After 26 Years, E-40 Knows He’s Got The Rap Game Down Perfect

All Due Respect
After 26 years in the game, E-40 is still at the height of his powers. And he’s not planning on slowing down any time soon.
Interview Dan Rys

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of XXL Magazine, on stands now.

It’s been said time and again that hip-hop is a young man’s game. But tell that to E-40 and he’s more likely to laugh in your face. The Bay Area rhymer, now clocking in at 47 years of age, is an anomaly in hip-hop, an MC who has mixed underground grit with an uncompromising dedication to his craft all while putting a traditionally underappreciated region on his back for a generation. Over his career, 40 Water has maintained a vice-like grip over the Bay’s hip-hop scene with an eclectic style that defied convention and gained him the credibility to be both an ambassador for his city and a well-respected lyricist who has made appearances on albums as diverse as 2Pac’s All Eyez On Me, UGK’s UGK 4 Life and Gucci Mane’s The State Vs. Radric Davis. It’s a resume that few can match and many have envied.

In short, 40 is a rapper’s rapper. His influence can often fly under the radar: slang phrases like “Fo shizzle,” “It’s all good,” and “You feel me,” for instance, are staples that he helped introduce but that are often credited elsewhere. But students of the game know what time it really is. 40 has had records bouncing around the Top 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 in three different decades, including his most recent guest spot on Big Sean’s “IDFWU,” which came complete with a football-themed concept video that pitted Sean as the quarterback, DJ Mustard running the ball, Kanye West as the head coach and 40 announcing from the broadcast booth. In a way it’s a microcosm of his career; E-40 has never been the focus, the center of the mainstream’s attention, but his voice reverberates through much of what is heard on the radio now.

Now it’s been more than a quarter century since 40 made his debut in the rap game back in 1988 with his group MVP, a three-piece crew made up of his brother (D-Shot) and cousin B-Legit, and 40 doesn’t see an end in sight. Since March 2012, he’s somehow managed to put out six solo albums and two full-length collab LPs with fellow Bay native Too $hort, and he’s got another four albums—Sharp On All 4 Corners 1, 2, 3 and 4—on the way, with the first two scheduled for December and the following two in the works for March. With 31 albums in 26 years, XXL caught up with E-40 to find out what it is that makes The Godfather of the Bay so impervious to Father Time. —Dan Rys

XXL: You’ve got four albums coming out in four months. Is there a grand concept to this?
E-40: Nah, it’s no gimmick. It’s always a concept, because I always talk about the struggle. I feel like I’m a voice of hope. I’m always giving life lessons in my music. Some people don’t get it because they never lived it but I paint pictures with my raps. So that even if you ain’t lived it you can see the visuals, you know what I mean? In my music, just listening to it you can imagine how things are and was for me and a lot of other people. And then a lot of times, with my unorthodox rap style, my lyrics go over their heads like a shower nozzle, you know? Sometimes I’m too deep—I tell ’em I’m too gamed up for these bench warmers.

There’s always a message in my music, you just gotta be able to just sit there and be open-minded. The world revolves around nothing but just normal rappers, a regular flow. Everybody can rap regular. You know what I’m saying? So be innovative. Do something different. Throw some twists and turns in the game, mane, you know what I mean?

But I’ve been having music on the shelves for 26 years, so evidently I’m doing something right. It’s not luck. You can only have so much luck, man. Everybody got a little tiny bit of luck, some people got a whole bunch of luck, but I’ve perfected this, man. This is what I was born to do, music. And I’m here, and it’s very rare to find any artist in the rap game who’s been relevant and successful for this long. You can have three, four, five, six years of platinum and double platinum albums and have a good run, but what do you do after that? Are you still able to do that 20 years later? That’s very rare. So I pat myself on the back and congratulate me for what I’ve accomplished.

What do you feel like you’ve done differently than everybody else to get to this point?
Well first of all, I helped pioneer the independent rap grind. I really started from grassroots, without a handout or anything. There wasn’t one person who put money in my pocket, you know what I’m saying? I funded my own shit, you feel me? That’s one.

But two, it was real coming from a small little city in the Bay Area when all you knew was Oakland and San Francisco. Vallejo, Richmond, Fairfield, some of those other small cities in Northern California wasn’t really recognized like that; we had to carve our own identity and make people recognize us.

To make a long story short and a short story long, what I did different was I came in the game with an unorthodox rap style. I talked about subject matters that everyone wasn’t talking about. I came with a bunch of slang, I spit real shit that real muthafuckas can feel, you know what I mean? I was the first one talkin’ about triple beam scales and drought season and choppas and AR-15s and all that good shit, I could go on and on forever. First one screaming, “You feel me?” and “It’s all good,” all that shit. Words that people say right now. When you hear a muthafucka say, “That shit slap,” that came from me. E-40 coined that shit in his rap game, you feel me?

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