Today in Hip-Hop: Krayzie Bone Turns 53 — And ‘Tha Crossroads’ Is 30 Years Deep at #1

June 17, 1996. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads” was sitting at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the fifth straight week. Thirty years later, on this same date, Krayzie Bone — born Anthony Henderson in Cleveland on June 17, 1973 — turns 53. Two clocks, one day. The man who anchored hip-hop’s fastest, most melodic Midwestern crew is older now than most of his fans were when his voice first slid through the radio like incense smoke.

The Cleveland Sound That Eazy-E Co-Signed

Bone Thugs were not supposed to happen. Cleveland in 1991 was not Compton, not Queensbridge, not Houston. It was a city without a coast, sandwiched between rust-belt despair and gospel-church discipline. Krayzie, Layzie, Bizzy, Wish, and Flesh-N-Bone had been rapping as B.O.N.E. Enterpri$e out of the St. Clair–Superior neighborhood, sharpening a triplet-flow style nobody else in the country was running. They tried New York. They tried L.A. They got stranded.

Eazy-E found them at a 1993 Ruthless Records audition in Los Angeles. The story is legend: the crew, broke and sleeping in motels, ambushed Eazy after a show with an a cappella performance of “Foe Tha Love of $.” Eazy signed them on the spot. He had a sixth sense for sounds nobody else heard — and the Bone Thugs sound, that smoke-thick harmonic stack over DJ U-Neek’s mournful loops, was a cathedral nobody had built yet.

Faces of Death (1993) was the warm-up. Creepin On Ah Come Up (1994) went 4× Platinum on the back of “Thuggish Ruggish Bone.” Then 1995 happened.

How ‘Tha Crossroads’ Became Eazy’s Eulogy

Eazy-E died on March 26, 1995, just over a month after publicly disclosing his AIDS diagnosis. Bone Thugs were deep in sessions for E. 1999 Eternal. The album version, titled “Crossroad,” was a song about fallen friends — most notably a Cleveland homie named Wally. After Eazy’s death, the group rewrote it.

The remix — “Tha Crossroads” — dropped as a single in April 1996. It hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of May 18, 1996, and stayed there for eight consecutive weeks. On June 17, 1996, the day Krayzie Bone turned 23, the record was in week five at the top of the chart. The jump it made — from #18 to #2 to #1 in three weeks — tied the all-time record for fastest rise to #1, a mark previously held by The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in 1964. Hip-hop didn’t break the record. It matched it.

The song went on to win the 1997 Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group, edging out 2Pac’s “California Love” and Nas’s “If I Ruled the World.” Thirty years later, the production still sounds like nothing else: U-Neek’s chopped vocal sample — lifted from the Isley Brothers’ “Make Me Say It Again Girl” — Krayzie’s verse locking the BPM into a triplet prayer, Wish Bone humming the bridge like a choir leader who’s seen a casket too many. It’s hip-hop, gospel, and eulogy stitched into one three-minute strip of devotional radio.

Also today in hip-hop:

• 1994: Warren G & Nate Dogg’s “Regulate” sat at #2 on the Hot 100 — frozen behind All-4-One’s “I Swear” in what became one of Death Row’s longest near-misses at the throne. The G-Funk era’s defining single never got #1, but it never had to.
• 2008: Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, released a week earlier on June 10, was confirmed by SoundScan to have moved over 1 million copies in its first seven days — the first rap album to break a million first-week since 50 Cent’s The Massacre in 2005. Wayne was officially the biggest rapper on the planet.
• 2014: Migos’ No Label 2 mixtape, dropped on DatPiff a week prior, was rotating heavy. “Fight Night,” the trio’s first true crossover single, was building toward its Billboard run. The Atlanta triplet flow that swallowed the late 2010s started in tapes like this one.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team