associated with old-school pimps like Fillmore Slim, resulting in an evergreen career in a field where artists are routinely tossed aside for younger act-alikes. Back in 1996, Short “retired” following his gold-selling Gettin’ It (Album Number Ten), although one suspects his inactivity lasted about as long as it took Jive to renegotiate his contract on more artist-favorable terms.

To this day, Too $hort records are rarely played on radio, with some notable exceptions, including 2001’s crunked-up smash “Bia Bia” with Lil’ Jon & the Eastside Boyz. Consequently, the rapper is more likely to work the small club circuit in the Dirty South and Midwest (where his core fans are) than sneak on corporate-sponsored arena tours. You probably won’t find him doing too many unpaid promos for megawatt radio stations, either. He’s never much cared for interviews, preferring to let his music speak for itself.

Which is why Life Is: The Life and Times of Todd Shaw ($hort’s alter ego) is such a compelling documentary. Produced by D’Wayne Wiggins’ Grassroots Entertainment, Life Is offers insight into Too $hort’s character that VH-1 — and really, the rapper’s entire hardcore fanbase — wishes it had. Todd Shaw’s life story might be too “ghetto” for Behind the Music or A&E’s Biography, but the documentary is fascinating nonetheless, placing among the most anticipated and well-received entries at this year’s Black Film Festival in San Francisco, where it screened before an enthusiastic audience that literally grew up on $hort.

Those fans will have to let Life Is tell $hort’s story; fortunately, the flick tells it well.

Life Is begins with a photomontage series of testimonials describing the impact the rapper had on West Coast rap and rap in general. Some seminal figures in the Bay Area’s urban music scene — E-40, the Digital Underground’s Money B, Wiggins (a member of Tony Toni Tone), and Sway (currently an air personality for MTV) — put their two cents in on what $hort has meant to hip-hop, along with various industry suits and media folks like Davey D and Danyel Smith. E-40 bestows perhaps the ultimate compliment on his artistic influence and sometime collaborator: $hort, he says sincerely, was on some “straight game-orienfestated straight soil block turf-type shit, feel me?” (We feel you, 40, even if we don’t quite understand what you just said.)

Shaw himself explains that he was initially inspired to rap by East Coast artists such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. “But instead of being like them, I said, ‘I’ll just tell Oakland stories,'” he recalls. His Californian street slang resonated with West Coast rap fans — up until then, no one had represented them. “There was nothing like hearing somebody rapping the way we all spoke,” Smith says.

Davey D sheds light on Oakland’s “rich cultural legacy” before Too $hort’s arrival. He cites Sly and the Family Stone and the Black Panther Party as important historical predecessors to a new generation of urban youth coming of age in the ’80s and ’90s. Other factors, like the freewheeling San Francisco rock scene and Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, contributed to an independent-minded Bay Area, which set its own trends rather than following national ones. “Selling tapes out of the trunk of a car or on the back of the bus, that’s what hip-hop is about, creating something out of nothing,” Davey D adds.

Ironically, the rapper’s ascension as the Reagan years dawned coincided with the rise of the crack epidemic, which pumped buckets of money into the streets of Oakland but also resulted in brutal violence. “That’s when it really went down,” E-40 says of a time he calls the “hubba head era.” During that period — which also saw acts like Digital Underground, En Vogue, the Tonys, and MC Hammer become prominent — a vibrant local music scene had developed, but Smith notes that “at the same time, you always heard about somebody getting shot or getting killed.”

Like a ghetto griot, Too $hort’s raps reported on what was going down in the ‘hood. “Everything that happened in Oakland socially and economically, you would hear in Too $hort lyrics,” Sway explains. A prime example of $hort’s social commentary is his reworking of Donny Hathaway’s “The Ghetto,” which plays over Life Is‘ opening credits:

The streets are bumpy

Lights burned out

Dope fiends die with the pipe in their mouth

Old school homies not doing it right

Every day it’s the same and it’s the same every night

After this eye-opening intro, the storyline backtracks a little, fleshing out Shaw’s childhood before he morphed into Too $hort. Dorothy Shaw, his mama, is interviewed in a revealing segment. While living in Atlanta, she says, eleven-year-old Todd became fascinated by music, learning how to play the drums and developing verbal skills that allowed him to manipulate others into doing his bidding. “I don’t think anybody taught him that,” she says, as stills of Todd striking a cool pose on a banana-seat bicycle flash on the screen. “I think his basic nature was to cause life to be what he wanted it to be.”

Young Todd lived with his father in Los Angeles for a year, rejoining his mother when she settled in the Bay Area. Later she planned to move to Arizona, but rather than accompany her, Todd remained steadfast in his desire to remain in Oakland. He dreamed of becoming a rapper, against her better judgment — she thought he could be an astronaut or a brain surgeon, but Todd was convinced his future lay on the mic. He enrolled in Oakland’s Fremont High, dropping out of the tenth grade for a year as he began penning his own rhymes. Adopting the now-famous moniker $ir Too $hort, he began recording homemade tapes in his bedroom, patterning his flows on early rap acts like Run-DMC. To this day, his uncomplicated syntax retains a straight-ahead, old-school flavor.

At Fremont High, $hort met a guy who called himself Freddy B, and the pair quickly became partners in rhyme after battling a bunch of other MCs one day after school. They began MCing at house parties around Oakland and recording their own original songs, including “Trues and Vogues,” which took inspiration from the car-oriented lifestyles growing around them in the Deep East “O.” Soon, drug dealers in Arroyo Park were purchasing their “Special Request” tapes, which Freddy B describes as “a fifteen-minute rap all about you. Our clientele was brothers on the streets, grinding, getting they money.”

News of the two rappers and their personalized cassettes spread to other drug turfs, such as 84th and Bancroft, and it was officially on. Like the proverbial dope, the tapes practically sold themselves. Freddy B and Too $hort’s tapes became the official Oakland soundtrack, “in the trunk” of almost every car rolling down the Foothill Boulevard strip and ubiquitous at the weekend sideshows around Eastmont Mall.

“That was the beginning of the whole independent, entrepreneurial music thing,” explains producer and musician Al Eaton. “I don’t think too many people were doing it before then.”

$hort’s local fame scored him an opening gig at a 1984 U.T.F.O. show, a group then on top of the rap world with their hit “Roxanne, Roxanne.” Performing for a crowd estimated at seven thousand people, $hort seized the opportunity, blowing up the spot like this was his hundredth — not his first — time in front of such a large crowd. “For some reason, everybody knew the words” to his rhymes, $hort recalls, still a little amazed.

The documentary goes on to detail $hort’s association with his first label, 75 Girls, which put out the rapper’s early albums and the classic single “Girl (That’s Your Life).” $hort credits 75 Girls owner Dean Hodges with showing him “how to be a real player.” Yet though $hort’s records and tapes were selling like hotcakes, he saw little, if any, of the money. He did, however, learn the music industry game from the ground up, from studio recording to manufacturing and distributing.

When Hodges was arrested and sent to jail — the film doesn’t say why — $hort went into business on his own, forming Dangerous Music, a production crew that included producers Ted Bohanon and Ant Banks. Their first effort was “Freaky Tales,” which made an immediate impact. As Sway recalls, “it wasn’t nowhere you could go in Oakland or even outside of Oakland, down to LA, where you couldn’t hear the beat.” And while rappers back then occasionally used cusswords, $hort’s descriptions of grotesquely graphic sexual fantasies made the 2 Live Crew sound like choirboys. The single’s success financed the 1987 album Born to Mack, whose cover featured $hort casually reclining on a pimp-worthy black Cadillac — the perfect image to accompany the album, which put Oakland on the national rap map. “Remember, there was no MTV or BET,” Davey D says. “You livin’ in the Bay Area, $hort is it. When you go down South or to New York, what’s happening in the Bay Area? Too $hort.”

$hort’s fame began to attract the attention of New York record companies, who may not have understood where the rapper was coming from, but knew how to sell records. Jive senior vice president Tom Cordoba notes that $hort’s funk-infused production and use of live instrumentation wasn’t something you heard in New York rap back then, while A&R executive Jeff Sledge testifies that “Short has the best understanding of his audience of any artist I’ve ever been around.”

Another insightful segment concerns the 1996 Summer Jam incident, when a backstage brawl resulted in $hort temporarily being banned from the airwaves by concert sponsor KMEL. The fight is discussed in detail by Davey D, Sway, C-Note Records’ Chris Hicks, and Numskull of the Luniz. $hort also discusses his musical response, “That’s Why,” which among other things dissed the fuck out of KMEL, known in its pre-Clear Channel incarnation as “The People’s Station.” But the people still loved $hort, and another tune, “Gettin’ It,” was eventually reinserted into the station’s rotation. (Nowadays, an artist would likely find himself blackballed from 1,200 stations nationwide for trying something like that.)

$hort’s mythic origins are clearly the best part of Life Is, especially because that history is largely unknown, except to those who played a role in it. But the film begins to lose momentum after the rapper relocates to Atlanta in the mid-’90s, relying on generic-looking footage of $hort’s recent birthday party in Las Vegas. By this point, he could be any contemporary rap artist in front of a crowd, hollering “biiiiiiiiiitch!” with a plastic cup in his hand.

Speaking of the b-word, Life Is also fails to answer the highly publicized feminist challenges to the rapper’s use of the term, although some hoochified women are depicted singing along to the explicit lyrics of $hort’s “Dope Fiend Beat.”

Another disappointment is that the difference between Todd Shaw the man and Too $hort the artist is never really explored in depth. The documentary also neglects to mention the artists that came up directly under $hort — at one time, the Dangerous Crew, which included Ant Banks, Spice One, and MC Pooh, dominated Jive’s roster. $hort’s recent acceptance by the Southern rap scene is also ignored.

On the plus side, there’s some lively MTV-style editing — lots of jump cuts, split-screen images, and shots of sexy women gyrating — that makes the doc’s one-hour running time go by quickly. The music in the film offers an overview of $hort’s career, from “Oakland, California” to “I Ain’t Trippin'” to “Gettin’ It” to “Fuck Faces.” Unfortunately, there’s no soundtrack available; if you want the dank-saturated beats, you’ll have to chase down the albums.

Hip-hop culture has undergone countless changes since Too $hort’s heyday, when he defined the sound of an entire region. It’s certainly not as easy to have that type of success as an independent entrepreneur these days, and even less likely that a new artist could ever become a full-fledged cultural phenomenon. But in the end, the last words belong to Todd Shaw: “They’re not gonna write Too $hort out of the history of rap.” Life Is helps write him in.

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