Today in Hip-Hop — October 22: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing Turns 35, and the Black Sheep Who Outsold the Family

October 22, 1991. Mercury Records drops A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, the debut from Black Sheep, which is Andres “Dres” Titus and William “Mista Lawnge” McLean. It turns 35 today. The receipt most people miss is on the back of the jacket: every track is credited to McLean and Titus. The two of them made the whole record themselves, and then it went gold in six months.

The Black Sheep of the Native Tongues

They were Queens kids who met as teenagers in Sanford, North Carolina, after both families moved south. Lawnge was DJing in New York when Mike Gee of the Jungle Brothers and DJ Red Alert told him to start his own group, so in 1989 he called up Dres, a friend he’d grown up with. Their first appearance on wax came before their own album. Dres shows up on “Fanatic of the B Word” on De La Soul’s De La Soul Is Dead earlier in 1991. That made them Native Tongues by association, and the name says the rest. They were the family members who cursed at the dinner table, poked fun at the Afrocentric earnestness and made a whole bit out of it.

Then “The Choice Is Yours (Revisited)” hit. It’s built on Johnny Hammond Smith’s “Big Sur Suite” from Higher Ground, with the “Engine, engine, number nine” bridge lifted from Roger Miller. Albumism argues that from Thanksgiving 1991 through the spring of 1992 there was no bigger single in rap, and that the album initially outsold the second albums from A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, the records critics usually rank higher. It peaked at No. 30 on the Billboard 200 and No. 15 on the R&B albums chart, and the RIAA certified it gold by April 1992. “Strobelite Honey” went all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s dance club chart. Black Sheep were also the first hip-hop act booked on The Tonight Show after Jay Leno took over from Johnny Carson.

The long tail is real too. VH1 put “The Choice Is Yours” at No. 74 on its 100 Greatest Hip Hop Songs in 2008. A Kia Soul ad brought it back in 2010. The Source named the album one of its 100 Best Rap Albums in 1998, and Rolling Stone ranked it No. 146 among the 200 greatest hip-hop albums in 2022. Not bad for a group a lot of people still file as a one-hit wonder.

We made a Black Sheep A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing tee for anyone who still yells “you can get with this, or you can get with that” with their whole chest. The choice was always yours.

Also Today in Hip-Hop

• 1991: Del the Funky Homosapien, I Wish My Brother George Was Here (35 years). The same day as Black Sheep, on Elektra. Del was 19 and had been writing lyrics for Da Lench Mob. His cousin Ice Cube co-produced the album with Del and the Boogiemen, and “Mistadobalina” carried it.
• 1996: Westside Connection, Bow Down (30 years). Ice Cube again, this time with WC and Mack 10 on Priority. It peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum on January 10, 1997. It also took shots at Q-Tip, which means a Native Tongues founder got dissed on Black Sheep’s fifth anniversary. Our Ice Cube shirts guide breaks down that whole era.
• 1996: M.O.P., Firing Squad (30 years). Brownsville’s second album on Relativity. DJ Premier mixed and oversaw the whole thing, and he stayed on for the next two M.O.P. records. Kool G Rap has the guest verse.
• 1996: Chuck D, Autobiography of Mistachuck (30 years). The Public Enemy frontman’s solo debut, on Mercury, the same label that put out A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing five years to the day earlier.
• 2012: Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d city (14 years). The Compton kid’s major-label debut on TDE, Aftermath and Interscope.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team

Jon Jones