LOS ANGELES, CA.- At a dusty studio space in an industrial corner of this city, LL Cool J bounced and vibed in black satin and bulging, size 13 Balenciaga boots.
This actor and rap luminary was filming a video for a sexy track, “Proclivities,” from his new album — but he wasn’t in front of the cameras, or rehearsing. He was just cheerfully shooting the you-know-what, with a late night of production ahead of him. Background players in feathered dresses floated by; his security circled. He did a little dance, demonstrating the inspiration for another song. He walks with a swagger and stands with a spring, too much rhythm in his 6-foot-3 frame to keep still. “Making fantasies happen,” he said, grinning, taking all of it in.
LL Cool J is 56 and has been a hip-hop eminence for 40 years: His whole life is a stretch into realizing the improbable, including a sneakily successful pivot into network television. Even before adulthood, he strode with a preternatural confidence in his abilities, and a willingness to dig into the work. His rap career is not now — and, to hear him tell it, has never been — about the money, the trappings of celebrity or the cultural prestige.
“I do it because I love it,” he said. “I love a fresh beat. A new lyric, a chord, the feeling — and then sharing that. Putting that on the easel of life, so to speak, for people to walk through the sonic gallery and listen to this, these vibes. I love that. I wanted my voice to be heard, and I wanted to share.”
Because he started so young, the first to sign to Def Jam, the then-fledgling label, when he was just 16 — and when hip-hop itself was only a decade old — he influenced an entire pantheon of artists who followed, including contemporaries his age. Hits like the bruising, Grammy-winning “Mama Said Knock You Out,” from 1990, and plaintive grooves from his lovelorn Lothario persona (“I Need Love”; “Around the Way Girl”), cemented his legacy as a crossover pop superstar.
Now, with his first album in 11 years, “The Force,” due Sept. 6, he’s an elder statesman returning to the form he helped create, with a heavy assist from Q-Tip, the visionary MC from A Tribe Called Quest who produced the record. It’s not just a valedictory lap; it’s a flex, suffused with ’70s Euro prog-rock samples, and full of unexpected references (Jean-Michel Basquiat; Huey P. Newton) and players, like Sona Jobarteh, the Gambian griot and first female kora master.
For LL Cool J, at this stage, breadth is everything. “Hip-hop is such a young genre,” he said. “It just shows you what’s possible.”
Q-Tip, who crossed paths with him early on, when they were both growing up in the Queens borough of New York City, called him a hero. “He’s the archetype,” he said.
When LL Cool J leaped into the scene in the ’80s, hip-hop was dominated by groups and crews; a solo MC barely existed.
“He was the originator of that,” Q-Tip said, while LL looked on from behind dark shades in a recent joint interview, at a high-rise Manhattan restaurant. “And I think some of the staying power is because of the elocution of the songs, the lyrics and things like that, that he was able to weave. It really is a constant.”
Witness Busta Rhymes’ deep bow to him, when he brought LL Cool J onstage at a Missy Elliott concert in August in Brooklyn, and recounted to the cheering arena how he first rapped over LL’s tracks, as a school kid. “He was my favorite MC,” Busta said. Then he turned to face LL, who is four years his senior. “You’re my hero from then, you’re my hero now.”
“The Force,” an acronym for “Frequencies of Real Creative Energy,” has verses from Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Nas and other megastars. Its opening track is perhaps its heaviest, a meditation on brutality told from the point of view of a Black LAPD officer. “Songwriting,” LL told me, is what’s missing from hip-hop today. “There’s nothing wrong with rapping about money and success, and there’s nothing wrong with rapping about pure sex — I love them both,” he said. But “there has to be more to it than that, to me, in order for a project to be compelling.”
The pulsing “30 Decembers” was inspired by the period, during COVID, when he traveled through New York unencumbered, wearing a mask and taking the subway to his old haunts. He’s reflective about the passage of time and his stature: “These kids don’t even know who I am/You don’t know you in the presence of a real made man.” (Thanks to a renegotiated deal with Def Jam, he owns his masters.)
Saweetie, who features on “Proclivities,” grew up listening to him — her parents were fans. “It is absolutely mind-blowing to be on set with such an icon,” she said at the video shoot. Their song is straight lust, but it’s “enlightening, too,” the rapper, 27, added. “How many times a day do we hear anyone say ‘proclivities’?”
In the last two decades, LL — who was born James Todd Smith and goes by Todd with his intimates — has mostly been onscreen. He was a lead on “NCIS: Los Angeles,” the CBS procedural, and its spinoff, for 15 years (and he got financial points on the series). He hosted the Grammys five times.
David Stapf, president of CBS Studios, said his star power and charm were evident even in an early, failed pilot. “What was even more impressive about him was his presence on the set — it was like everybody was happy,” Stapf said in a video interview. “He was just a great leader.” Afterward, the network “pretty much begged Todd” to be on “NCIS,” playing a charismatic special agent. “The vibe of the show revolved around him,” Stapf said, and audiences responded “because it was authentic, because that’s who Todd is.”
What does it feel like to glide through life with such overwhelming confidence? (“I thought that I had confidence to a degree,” Q-Tip said. But not of the LL flavor.)
“It feels like you’re either going to win or lose,” LL said. “And if you win, you keep winning. And if you lose, you figure out how to win. That’s what it feels like.”
He added, “I’m very aggressive when it comes to my dreams.”
But he didn’t need to make an album. There was no contractual obligation or beef that prodded him into it. Other artists from his era (and even more recent greats, like Jay-Z) rarely step into the studio. He could’ve coasted on his considerable laurels, hit the road — as he did last year, with the Roots — and remained an outsize influence. But he would’ve been bored, he said. So he made himself vulnerable.
“The reality is, in order to win, you have to risk being criticized,” he said. “I have to risk being trolled in the comments,” and yes, he reads them. “If you want to win a championship, you got to be willing to lose a championship.”
(Maybe 60% of what LL says is metaphor, often sports- or food-themed. “Fruit trees don’t retire,” he said, in another beat on this topic. “They don’t say, I’m going to stop producing fruit for, you know, Season 2. No, that’s our nature.”)
And once he’s in, he hustles, doggedly. His grandmother, who helped raise him, taught him a maxim that he still recites eagerly: “If a task is once begun, never leave until it’s done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.”
“I heard that damn near every day,” he said — his first exposure to the mind-invading power of rhyme.
On a rain-soaked Friday evening, at a listening party in Manhattan — one of five he hosted across the country — LL Cool J introduced his album to invited guests in a minimalist space with heavy branding and free drinks by Coors (for whom he starred in a Super Bowl commercial this year). Usually that kind of promotional affair features the artist saying a few words about the tracks, sitting and nodding along in stylized reverie as they play.
But LL Cool J could not be contained. In conversation with journalist Elliott Wilson, he was philosophical (“it’s Black from the soul, not from the ego,” he said of one project) and funny; he does impressions of his collaborators, like Snoop’s high pitch and Busta’s gravelly growl. When the music started, he stood, mic in hand, and mouthed along. Eventually he just started rapping, commanding the stage so hard that his T-shirt dripped with sweat. He was like a musical theater kid who couldn’t help but give it his all, even at rehearsal.
Spending time with LL, in New York and Los Angeles, at video and photo shoots, in green rooms and over meals, I was struck by how endearingly deep of a word nerd he still is. There’s nothing that makes his eyes light up like a pun. On “Passion,” a reputational throwback over dreamy Herbie Hancock jazz, he uses the word “tutor” to evoke both Tudor architecture and the role of a teacher.
LL is a reader — “It’s good for my mind. It’s like sharpening the ax” — with a big wood-paneled bookcase at home. “Everything from Iceberg Slim to the history of the Peloponnesian War,” he said. “Authors are my friends.”
When my Russian heritage came up, he suddenly started speaking in Russian. Then he mentioned a crocodile character that was popular in Soviet-era animation (and used to terrify me as a kid). Why did he know about that? “Because I’m crazy,” he said gleefully, and walked away.
Improbably, he seems bigger than he did decades ago; his biceps rest like coiled pythons. (He has written two fitness books with his trainer, a boxing specialist who sometimes had him work out after shows.) But he’s not immune to indulgence. At a 4 p.m. interview at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, he devoured two entrees, plus a slice of apple pie with a double scoop of vanilla ice cream. And on every occasion we were together, no server or staffer passed by without his acknowledgment: “Appreciate you.”
LL had a rough childhood. His father abused his mother, the rapper wrote in his 1997 memoir, including during her pregnancy. And when mother and son later fled to the safety of her parents’ home in St. Albans, Queens, his father turned up, LL Cool J wrote, and shot both his mother and his grandfather. The sound of her moaning woke him, and he saw blood all over the kitchen. He was 4.
They all survived, but his mother’s next partner was physically and emotionally abusive to him, he wrote. Working double shifts in hospital pharmacies, his mother wasn’t aware at first. LL took solace in hip-hop, and started writing verses when he was 9. “The music and the rhymes helped me escape all the pain,” he said in the memoir.
When he was 11 and saw a Sugar Hill Gang concert in Harlem, he knew his path and began practicing. At 14, in a bit of wishful thinking, he christened himself Ladies Love Cool J (which came true). His family supported him, buying him turntables and a mixer.
But when he dropped out of school in ninth grade to pursue rap, his grandmother gave him an ultimatum — either resume his education, or leave her house — and he split, sleeping at friends’ places and on the subway, toting his belongings in a green garbage bag. He sent demos everywhere. And then Rick Rubin, the producer and a founder of Def Jam, called. (Four decades later, LL can still remember Rubin’s old phone number.) Not long after, he returned to his grandmother’s home — which he now owns — with a $50,000 advance check.
Alongside his grandmother’s work-ethic couplet, he had his mother, Ondrea Smith, exalting that he could be anything he wanted. “It’s the kind of support that teaches you how to grow a garden,” he said, “not shop for lettuce.” (His grandmother, Ellen Hightower, also inspired “Mama Said.” In the late ’80s, after an unsuccessful album, he was back home, wallowing in her basement. She told him, “You should get out there and knock them out.”)
Though he had wild — very wild — years, he met his wife, Simone Smith, early; the first of their four children was born when LL was 21, and in 1995, they married in their Long Island backyard, a small potluck wedding. They’re now grandparents, living in Los Angeles.
As he rose through fame, LL Cool J evolved musically. His all-out, bare-chested performance was the standout in a 1991 episode of MTV’s “Unplugged” series — the first to feature hip-hop, along with a live backing band. (Tribe, MC Lyte and De La Soul also played.) In the rehearsal, “you could see something click,” said Alex Coletti, the series’ producer. LL had the idea to drop in the Otis Redding “Hard to Handle” riff, as the breakdown in “Mama Said.” “He had a vision,” Coletti recalled. And on his next tour, LL had a live band.
He found some of that same restless, ranging spirit while recording with Q-Tip in his home studio in New Jersey. They were in and out, holed up for over a year, breaking for Q-Tip’s cheffy cooking, and to watch films; Basquiat’s moves in “Downtown 81” led to the funky ode “Basquiat Energy.”
LL had started an album with Dr. Dre, but felt he wasn’t living up to Dre’s production; after Phife Dawg, the Tribe member who died in 2016, came to him in a dream, he called up Q-Tip, who has produced for Nas, the Roots, Jay-Z, Mariah Carey and Esperanza Spalding. “Say less,” Q-Tip responded, when asked to collaborate. He didn’t need convincing.
LL was immediately awed by his musicality. “This is a guy that’s going to sit there and unpack jazz records for me and talk to me about musical theory,” he said. It reminded him of a lesson from a mentor.
“Quincy Jones would always talk to me about soul and science,” he said. “A lot of producers, especially in hip-hop, it’s all soul, it’s all feel. But then there’s a point when you need some science to help bridge the gap and go to the next level.” With Q-Tip, he found the right chemistry. “We didn’t have no eggshells,” LL said. “We didn’t have no weirdness. He got this mild-mannered demeanor,” but Q-Tip wasn’t afraid to push LL lyrically, telling him, “Big bro, that ain’t it.”
For his part, Q-Tip was enthralled by how intricate and easy LL’s flows were — and how connected he was to, he said, “his younger self.”
“I’ve been doing this for a minute,” Q-Tip said. “And you see people who sometimes, they forget that naivete, that inquisitiveness. I was surprised that somebody with his acumen would be willing to go into the sandbox like that.”
Sitting on the 101st floor of Hudson Yards, they could not have been more different: Q-Tip, dressed all in black, nibbling olives; LL, in shades of cream, blitzing through a saucy seafood entree. At one point they started singing the “Odd Couple” theme song.
Their partnership was reinvigorating, LL said — Q-Tip even drew the album artwork — and he hopes to collaborate again.
“I mean, I’m gonna pay through the teeth,” LL said, and they both laughed. “But that’s a whole other conversation.” Any producer could’ve made him beats; Q-Tip dialed him back into the art.
The last song on “The Force,” called “The Vow,” features three unsigned rappers: J-S.A.N.D, 25, whose beat is also on the track, was recruited by Q-Tip; Mad Squablz, 27, a security guard from Philadelphia, got a call from LL on New Year’s Day, 2022, after his manager spammed the star’s DMs; and Don Pablito, 38, a onetime barber and fellow Queens native, who’s been orbiting LL for decades.
The three didn’t know one another, but in video interviews, all said that being summoned for the LP was surreal and exhilarating. “It shows me what I have to aspire to be, or what I have to strive for,” J-S.A.N.D said.
After generations in the spotlight, LL exists in a state of “maximum gratitude,” he said. But especially after watching Mick Jagger strut with the Rolling Stones (he also cited Bruce Springsteen’s three-hour sets and U2 lighting up stadiums, he’s still hungry.
“Super-hungry,” LL said. “It’s so exciting to me to be able to do something impactful and keep going — there’s something real magical about that.”
It’s rare. “And it’s fun. That’s the most important part. This [expletive] is fun!”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
