Shaquille O'Neal Has Got Some Jams!
Back in the day there used to be a very popular yearly feature in The A.V Club humorously dissecting what we deemed the Least Essential albums of the year. The idea wasn’t to single out the worst albums, necessarily, but rather albums that had no reason to exist beyond our bottomless fascination with celebrity.
We wrote up albums by walking punchlines like William Hung but we also covered albums by superstar athletes like Shaquille O’Neal.
I suspect that the 1996 compilation The Best of Shaquille O’Neal made it into the Least Essential line-up, in no small part because it collected “hits” from only two albums.
Twenty seven years later I would like to officially come out as a fan of Shaquille O’Neal’s rapping. Within reason. I won’t make any great claims for the legendary center as a lyricist or wordsmith but if my deep immersion in the world of Insane Clown Posse has taught me anything it’s that you don’t necessarily have to be a great rapper, or even a particularly good one, to make a fun rap song.
The Best of Shaquille O’Neal has at least two songs that I fucking love and have endured through the decades.
The Shaquille O’Neal song I have the strongest emotional connection to is unsurprisingly “Biological Didn’t Bother”, a heart-wrenching ode to the rapper’s stepfather, who stepped up and raised him when his biological father abandoned him.
As readers of this blog, and also my therapist, are well aware, my biological mother abandoned me when I was a baby. I thought I had gotten over that loss and pain when I became an adult but I didn’t.
Parental abandonment is a scar that never fully heals, a wound that never entirely closes. I know that and so does Shaquille O’Neal.
There’s something inherently poignant about a big man being honest and public about his big feelings. It doesn’t get much bigger than Shaquille O’Neal, literally or figuratively, but on “Biological Doesn’t Bother” he reconnects with the sad little boy he once was and shows him the kindness and empathy that his own father did not show him when he needed it most.
Do I tear up listening to “Biological Didn’t Bother?” I do. I cannot make it to the end of the song without getting a little emotional.
The other Shaquille O’Neal song that I legitimately love is “I Know I Got (Skillz)” It’s what the kids probably no longer call a banger for a very simple, very predictable reason: the beat fucking slaps.
One of Hip Hop’s worst kept secrets is that production is almost invariably more important than rapping. A dope beat can carry the weakest rapper and “I Know I Got (Skillz)” has dynamite production and a deft guest verse from Def Jef.
But Shaq fucking holds “I Know I Got (Skillz)” down on the lyrical front with an excess of flashy, showboating superstar charisma. One of the reasons I like Shaquille O’Neal’s music is because he seems like a great guy, and that likability comes through in every song.
Apparently Shaq DJs fairly regularly these days. I’m tempted to go to one of his shows, but only if he promises to play the two songs of his that I fucking love.
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