Today in Hip-Hop — October 2: Ja Rule's Pain Is Love Turns 25 - Custom Creative

October 2, 2001. Island Def Jam drops Ja Rule’s third album, Pain Is Love, and it debuts at #1 on the Billboard 200 — his first chart-topper, and still his biggest seller. Twenty-five years later, it’s the record that marks the exact moment Murder Inc. stopped being a label with a hit single and became the label running pop radio.

Irv Gotti produced the whole thing himself, and the formula was simple and ruthless: take Ja’s gravel-and-honey rasp, pair it with a hook-singing woman, and let the sample do the emotional work. “Always on Time” paired him with a then-unknown Ashanti and sampled Dave Grusin’s “Either Way” — it became Murder Inc.’s first Billboard Hot 100 #1 and basically wrote Ashanti’s resume overnight. “Livin’ It Up” flipped Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do” into a victory-lap anthem with Case on the hook. “I’m Real (Murder Remix)” brought in Jennifer Lopez over a Rick James flip, and for about six months in 2001, you could not turn on the radio without hearing Ja Rule’s voice stacked against a diva.

The album went triple platinum in the U.S. and picked up a Grammy nomination, and it set the template — thug-sings-the-hook, R&B feature on the chorus — that half of mainstream rap radio ran on for the next three years. It’s also the record that painted the biggest target on Murder Inc.’s back: the singjay sincerity that made Pain Is Love a crossover smash is the same vulnerability 50 Cent spent the next two years turning into ammunition. Twenty-five years out, strip away the beef narrative and what’s left is a producer and an artist who, for one album, had the entire Hot 100 format figured out.

Also today in hip-hop:

Proof — born October 2, 1973. D12’s founding architect and Eminem’s childhood friend and hype man, the guy who actually organized the group into existence in 1996. He was shot and killed at a Detroit pool hall in April 2006 at 32 — Detroit hip-hop still carries that loss.
Soul Train goes national — October 2, 1971. Don Cornelius’s show had already been running locally out of Chicago for a year, but this is the date it hit national syndication. Fifty-five years later, it’s still the blueprint for every music-and-culture TV format that gave Black artists a stage network TV wouldn’t.
Slip Capone — passed October 2, 2017. The Hawthorne, California rapper came up through Tha Dogg Pound Clique on Death Row as a teenager in the mid-’90s, cutting his teeth on the Murder Was the Case soundtrack before building his own West Coast catalog.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team

Jon Jones