Beyond that, he takes obvious pleasure in language itself, in the actual physicality that words develop as they leap from cortex to vocal cord to tongue. What he calls his “devastating mouthpiece” fuses form and function, art and commerce. It acts as both the adhesive necessary to piece back together the damage his unorthodox writing style does to music written in 4/4 and as the force that bends his work into the tautological mobius strip that it is: a guide to the streets, written by a guy who got out thanks to his wit and his voice, which he uses in tandem to tell this same story over and again.
With
his glasses low on his nose, his not-quite-aerodynamic stature, and his tendency to over-enunciate, E-40 fashions himself as a tough guy who play-acts like a nerd. This is a gambit he brings up frequently, most memorably on 1999’s “Ballaholic”: “I’m wearing these glasses so that I can look like a square/ But if you ever see me in a fight with a bear, don’t help me, nikka, help the bear.” Inscrutability is the insult that’s been lobbed at him throughout his whole career, but his raps refashion it into a virtue, a means of evading enemies, law enforcement, and everything in between. In its own way, this is radical stuff, but E-40 sweetens it with irreverence: on one song, he imagines convincing a cop that his triple-beam scale is for “weighing nuts and fruits”; on another, he suggests dealers speak in Pig Latin and communicate only by “walkie tiznalkie.”
“I’m a survivor, man. I done had my ups and downs, but I’ve got get-back skills
for real for real.”
In E-40’s eyes, providing his listeners with this sort of advice is the whole point of making rap music, to show the youth, as he put it to me once, “that you don’t gotta make the dope game, or whatever your illegal activities are, into a permanent occupation.” On the way back from the Warriors game, we were talking about
his new album, The D-Boy Diary, and contemporary trends in rap music, and he mentioned something that bothers him: rappers who do nothing but show off and talk shyt. “If you ain’t in this game to teach somebody something, to try to uplift their spirit or give ‘em motivation about whatever the fukk they’re doing, you shouldn’t be rapping,” he said. “Get up out of our game.”
He was as animated as I’d seen him all night. I asked him what sort of rap bothered him in particular. “Bragging,” he said. “Which can be 10 percent motivation, but the 90 percent is, like, a lot of people ain’t living like that. Man, at least show ‘em how to
get out of it. Teach ‘em some business skills and some ways to flip the money. But, nah, they don’t want to do that.” He continued, getting still more worked up: “If you ain’t doing nothing for the children, you a bytch muthafukka. fukk you and whatever horse you rode in on! I don’t give a fukk about your Bentleys, your Phantoms, your luxurious cars. If you ain’t doing nothing for the kids, you a bytch boy.”
I offered that he’s providing “tips and tricks” for his listeners. “Nah, not tips and tricks,” said E-40, starting to crack up at the suggestion. “That makes it sound like you trickin off your money! I don’t condone that shyt! Sheeit, not The Watermelon.” This was new to me, too: a derivative of 40 Water, itself a variation on E-40. In other words, a nickname for his nickname for his nickname. I asked him how many he has at this point.
“Ain’t no tellin,” he said. “That’s what Jack told Helen.”
E-40 is an exceedingly friendly guy who rarely ends a sentence without a light chuckle, but he still carries his distrust of the industry and its representatives with him. I made clear to him that I was born and raised in San Francisco, and yet, once or twice, he slid back into speaking to me like I was a walking, talking East Coast magazine, the enemy of all California rappers, saying that my “favorites” were guys like Nas and Rakim. (I opted against pointing out the irony here — that he, E-40, is in fact my favorite rapper — mostly because it would be humiliating, but also, I suppose, for journalistic reasons.) Still his frustration with the music business has been tempered, perhaps by age, and perhaps by success.
In 2000, E-40 made a song called “To Whom This May Concern,” that opens up with a skit. A rapper named MC Fly By Night calls up his label looking to speak with the president of the company about why he’s been dropped.
“Fly, it’s over, the buzz is gone,” the president explains. “You’ve had your 15 minutes of fame.”
“What the fukk you talking about, 15 minutes of fame?” says Fly, incredulous. “This is my life you’re talking about!”
“Fly, we’ve reevaluated your market position,” the executive says. “You‘ve got a bad attitude, you don’t sign autographs, people are complaining about you.” What follows is a gleeful hate-letter of a song to the whole music industry: labels, the press, radio programming directors. But E-40 saves the taunting hook for rappers who fail to see how the whole thing works, who don’t understand that they’ll be on their ass in short order if they aren’t careful: “To whom this may concern/ All you rappers with all that fetti to burn/ The industry is finicky so let me make this clear/ THEY’LL HAVE A NEW nikka NEXT YEAR!”
Just six years later, E-40 ran the risk of becoming the very thing he had warned against. In 2004, nearly 40 years old, he signed a deal with Warner Bros. based on the strength of hyphy,
a high-BPM ecstasy-fueled sound that looked poised to bring the Bay Area into the mainstream, and released
My Ghetto Report Card. The lead single, “Tell Me When To Go” was a call-and-repeat style guide to the hyphy scene — sideshows, ghost-riding, the thizz face — and it was a hit,
introducing E-40 to a new generation of listeners.
Hyphy was party music first and foremost, and, in some ways, it was a suit that never hung quite right on E-40’s frame. This isn’t a man who likes to put on big sunglasses, pop three double-stacks and swing donuts in a ‘93 LeSabre with his legs somehow dangling out the window. But that’s what hyphy was all about, and that’s exactly what it sounded like. It had a good-natured humor at its heart, which set it apart from the hyper-serious gangsta rap that dominated in that decade, but that same quality provided the basis for its rapid mutation into self-parody.
Today, E-40 lays some blame at the feet of copycats and opportunists. “There were some rappers who made it repetitive and were doing repetitive music and just slopping it up and being goofy,” he says. “Everyone was just saying the same thing over and over, they weren’t putting no creativity in it.” I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said only that Mac Dre — the progenitor of the sound — didn’t live to see all the love he got; he was shot dead in Kansas City in 2004.
After releasing his second album with Warner, E-40 and the label parted ways amicably. The deal had allowed him to experiment entrepreneurially, selling things other than tapes — with varying degrees of success. He opened a Fatburger not far from his home in Danville, but that closed in 2008. He decided to open a Wing Stop in Benicia after that, but it stalled out. E-40 says he didn’t even take out a loan for that project. “I should have!” he told me, laughing. “I should’ve started thinking like the white man!” A sports drink called “40 Water” came and went quickly, too.
Perhaps a different person would have walked away from it all, but E-40 instead regained his footing. First, he returned to recording independently, releasing his 11th and 12th solo albums,
Revenue Retrievin’: Day Shift and Revenue Retrievin’: Night Shift, on the same day in 2010.
His son Droop-E, then 22, handled the bulk of the production, and the guest verses came mostly from Bay Area artists, both old-timers and upstarts. He continued with this exact same model, released two more albums on the same day in 2011, three albums at a time in 2012, then did that again the next year. In all, he has released fifteen records this way over last six years, moving about a half a million physical copies in all.
Second, he became a vintner. E-40 may have gotten his name for drinking beer, but he’s always loved wine. One of his best songs, “Carlos Rossi,” is an ode to getting ripshyt on Northern California’s favorite jugged plonk. He met a guy named Steve Burch, a freelance winemaker who had worked on a number of celebrity wines: Adam Carolla’s Mangria and Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini’s Southpaw Wine. The two teamed up to create a fruit-forward red blend, with an eye to keeping it under $15 at retail. According to the
Sacramento Bee, E-40 sold
180,000 bottles of Earl Stevens Selections in 2014 (he says it was twice that). His expanding beverage business has brought him full circle: the liquor store down the street from his house on Magazine that used to sell Click tapes now sells his beer.
He records at his home, where I visited him the day after the Warriors game. He lives in a boxy white mansion at the end of a cul-de-sac in a gated community in Danville, the sort of Northern California environment — rolling brown hills pocked with subdivisions — that looks gorgeous, but you
just know has a serious coyote problem. He was in his studio, a cozy orange-walled room on the ground floor of his house, with his engineer Miqui, his friend Kenn, and KD Stunts, an artist on Sick Wid It and his first cousin once removed — fresh off, as he put it, “an iron vacation.”
E-40 was slightly hungover, but nevertheless planned to record a guest verse for Payroll Giovanni, a rapper from Detroit. Miqui cued it up, shaking the entire room with the bass. The song was perfect for E-40: a loping, dissonant piano loop timewarped in from 1996, with a hook about the wisdom of hoarding money. “I’m trying to get my mail on,” says Payroll over and over and over and over again. E-40 had recorded a few bars of his verse weeks earlier; all he had to do was rap 12 more lines to finish it, which he did over the next four hours, punching in and adding bars two at a time.
This sedimentary approach to creating a verse allowed E-40 to spend his Sunday afternoon working, but also relaxing, drinking a little Gnarly Head zinfandel — he was out of his own stuff — and shooting the shyt with friends and family. Over the course of the day, as the small room filled up with new arrivals, he sat in his designated spot, at the head of the room, and held court, occasionally jotting down lyrics on the back of a Dixie plate. He talked about a Foghorn Leghorn line he wants to work into a song one day (“Boy, I say, BOY — you doin all that choppin’ but ain’t no chips flyin’!”); he discussed the merits of converting rental properties to Section 8 and setting up LLCs to protect your assets; he made tentative plans with the crew to go see the televangelist Joel Osteen in Sacramento. “He’s the
guy-guy,” he promised.
His manner was easygoing, that of a wistful patriarch, but when he got into the booth, he could switch that off, making a verse that hits all his stops: frugality, caution, absurdity. “Stack yo paper mayne, fukk blowin’ a check/ Buy a car lot, a dispensary, or a fourplex/ Pack a glidnock for the enemy, extra clips/ Tote a chidnop that’ll take the head off a T. Rex.” As we listened to the track play back, he turned to me right as the punchline landed and flashed a Cheshire grin.
This process, or something like it, brought to the world E-40’s last 15 studio albums, which include two gold singles, “Function” and “Choices (Yup),” both certified this year. In fact, sitting under a staircase just outside the studio was a small pile of still-unwrapped RIAA trophies he didn’t yet have wall space for. At the end of that hall, in an alcove, there’s a somewhat crude wooden 1:2 scale statue of E-40, holding a baseball bat by his side; he’s wearing his Sick Wid It chain — the monivorous hog — and his glasses sit a full inch below his eyes, which peer off to the left, back toward the studio’s door. It was made, I learned, by his father, Earl Stevens Sr., who has taken up wood carving in his later years. E-40 said that the portrait was an early work, and that his dad has gotten a lot better. His Vallejo Open Studios page shows a much more convincing carving of a bear, just like the one on California’s state flag: mid-stride, with mountainous shoulders and a rippling coat.
I’ve spent a lot of time gazing at the bear, and I’ve come to think of it as an nice analogue to E-40’s body of work: a chainsaw-cut bear is as much a piece of art as it is a commodity, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune to formal improvement. On the contrary, years and years of making them will only make you better, faster at finding the bear in the log and revealing more lifelike versions every time. Rap music may seem to be the precise opposite of a craft like lawn ornament-making. A constant influx of newcomers guarantees that the rules will always change, and older artists will feel the pressure to either step aside or, worse, risk humiliation by acting younger than their years. But E-40’s proposition seems to be: what if the two pursuits aren’t that different at all? In fact, if rapping is, as he believes it to be, all about the dissemination of wisdom and wiles, then surely it follows that one gets better, not worse, with age. I asked him once if he would make music past 50, and he told me he might keep going until he’s 80 or 90.
When I visited, his home was undergoing a massive renovation, part of which involved making more room for those new plaques, flush-mounting them, and stacking them three-high. But the bulk of the work, he said, was happening upstairs. He and Tracey were getting a second bathroom put in; his and hers. “We getting older and shyt. We gotta get a bigger, taller bed,” he said, laughing, as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying was true. “We thinking about the future in this motherfukker! We’re gonna grow old together!”
“You gotta plan ahead,” Kenn said.
“You got to, folks,” said E-40, then he got serious once more. “I’m a survivor, man. I done had my ups and downs, but I’ve got get-back skills
for real for real. I refuse to fall. As long as I’ve got my life, health and strength, and I’m in my right mind? I’mma get money.” The song had come back to the hook for what must have been the millionth time, and, without missing a beat, he started to sing along.
