Today in Hip-Hop: Redman’s ‘Malpractice’ Turns 25 — The Funk Doctor’s Loudest #4

Twenty-five years ago today — May 22, 2001 — Reggie Noble walked into Def Jam with a 23-track loaded clip and emptied it on the Billboard 200. Malpractice, Redman’s fifth solo, opened at #4 on 148,000 first-week copies — his highest debut as a solo act — and went straight to #1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. Gold inside a month. A Funk Doctor’s loud confession that the Brick City voice still ran the East Coast in the post-Doc’s Da Name 2000 stretch.

The record was a delay story before it was a chart story. Originally penciled for December 2000, then April 2001, Malpractice kept slipping while Def Jam re-tooled around the Cash Money/Roc-A-Fella heat. By the time it landed in May, Redman had already spent eighteen months on the road with Method Man behind Blackout! (1999) — and the chemistry from that run is all over the tracklist. Meth shows up on multiple cuts. So does DMX (still in his Ruff Ryders peak), Missy Elliott, Scarface, and — in a move only Reggie could pull — George Clinton, the Parliament-Funkadelic patriarch whose sample DNA had been laced through Def Squad records since EPMD’s first sessions.

Production was the family business. Erick Sermon — Redman’s mentor since EPMD signed him in ’91 — handled the rubbery low-end. Rockwilder (fresh off “Lady Marmalade” hitting #1 the same month) brought the radio shine. Redman produced under his “Da Mascot” alias, which is where the album’s weirder corners — the skits, the dusted interludes, the Newark-funk fingerprints — come from. The lead single “Let’s Get Dirty (I Can’t Get in da Club)” with DJ Kool was the strip-club anthem of summer ’01; the follow-up “Smash Sumthin'” with Adam F drum-and-bassed itself onto the soundtrack of The Fast and the Furious. Critics split — Metacritic landed it at 59 — but the streets never wavered. Twenty-five years on, Malpractice still plays like a snapshot of the exact moment Def Jam was Def Jam.

We made a Reggie Noble Energy Redman Tribute Tee that catches him mid-spit — the kind of design that belongs in the same drawer as the Muddy Waters and Doc’s Da Name originals. If you came up on the Funk Doctor Spock cadence, this one wears like a receipt.

Also today in hip-hop:

• MC Eiht turns 55. Born Aaron Tyler in Compton on May 22, 1971. De facto leader of Compton’s Most Wanted, voice behind “Streiht Up Menace,” A-Wax in the 1993 film Menace II Society, and the lone vocal cameo on Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city (“m.A.A.d city,” 2012). A West Coast lineage anchor.
• KRS-One & Marley Marl drop Hip Hop Lives — 19 years ago today (May 22, 2007). The single most improbable reconciliation in rap history: two Bridge Wars antagonists making a record together as a direct rebuttal to Nas’s Hip Hop Is Dead. Marley handled every beat (one assist from 88 Fingers); the title track is canon now.
• Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz — Put Yo Hood Up turns 25. May 22, 2001, BME Recordings. The album that broke the Atlanta crunk sound nationally and set up Kings of Crunk the next year. “Bia’ Bia'” with Ludacris, Too Short, and Big Kap was the breakout.
• Redman’s Malpractice tour — that summer Reggie joined Method Man on the Def Jam tour leg, the same run that birthed the How High press cycle.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team

Jon Jones