It felt a little weird writing an article that’s even mildly comprehensive about a rapper I never listened to with any regularity until earlier this year, but I think I pulled it off…plus, (side)cover story!
“Parents, I’m not tellin’ your children to smoke, ya see/ ’cause if they just say no, it be more for me.” This line, from Devin the Dude’s “Mo Fa Me” off his 1998 solo debut, The Dude, set the blueprint for everything the Houston MC has done since. Namely, write a bunch of songs about weed. Such fixation suggests a lack of inspiration, but the Dude’s hazy tunnel vision belies the man born Devin Copeland’s ability to mine a subject obsessively. Cannabis is merely an oft-chosen metaphor in an endless stream of goofy–yet frequently poignant–songs, stretched out now through more than a decade of music, starting in 1994 with his posse project, the Odd Squad, and culminating in this year’s definitive Waiting to Inhale (Rap-a-Lot)”…
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