#147, "Oh No!" Mos Def, Nate Dogg, and Pharoahe Monch (2000)

150 Favorite Songs: #147, "Oh No!" Mos Def, Nate Dogg, and Pharoahe Monch (2000)

Youngsters may not remember this, but there was a time when hearing mainstream rap stars like Nate Dogg on the same track as "conscious" rappers like Mos Def (who now lives and performs as Yasiin Bey, and who I’ll refer to as such from this point on) on the same track was kind of mind-blowing. They were different worlds, and so the first time I heard "Oh No!" I thought it was amazing.

Years ago, during SXSW, Kanye held a special SXSW showcase at what was, then, the city’s defunct old downtown power plant (it’s now a Trader Joe’s). It wasn’t like ordinary SXSW showcases, which are often very cool or exclusive or whatever, but are also mostly normal shows that make sense if you’ve been to another show. This was bonkers. I don’t remember what sort of hoops you had to jump through to actually get a ticket—probably they were only open to people who held a particular credit card who pre-registered, were selected at random, and then performed some sort of challenge where you sky-dived off of the bridge and landed on a barge shaped like the G.O.O.D. Music logo or something. This was during the days of peak SXSW-as-FOMO-fuel, when the whole point was that something amazing was happening and only 400 people could actually get in. (I worked for MTV at the time, so I got into everything—it was a rude awakening when I no longer worked for MTV and learned that all the publicists who had been so solicitous with the free stuff were no longer interested in what I wanted to write about.) The actual show started around 4am, which makes me positively exhausted just to think about now—and the twist was that it wasn’t just a Kanye show, it was the entire list of artists on G.O.O.D. Music, his label at the time, which included Yasiin Bey. Nate Dogg had died a few days earlier, and Bey started his part of the set—everyone got two or three songs, except Ye, who did a full set and then brought out Jay-Z for the encore—with “Oh No,” which I found weirdly moving. This wasn’t a big hit song or anything, it was a track they recorded for a compilation CD for Rawkus Records eleven years earlier. I liked that it still mattered to him, because it mattered to me.

“Oh No” still sounds great today, with Nate Dogg doing his incredibly smooth Nate Dogg thing over the sort of beat that the artists he normally worked with rarely touched. I don’t know how they got him for this one—Nate did not work cheap, and the Rawkus Records budget wasn’t exactly Interscope. (I remember reading an interview with him ages ago where he talked about how rappers would come up to him and offer, like, a bag of weed for him to sing a hook and he had to explain that he was an artist, and if you wanted him to bring his instrument to your song, the price started at $50,000.) But maybe he wanted to do it because he recognized that it was something special, with Pharoahe Monch doing his mad preacher bit, and Bey having about as much fun as you'll ever hear him have on a record.

I love Yasiin Bey’s verse here—it’s so much looser than he usually is, full of amazing boasts, the sort he rarely bothered with. "The kids better buy my rookie card now / cuz after this year the price ain't coming down" may be my favorite rap boast ever. "Keep your boots laced if you wanna keep pace." Dang. When Bey wanted to be the best rapper in the world, he could record songs that made a strong case for it.

Pharaohe Monch's verse here is admittedly pretty dated. I mean, Skytel pagers! Weird homophobia*! (Skytel pagers were basically like tiny, hard-to-use texting devices in the late ‘90s, advertised as “two-way pagers” because you could both send and receive a message on them; you didn’t see a lot of them.) But he’s also energized in a way that he rarely was on his own records at the time—aside from "Simon Says," I rarely heard what I was looking for in his music, but he brought it on "Oh No!"

I think that what makes the song really work for me, though, is the fact that it's bigger than the sum of those parts. It's not just one of Bey's best verses, or a star turn from Pharaohe Monch, or even the fact that both of them coming together before this hook serves to re-contextualize Nate Dogg—it’s also just a great, unexpected song, dropped as part of a compilation CD from twenty years ago, that still sounds fresh almost everywhere.

*somehow still not that dated, alas.