Lloyd Banks - COTI 2 (Discussion Thread)

[WSFGDan]

 

[Avisible Man]

Socialize my favorite track. I woulda thought that was That Jerm produced song. It almost sounded like Owe it to Em. Cartune did his thing on that shyt. I was reminded a lil of Misunderstood by Beat Butcha too.

I was a lil apprehensive with Cartune Beatz having 8 tracks but, similar to COTI, he was able to capture that signature Banks sound from his mixtapes with That Jerm, Pesci, Butcha, Authentic, etc. Obviously, Jerm, Pesci and Authentic all had production here too.

 

[iamduval]

This is amazing off first listen

 

[Braman]

Off 1 listen:

-Pause Banks voice alone restores the feeling.

-Impact is on repeat. Hearing Banks makes you realize how far left the rest of the game has strayed.

-I actually like that more dark Banks songs; this, like COTI 1, is slightly more upbeat than AON and FNO. I think he might be in a better place in life bc those 2 mixtapes were DARK. I dont think that level of depth/pain/darkness is possible anymore

-Idgaf what nobody say I’m tired of Benny the butcher redundant monotonous features. I do not like that ngga

-Switch Up and Dead Roses instant classics.

-20 years later Yayo still make you laugh, that Will smith bar wasn’t even clever the ngga delivery is just comedy

 

[WSFGDan]

Lloyd Banks, Rap's Master Technician​

The G-Unit punchline king discusses his new album, his origins with 50 Cent and Tony Yayo, and the secret inspiration he took from Layzie Bone.

BY PAUL THOMPSON
July 15, 2022

Lloyd Banks. Courtesy of Anthony Geathers.

50 Cent’s 2003 debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, instantly made him one of the biggest musicians on the planet, but rather than follow it immediately with another solo effort, 50 leveraged his new fame to make his next release a group effort: Beg for Mercy, the first studio album by G-Unit, the rap group he had formed in his native South Jamaica, Queens, with his friends Tony Yayo and Lloyd Banks. Where 50 was the charismatic group leader with a savant-like ability to rattle off pop hooks even on mixtape tracks—and Yayo’s hypeman absurdity was chopped, imperfectly, into 16-bar increments—Banks was a consummate punchline rapper, staking his reputation on two- to four-bar bursts of wit and wordplay.

In the nearly 20 years since Banks followed Beg For Mercy with his solo debut, 2004’s The Hunger For More, the rapper has attempted to refine and deepen this style through a zealous writing regimen. “You think I’m here ‘cause of talent?” he asks on one song from The Course of the Inevitable 2, his fifth solo album, which is due out today. “It was the repetition.” GQ spoke with Banks over the phone about his childhood in Queens, his adjustment to the first wave of G-Unit fame, and stepping away from music to focus on his family.

You mentioned getting into a lot of different creative mediums during your youth: music, poetry, visual art. What activated that side of your brain?
There are a lot of elements in hip-hop. My uncle used to take us out to Brooklyn, and I used to see them breakdance on the cardboard, break down a bunch of boxes and be right in the square. And then graffiti drew me into tagging, be it in school where I’m not supposed to be doing it, or outside, or just in my notebooks. I was drawn to the art of graffiti, which led to me drawing characters and things of that nature. Even when The Boondocks used to be in the newspaper, I would take mental snapshots and then create my own characters. And then the poetry started to form when I got into hip-hop. I was heavy on a lot of lyrical-driven artists, the Rakims and Big Daddy Kanes and Nas’s. I wanted to be a writer. When I was in school, when I was supposed to be doing work, or if I’d finished my work fast enough, I would start writing. And then it went to me walking around, reading the dictionary. So I can’t really point out one thing, I just feel like I’m a person who was heavy into art as a whole.

What name were you tagging with?
LAYZ.

Like lazing around?
Nah—I’ve never told nobody this except the actual person I adopted the name from, but it was Layzie Bone. I was a big Bone Thugs-n-Harmony fan. Actually, the night 2Pac passed away was the first major concert that I went to, at Nassau Coliseum. It was Nas performing, The Firm, The Fugees, and Bone Thugs. That was my first time seeing them perform. A few years back, in Texas, I was actually on tour with Bone Thugs, and I got a chance to tell them that I kinda adopted that name from that.

Wait, was that concert the one where Nas stopped his set to bring Ed Lover on stage to announce Pac’s passing?Exactly. I was at that concert with my cousin and my mom. It was crazy because at that time there was no internet. So driving to the concert from Queens, I believe Angie Martinez was on the radio and she had announced it, and everybody on the Long Island Expressway was pulling over to the side of the road, outside their cars, honking horns. It was unbelievable. I remember that very vividly to this day. This is probably a half-hour before we made it into the building. And once we got there, Nas was the headliner. We had to sit through Keith Sweat, the Fugees, Bone Thugs, and the Firm performance before Nas. It was probably another two hours before people who had been in the building [when the news was broken on radio] knew. So when he announced it, you could literally feel the building sink. It felt like we all fell down just a little.

How old were you at this time? Did you have much of a relationship to Pac’s music?I was 12. And of course—I was on Pac since, like, “Trapped” and “Brenda’s Got a Baby.” I was a fan of everything, from Slick Rick on—even before him. Nothing really got past me. I was heavy on Queens artists like Mobb Deep, Nas, Capone-N-Noreaga, Tragedy Khadafi, Royal Flush. I was so Queensed out because that was the closest thing to me. It inspired me the most. So something in my mind, as a fan, was keeping me a little biased. But once Pac passed away… as artists, we’re part of a cult. When somebody does something that you do and passes away at a very young age like that, it puts everything back in perspective. I became heavy on his music. When Makaveli came out, that was like the ultimate album for me.

You were 12, but you already considered yourself an artist.
As naive as that sounds, yeah. Like I said, I’m at the concert with my cousin and my mom. And I’m telling them, “I’m gonna be on that stage, I’m gonna get there.” I actually saw Nas and them at the food stands while I was going back and forth to the bathroom, and I was just too shook to say, “what’s up,” as a 12-year-old. But in my mind, I knew I wanted to be there. I really felt like I was going to end up there. Crazily enough, the first arena show we did was in Nassau Coliseum, that exact building.

Who did your earliest raps sound like? Were you imitating anyone in particular?
To be honest with you, I don’t think I sounded like anybody. I was so young. Even though I was inspired by a lot of those artists I mentioned, I couldn’t really sound like them because my content was more geared around what was going on in my life at the time, whether that was school or whatever. A lot of different [young rappers were breaking out]: Another Bad Creation, and there was a group called Illegal if I’m not mistaken. So there were a few reference points for a younger generation of rappers that made it even more believable that I could do it.

It wasn’t until my later years in high school that my subject matter started to change and I became a little bit more inspired by artists like Biggie and Mobb Deep. [But when I did,] they gave me an example for how to express myself and where I come from. The best way I can put it is I was heavily influenced by Biggie, just flow-wise, just not being afraid to try new things, Nas for his storytelling and speaking from the perspective of the neighborhood, and Snoop. Snoop came across as a very cool individual—laid back. And that’s who I naturally was as a kid, so I think I’m like a mixture of those three. I used to rap [Doggystyle] word for word in school. He taught me, as a young writer, how to breathe—meaning like, how to space out, not go over too many words, leave points where more style is involved as opposed to staying heavily lyrical like Rakim. Rakim would leave no space between rapping. Snoop taught me how to be melodic.

Lloyd Banks.Courtesy of Anthony Geathers.

Have you read Rakim’s book? He talks about breaking the pages of his notebook into a grid so that he can land each syllable with no empty space.
That’s funny—there are little things some writers do. I would always jot the alphabet on the top of the page because when I was in the early stages, my school books, the composition books, the first page would have the alphabet and times tables. I would go back and bounce off syllables and different words. I still do that to this day: whatever rhymes with A, B, C, D, all the way down. And it just became effortless to me. Other people would be like, “How do you do that?” But it’s something that I’ve been training my mind to do since school days.

Are you still writing on paper today?
Yeah, I still write on paper. Sometimes my phone, but there’s something about writing on paper, even my tracklists and ideas and things. Most of my early records, even the freestyles, I still have the notebooks. Somewhere between 30 and 40 composition books and spiral books. I write every day. There have been times I was in the car and I could write a whole verse to the sound of the windshield wiper. I don’t really need too much. It could be a steady raindrop, and my mind will start to click because of the tempo. I write a capella too; I write raps on the way to concerts, sometimes even in my sleep. If I’m lucky I’ll wake up and remember some of them.

Your writing style—at least the one that got you noticed early on—prioritized punchlines, bar-for-bar showmanship, that sort of thing, over longer-form storytelling or hooks. I imagine that would make the process more painstaking, because the standard for every bar gets higher.

It would appear to be that way, but it’s the total opposite. Being creative and saying the dopest shyt that come to mind—my mind just clicks that way as a writer. That’s actually the dumbed down version of me. Yayo would always say that to me. I do that effortlessly. If I’m not drinking or smoking or nothing like that, my mind hits a whole different level: storytelling, a lot of different elements of who I am open up.

 

[Tetris v2.0]

Dope to see Banks in the media, he's very good at making a brand of hiphop that some might find dated but I grew up with this shyt and will always want it

 

[The_Third_Man]

never thought I'd see Lloyd Banks interview in GQ

salute the Rap Master Technician

 

[Animal House]

Flames idk what some of y’all are on but this is definitely better than the first joint.

Impact

 

[dakidbanks]

Lloyd Banks, Rap's Master Technician​

The G-Unit punchline king discusses his new album, his origins with 50 Cent and Tony Yayo, and the secret inspiration he took from Layzie Bone.

BY PAUL THOMPSON
July 15, 2022

Lloyd Banks. Courtesy of Anthony Geathers.

Lloyd Banks.Courtesy of Anthony Geathers.

Dope read! This the type of interview I wanted to see someone do from Banks

 

[L $ C]

banks putting together quite a discography honestly

 

[Corndog]

This album is great, love the rhymes, love the beats too. At first brush maybe the highs aren't quite as high as COTI1, but it's more consistent and focused for sure

 

[CourtesyFlush]

My take after one listen:

Great follow up. The highs are higher on COTI 1, but the songs flow alot more on COTI 2 and it feels more like a cohesive album, where I personally wasn't a fan of how 1 had a whole second half of slow songs. Felt like two different albums.

 

[CourtesyFlush]

This album is great, love the rhymes, love the beats too. At first brush maybe the highs aren't quite as high as COTI1, but it's more consistent and focused for sure

Didn't see your comment until after I posted mine but I said the exact same

 

[Tetris v2.0]

fukk...this shyt is dope af and in rotation all day. This is easily better than the 1st after a few listens. I just skip the record with Jada (beat is wack) and the next one that sounds like a Tyga record...the rest is official

 

[Tommy Sheppard]

ran this back 3 times and this is way better than the 1st one.