![LL COOL J](/https/music.apple.com/assets/artwork/1x1.gif)
![LL COOL J](/https/music.apple.com/assets/artwork/1x1.gif)
Pre-Release
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- 6 SEPT 2024
- 14 Songs
- All World: Greatest Hits · 1990
- Saturday Night Special - Single · 2024
- Ebony Moments Classic interview with LL Cool J (Live) - Single · 2022
- The Last Dance · 2021
- Golden Era (Instrumental Version) · 2021
- This Is How We Do It (Instrumental Version) · 2021
- Jeep Beats (Instrumental Version) · 2021
- Jeep Beats (Instrumental Version) · 2021
- Jeep Beats (Instrumental Version) · 2021
- Jeep Beats (Instrumental Version) · 2021
Essential Albums
- A thundering, minimal hip-hop landmark, 1985’s Radio launched LL Cool J from a hungry Queens kid with a Krush Groove cameo to the greatest rapper on the planet. And even if you didn’t think he was the best around, LL Cool J himself certainly sounded convinced: Radio remains one of the braggingest, boastingest, flexingest, most assured albums of all time. A teenage dynamo and “MC assassinator”, LL makes numerous sky-high claims on Radio—that he can make Madonna scream; that his vocal chords are so rough, he can eat cactus; that he’ll make your girlfriend ask him for his autograph. “I disintegrate rappers, I can and I could,” he shouts in “You’ll Rock”. “The great Edgar Allen Poe couldn’t write this good.” Selling more than half a million copies without the help of MTV, Radio was the first of its kind, as well as a booming introduction to the corrosive, pavement-cracking production of Rick Rubin. Radio was the first full-length album released by Rubin’s Def Jam Recordings, kicking off a dynasty that would last a generation. The 1984 single “I Need a Beat”, programmed in Rubin’s NYU dorm room, was the breakthrough, providing the nascent label with a huge hit right out of the gates. From that, his first moment on wax, Cool J promises nothing short of predicting “This jam will hit/The highest plateau in the world of music/Paparazzi, wealth and fame/The total propulsion of my name.” (A remixed “I Need a Beat” adds an extra layer of dubbed-out chaos.) The album’s most legendary track, “Rock the Bells”, remains hip-hop’s ultimate battle challenge, as well as a game-changer: The song’s jolting guitar stabs would presage rap’s mid-1980s moment as “the new rock”, while the take-all-comers intro would end up one of the most enduring tools for DJ battles. More crucially, the brash attitude projected on “Rock the Bells” would follow Cool J for decades, as he became the undefeated champion of wars on wax. Radio isn’t all ferocity and fervour: “I Can Give You More” and “I Want You” are early love raps from the Kangoled Casanova—bare, honest, emotional invitations that, nonetheless, still pound with Rubin’s spare and deafening beatwork. But the legacy of Radio is in its raw power. The album would spawn an entire generation of larger-than-life MCs, with LL Cool J’s flow being endlessly mimicked throughout the mid- to late-1980s, and his confidence serving as inspiration throughout the battle-torn 1990s. LL may have rapped that JVC speakers vibrated the concrete, but it was his cocky attitude that would shake the world.
Artist Playlists
- Knock-you-out rhymes from the MC they call the G.O.A.T.
- His rhymes raised the bar for peers and foes alike.
- Where trailblazing MCs get crosswired with funk innovators.
- His rawest, most aggressive raps and his sexiest slow jams.
Compilations
More To Hear
- Lowkey takes listeners back to the beginning in Queensbridge.
- The iconic MC talks “Mama Said Knock You Out” turning 30.
- The evolution and politics of Green Day.
- "Crushed Up" is the Beats 1 Banger, plus ALLBLACK & Kenny Beats.
- Q-Tip spins LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, and Slick Rick.
About LL COOL J
When Todd Smith was 11, his grandfather called him up to his attic in St. Albans, Queens, to give him a gift that would change his life: two turntables, two speakers, a mixer and a microphone. This was 1979: Smith—who later re-christened himself LL Cool J—was into The Sugarhill Gang, Afrika Bambaataa and Zulu Nation, the rudiments of hip-hop. Between his new tools and a restless imagination, he discovered his course. “I’m on the move. It’s 1765—no one knows that I escaped the plantation and built a spaceship and flew here. I can write that. Know what I mean?” he recalled in his 1998 memoir, I Make My Own Rules. “Through words, I could go wherever I thought to go.” Smith went on to become a pioneering figure in hip-hop, one of the first artists to re-frame the word-heavy vamps of early rap—where tracks could run for 10, 12, even 15 minutes—as pop music, steering hip-hop toward the mainstream at a time when it was still considered underground music. But more than an MC, LL was rap’s first pop star, conquering R&B (“I Need Love”, “Doin’ It”, “Around the Way Girl”), hosting the Grammys, working in film and television, becoming the kind of multi-faceted household name that set the precedent for artists like Drake, Will Smith and Eminem. After mailing around his demo tape in the early ’80s, Smith landed at a then-new label run out of an NYU dorm, called Def Jam, and released his first single, “I Need a Beat”, when he was 16. (The beat had been made on Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin’s drum machine by another teenage rapper, Adam Horovitz, a.k.a. Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys. Alongside T La Rock & Jazzy Jay’s “It’s Yours”, LL's and the Beastie Boys’ debuts were Def Jam’s firsts releases.) His star grew quickly: His first album, 1985’s Radio, helped crystallise the boxy, minimalistic sound of early rap, selling more than a half-million copies in its first six months—a presence that, alongside Run-DMC’s King of Rock, pushed rap into the mainstream. He broke ground again in 1987 with “I Need Love”, one of the first instances of rap being cross-pollinated with the vulnerability of R&B—a move that also helped cement him as hip-hop’s first real sex symbol. By 1990’s Mama Said Knock You Out, he’d become a pop-cultural icon; he was 22. His run continued, producing a series of albums—including 1995’s Mr. Smith, 2000’s G.O.A.T. and 2004’s The DEFinition—that kept pace with the stylistic times while continuing to develop his persona: smooth, confident, easygoing but never without a swaggering edge. Alongside fellow pioneers the Beasties, he helped prove that rappers weren’t just figures of a cultural zeitgeist but artists capable of forging long-term careers. In 2017, he became the first rapper in history to receive Kennedy Center Honors.
- HOMETOWN
- Bay Shore, NY, United States
- BORN
- 14 January 1968
- GENRE
- Hip-Hop/Rap