Today in Hip-Hop — September 12: Bizzy Bone Turns 50, and Cleveland’s Fastest Mouth Is Still Unmatched

September 12, 1976. Bryon Anthony McCane II is born in Columbus, Ohio — the world will come to know him as Bizzy Bone, the youngest and fastest voice in Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s five-man attack. He turns 50 today. Before Twista claimed the speed-rap crown, before “melodic rap” was a genre unto itself, Bizzy was already stacking gospel-choir harmonies on top of auctioneer-pace verses — a style so specific that three decades later, nobody’s fully duplicated it.

Eazy-E signed the group — then called Bone Enterpri$e — to Ruthless Records in 1993 after hearing them freestyle backstage, and Bizzy became the connective tissue between the group’s rapid-fire verses and its church-rooted harmonies. That combination turned Creepin on ah Come Up (1994) into a street phenomenon and E. 1999 Eternal (1995) into a five-times-platinum landmark. When Eazy died that March, Bone Thugs turned the grief into “Tha Crossroads” — Bizzy’s opening verse carries the song’s emotional weight before Krayzie or Wish Bone ever touch the mic. It became the fastest-rising No. 1 single in Billboard history at the time.

Bizzy left the group in 2002 after a blowup at a New York show, and he’s been in and out of the lineup ever since — but the solo catalog never slowed down. Since Heaven’z Movie in 1998, he’s dropped albums almost every year, chasing the same harmonized-chaos style nobody’s replaced him at. Eminem has pointed to Bone Thugs’ flow as a direct influence on his own cadence, and two decades of melodic rappers since owe something to the blueprint Bizzy helped write on the east side of Cleveland.

Also today in hip-hop:

• 1977 — 2 Chainz is born in College Park, Georgia (49 today): Half of Playaz Circle before he was 2 Chainz, he turned a Ludacris co-sign and a decade of mixtape grinding into a platinum solo run, a Grammy, and a second act mentoring the next wave of Atlanta talent.
• 2000 — LL Cool J’s G.O.A.T. drops (26 years): Uncle L’s first No. 1 album, and the record that put “Greatest of All Time” into rap’s permanent vocabulary years before ESPN ever borrowed it.
• 2008 — Big Meech and Southwest T sentenced (18 years): The Flenory brothers, founders of Black Mafia Family, each got 30 years in federal prison the same afternoon — closing out an empire that quietly bankrolled Atlanta studio time and fed trap-era mythology years before BMF became a Starz show.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team