*Grammy Award-winning Big Daddy Kane started his career in 1986 as a member of the rap collective the Juice Crew before releasing his acclaimed debut album in the early summer of 1988 called “Long Live the Kane,” which featured the hit “Ain’t No Half Steppin'”.
Rolling Stone magazine ranked the track #25 on its list of The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time, calling Kane “a master wordsmith of rap’s late-golden age and a huge influence on a generation of MCs.”
Kane would go on to release six more albums, but as noted by The Daily Beast, the rapper’s commercial and creative decline was swift and steep.
“Well, the string of releases essentially ended after the first four albums. We did Long Live the Kane and I caught the bug,” Kane told HuffPost in 2016. “I realized pretty much everything I did wrong with Long Live the Kane and went right back in and did It’s a Big Daddy Thing, because now I had a more universal approach. I think Long Live the Kane was pretty much a real boxed-in mindset with me just doing what I represented in the hood.”
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According to the publication, Kane said that ‘the drop-off in his material was the result of his own frustration and indifference with his label, Cold Chillin’/Warner Brothers. Following his first two albums, he essentially rushed through releases.’
“After that, I was unhappy with the label, so I dropped two trash albums to try to hurry up and finish up my 5-album deal so that’s why they were coming so fast after that,” he added. “I was trying to hurry up and get out of the deal. I guess Warner Brothers caught on after Prince of Darkness and they just stopped me and made me freeze for a year.”
Many would debate that Big Daddy Kane’s decline started in the early 90’s, with his 1991 Playgirl spread.
“There’s no shame,” he told the Associated Press in 1992 of the issue. “First of all, I wasn’t born with any clothing. Shame is something that’s man-made. I just wanted to do something different, and I’m not scared to take off my clothes.”
He reflected on the Playgirl shoot in 2013.
“It came about by joking with my publicist at the time, Gene Shelton,” Kane told The Daily Beast. “He said, ‘We did everything from Right On to Essence. What’s left?’ I said, ‘Playgirl?’ So we pursued it and the shoot was wonderful. A first for hip-hop. A lot of my male fans thought it wasn’t a good look for me. But as for the female fans, I think that month was the magazine’s highest sales for black women between the ages of 18 and 25. What can I say? I like breaking ground and exploring new things.”
Kane followed his Playgirl shoot with his appearance in Madonna’s 1992 book SEX, posing in sexual photos with the pop star and supermodel Naomi Campbell. Those two moments occurred while there were whispers that Kane was HIV positive.
“AIDS hit rap back in ’89/’90 when a rumor gained momentum,” dream hampton wrote back in 1996. “The streets of New York City were abuzz with news that Big Daddy Kane was dying of AIDS. That he’d been a closeted bisexual playing straight playboy all along. The rumor proved to be untrue but fatal to Kane’s career. In a moment that was embarrassing for us all, Kane stood onstage at a free concert organized to register voters in Harlem and declared his negative status and his heterosexuality. His career never quite recovered from that moment.”
In a 2009 article called “Scared Straight: Hip-Hop, Outing and the Pedagogy of Queerness,” Marc Lamont Hill wrote:
“Given the dominant belief that HIV/AIDS was a gay disease, public attention quickly shifted from Kane’s health to his sexuality: Did hip-hop have its first gay MC? Was he gay or bisexual? Did he catch the disease from another rapper?” These and other questions chased the rumor throughout the city’s boroughs and into urban spaces throughout the country. Further enhancing and complicating the rumor was its apparent irony. In addition to being a lyrical giant, Big Daddy Kane was hip-hop’s playboy extraordinaire. With good looks, braggadocios lyrics, a flashy persona, and even a pimp-like name, Kane’s very identity signified a carefully crafted and extravagantly performed masculinity. After the rumors began to circle however, Kane’s image was placed in serious peril.”
And “Kane heard the “streets” chatter,” Stereo Williams of The Daily Beast writes, adding: “and there was a sense that he was about to lose his audience completely. His label forced him to slow down before releasing …Job For in 1993.”
Kane would release “Daddy’s Home” in 1994 and “Veteranz Day” in 1997, but over 20 years later, he hasn’t released a new album.
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