Souls of Mischief - 93 'til Infinity

"No time to do hair, the flicks at eight so get straight, you look great, let's grub now."

Album: 93 'til Infinity [debut album]
Recorded: San Francisco, California
Genre: Hip Hop, West Coast Hip Hop
Album Release: September 28th 1993
Single Release: September 7th 1993 [lead single]
Length: 4.46
Producer: A-Plus
Vocalist: Tajai, Opio, A-Plus, Phesto (all members of the crew)
Label: Jive Records

Music Video


Sampled from Billy Cobham - Heather (1974)

Charts, Streams & Sales

US: #72
Spotify = 194,000,000 +
YouTube Music = 62,000,000 +
About.com's Top 100 Greatest Hip Hop Songs of All Time: #62

Credits

Sample: Billy Cobham - Heather (1973). Contains several samples from this record.

Details

• Recorded in San Francisco, California.
  
• Released as the lead single from 93 'til Infinity on September 7th 1993, three weeks before the release of the album.
  
• Souls of Mischief are a part of underground Californian hip hop crew Hieroglyphics.
• An early version of the track, made while the members were still in high school, was called '91 til Infinity.
• Made with an SP-1200 sampler. 
• The track has 12 verses as well as hooks, an intro and an outro. The emcees are bouncing off one another, trading bars in a way Phesto described as such "compositionally, we wanted to include everybody. And it’s kinda hard to do that with everybody kicking a 16-bar verse. … So in order to keep the ear interested, we were just like, well what if we just trade off, like rapidfire in that sense? And that way everybody gets to have equal time on the track." This approach gives the track a raw energy which contrasts with the beats hypnotic quality and keeps things interesting.
  
• 93 'til Infinity. The song captures a moment in time that will last forever. It's 1993 in Oakland, California and, while the radio plays the crime filled rantings of Ice Cube in Lethal Injection or Ice T with Home Invasion, four teenagers are rapping about something altogether different: ordinary life. Those kids would be Souls of Mischief and who would have guessed that their reality raps about going on dates and drinking beer would connect with people in such a visceral way? People felt it because they could relate to it. Some parts of the usual hip hop audience could relate to thug life topics but everybody could relate to finding a date and having a good time staying up late.
  
  As much as America loves an outlaw, especially in the west, with it's Jesse James's and Billy the Kid's, in 1993 it wasn't only contemporary outlaw figures, such as Ice Cube and Ice T, that captured the hearts and minds of ordinary people, it was ordinary people. And that lure of the real over the mythological, at least to an extent, continues to this day. At the time of writing 93 'til Infinity has 194 million streams on Spotify while not one song on Home Invasion by Ice T has more than 500,000.
  
  Of course, Ice Cube's You Know How We Do It, from the same year, has over 500 million streams. It wasn't like gangster rap lost its appeal overnight or anything it's just notable that these kids could make such a mark by doing something so different and by being so unapologetically themselves in an industry, and an America, that wanted them to be thugs.
  

Artwork