Montell Jordan "This Is How We Do It"

Album: This Is How We Do It (Def Jam)
Songwriters: Montell Jordan and Oji Pierce
Hit #1: April 7th, 1995 (7 Weeks)

In 1988, a London-born, eyepatch-ed emcee named Slick Rick emerged as hip hop's greatest storyteller with the classic album, The Great Adventures of Slick Rick. Though it's vulgar lyricism and misogynist themes derailed some, the album premiered one of rap's most entertaining entities, whose humorous tone and breaks into sing-song cadences would influence an entire generation. One of the album's highlights was also it's biggest commercial release.

Coaxed by his nephews into telling them a bedroom tale, "Children's Story" found Uncle Ricky relaying a nightmarish yarn about a teenager who decides to earn some dough with some friends by "robbin' old folks and makin' da dash.". Unfortunately, he doesn't know when to quit and when he attempts to make a victim of an undercover cop, we're led through an adventurous chase scene. As a villainous beat pummels forward, we follow the thug through abandoned buildings, flying bullets and meetings with shotgun-packing dope fiends, with Rick expertly detailing every frightened, feverish thought of a seventeen-year-old realizing the trouble he's now facing ("Deep in his heart he knew he was wrong"). By the time the single verse narrative has ended, the boy lies dead in the street and Uncle Ricky has left two young kids horrified, the thought of going nighty-night the furthest thing from their mind.

Cut to the spring of 1995 and Def Jam's latest stab at R&B, a rap-adoring Los Angeleno named Montell Jordan, has taken that classic beat and morphed it from a haunting tragedy into a feel-good hip hop-soul party banger.

A celebration of one man's ascension from broke artist to high-paid superstar in record time (", "This Is How We Do It" marked a break from West Coast rap's violent imagery allowing gangbangers a chance to forget about the drive-bys and just chill in their Kani. Leading the South Central festivities with one hand in the air and the other wrapped tightly around his trusty 40-ounce malt liquor, the velvet-voiced Jordan demands the DJ "flip the track" and "bring that old school back" to a crowd of willing participants, more than happy to let loose and enjoy life for the oncoming weekend.

Montell didn't only get the party started in the West, though, as "This Is How We Do It" quickly took over the entire globe as an obligatory club jam still cherished to this day. But busting out of the gate with a platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated smash ended up a double-edged sword for a new artist, overshadowing a successive catalogue that would bring him to #1 again, but wouldn't produce anything as instantaneously and universally adored as this one.

Best Moment: "You see the hood's been good to me/ Ever since I was a lower-case g/ But now I'm a big G/ The girls see I got the money/ Hundred dollar bills y'all" (1:38)

Montell Jordan - This Is How We Do It
Uploaded by classics007

DL: "This Is How We Do It" (YFH)

Slick Rick - Children's Story
Uploaded by wechkane

DL: "Children's Story" (YFH)