Three decades ago, a close-knit rap collective from the Midwest sent a powerful statement through the culture of hip-hop.
Fusing hardscrabble, horror-influenced rhymes with slick G-funk production and an inventive approach to rap vocals, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony — a five-member Cleveland-bred group signed to Los Angeles-based Ruthless Records — struck lightning with their sophomore album E. 1999 Eternal. Released on July 25, 1999, the record debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and eventually sold 4 million copies. It also earned a GRAMMY nomination for the inaugural Best Rap Album award.
E. 1999 Eternal's dark and macabre tone was informed not only by the group’s experiences on the streets, but on the tragedy of loss. Members had seen friends and family die over the years, including their mentor Eazy E. These tragedies set the stage for their cathartic hit "Tha Crossroads" — a chart-topping remix of an album track that won Bone Thugs their only GRAMMY for Best Rap Performance By A Duo or Group. Thirty years on, GRAMMY.com charts the legacy of this influential album.
E. 1999 Perfected Bone Thugs' Signature Style
Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's style gave the group an edge over the rest of the rap field. Their combined use of fast flows and harmonically-delivered vocals made them a novelty, with few contemporaries attempting to replicate their sing-song delivery.
Contrasting these pleasant melodies with gritty lyrical content also gave them an edge. Gangster rap at the time truly reflected the harsh conditions of life on the streets — and this was especially true for Bone, who channeled into music the grim realities of life in post-industrial Cleveland’s east side (the album is named for East 99th Street where the group typically hung out). The album is littered with tall tales about encounters with rival gangsters ("Eternal," "Land of the Heartless" ) and the criminal justice system, with a prison break narrative on "Down ‘71 (The Getaway)." Meanwhile, "1st of tha Month" illustrates the day of welfare checks arriving in the hood and how much of the funds from them go to drug dealers: "The first be the day for the dopeman."
None of this would feel out of place in hip-hop’s New York heartland, but it’s the record’s West Coast-influenced production that again diversified it. Bone Thugs had been adopted as proteges by N.W.A.’s Eazy E and, under his guidance, they and DJ U-Neek (who produced all tracks on the album) set the group’s Midwestern nihilism against a backdrop of slow-rolling California G-funk. U-Neek sourced morose samples from vintage funk and soul and video game soundtracks ("Crossroads," "Eternal,") as well as building his own tableau of synth and drum machine-driven beats.
The Album Brought horrorcore To The Mainstream (And Caused Tension With Three 6 Mafia In The Process)
While hardcore and gangster rap frequently portrayed the urban ghettos that birthed hip-hop as hellish places as a means of social criticism, it was also sensationalized by politicians and the media as glamorizing gang violence. In response, horrorcore took the violent content in rap to its logical extension, drawing on psychological horror and slasher flicks for inspiration. Houston group Geto Boys’ work, in particular, frequently drew on horror tropes.\
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On E. 1999, Bone Thugs build on these early experiments and craft a world heavily inspired by horror content, depicting their C-Town hood as a nightmarish landscape of murder and death. The record is littered with spookiness from the very start, with satanic backmasked vocals and deep-voice modulation on “Da Introduction." Bone-chilling lyrics referencing murders, executions, and other grotesque violence soak the album in gallons of blood, especially on tracks like "Mo’ Murda" and "Land of tha Heartless." The crew even adopt slasher flick-inspired nicknames: Bizzy Bone becomes "Lil’ Ripster"and Krayzie Bone frequently refers to himself as "Leatherface" in reference to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Horrorcore would continue to hold a place in the rap landscape for years to come thanks to groups like Insane Clown Posse, $uicideboy$; Playboi Carti and Denzel Curry. Yet Bone Thugs were far from the only ‘90s group to adopt the genre; Memphis natives Three Six Mafia became their rivals in the scene. Both groups took a similar approach to the genre, favoring slow beats and rapid-fire flows, but while Three Six had only released their influential first album Mystic Stylez a year earlier, they had been active in the underground for much longer.
"When Bone came out … with ‘Thuggish Ruggish Bone’ and all of that stuff and we hear somebody kind of on our same style: Faces Of Death, redrum, muder, 6-6-6, tongue twisting," Three Six’s DJ Paul explained in 2015. "We were like, ‘Damn these dudes done stole our style!’"
Paul characterized the tensions between the two groups as "more of a misunderstanding" than a real feud, but the crews eventually did come to real blows in 2021 during a Verzuz rap battle event.
"Tha Crossroads" Set The Pace For Melodic & Soulful Rap
By 1995 the East Coast rap revival had firmly established hardcore hip-hop as the dominant style in the genre, with the likes of Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang Clan, and the Notorious B.I.G. answering the West Coast with their own gritty street rap. Yet quite a few of these gangster rap artists also made room for more soulful and introspective material, exemplified by tracks like Wu-Tang’s Gladys Knight-sampling "Can It Be All So" and, in particular, "Life’s A Bitch" by Nas featuring AZ.
Bone Thugs would take this combination of soft sounds and gangster lamentation to the top of the charts the following year with "Tha Crossroads," a remix of a E. 1999 Eternal track, already a eulogy to their dead friend Wallace "Wally" Laird III. U-Neek swapped the original’s gothic core sample (from a Sega Genesis fighting game) with a soulful Isley Brothers segment and the rappers added additional dedications to other fallen friends and family: group member Wish Bone’s Uncle Charles, fellow rapper Lil Boo of The Graveyard Shift, and most famously Eazy E, a victim of the AIDS epidemic who died just before he could see Bone Thugs achieve success with E. 1999.
The smooth, R&B-esque sound combined with the group’s emotionally bare paens to their deceased brethren ("Can somebody, anybody tell me why / We die, we die?") and the cruelties of "Livin’ in a hateful world" struck a nerve. Propelled by the tragic association of Eazy’s death and the prior success of the E. 1999 record, the track debuted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the chart the next week, staying in place for eight more. It later won a GRAMMY for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. Though a handful of rap hits would take on similarly morose subject matter in the years to come – DMX’s "Slippin’" serves as one example – track’s influence would be felt much more deeply a decade later, when a host of mainstream rappers including Kanye West, Drake, and Kid Cudi would combine confessional, moody lyricism and production with a sing-song rap style similar to Bone Thugs. Then that wave of "singing-ass rapping" would influence a subsequent 2010s wave of emo rap from Juice WRLD and Lil Peep, among others.