It seems like a lifetime ago, Dr. Dre said, "I never smoke weed or cess cause it's known to give a brother brain-damage." This late-80s construct, synonymous with lace-less Adidas sneakers and groups of rebel ghetto youths who lived with an "eyebrows down" mentality, dictated the way issues in the 'hood would be rationalized: with flash that appealed to all age groups. Only a few years after Dre said that, his critically acclaimed album, "The Chronic" was hailed as a classic by half-baked bangers and casual partiers alike. In the 80s, it was deemed crazy to even admit that you smoked weed even once on record. But who would wanna admit? With all the anti-drug statements that Public Enemy and Brand Nubian made during the height of the evil crack epidemic, there was simply a different consciousness among rappers. Crack was a drug that tore a new one in the hoods of America's major cities, especially New York City, so if you were associated with it, you were looked at in a much different light. There was some sort of an unspoken agreement that hip-hop had made that promised to use rap as a way to teach one-another about the peril of the pipe. But right around this time, it seemed that hip-hop started to take a soft left turn into a more reality-based identity that glorified the use of the hood drug-of-choice, the mind-expanding marijuana. NWA and the rest of the West Coast gangsta scene had already made it alright for rappers to shed light on the mentality of dudes on the block. Soon after, we were introduced to the chinky-eyed cheebahawk from Shaolin Method Man, and the New Jersey rhyme-surgeon who taught us all how to roll a blunt on his 1992 debut, Redman. It seemed as if accepting lyrics about using drugs was a huge barrier that allowed rappers to move forward creatively. For the first time, the whole rap game was blunted and it became normal for someone to spit a line like "smoke you like a blunt."

But then in 1995, something drastic happened. A whole new persona was created around a drug whose glamour and glitz far exceeded its commercial use. An album centered around an afflicting narcotic that once had the nation's top entertainers and personalities in a brainlock. The drug was cocaine and the album was Raekwon's "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx." With his eye-catching partner in rhyme, Ghostface Killah, Rae depicted lavish tales of fast cars and even faster broads bought with money made from grand coke deals. Sure rappers like Kool G Rap had sprinkled their lyrics here and there with low-radar references to coke, but Lex Diamonds was about to open up a whole new world to the game with such blatant endorsement. To the listener, the first thing realized is that coke had never been so "cool." With beats laced with Scarface samples and intros of what sounded like snorting, Rae had definitely amplified the already deadly allure of cocaine. Throughout the album, Rae spits tongue-in-cheek lines that imply his affiliation with the drug game. My favorite being one on "Incarcerated Scarfaces" where he says, "I move rhymes like retail/ make sure shit sells/ from where we at to my man's cell." He even went as far as changing the color of the actual cassette tape to purple; justifying it as saying, "I wanted to portray an image that if I was selling cracks or dimes in the street, you would recognize these dimes from other niggas' dimes." Every rapper was getting in on the new craze. Even the street's disciple - the rapper who represented the project hallway and staircase - Nas created an entire alter-ego, Nas Escobar. But still, just as Cuban Linx celebrates the fruits of slangin', the warning signs were there right at the beginning. In the album's opening skit, Raekwon and Ghostface converse about making one last score before getting out of the game. Ghost distraughtly admits, "My moms windows got shot the fuck up man! My baby's in here, God." But the mere fact that they both continue after attempts on their lives is the key to it all and perhaps the underlying moral of the whole album. It's that the underground drug world is full of money and top-dawg lifestyles, but greed and addiction always help bring the whole operation to its knees. "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx" captures coke-hop at its peak, before rappers appeared out of the woodworks claiming they had slanged in bulk and had even been shot over it.

These days, the presence of drugs in hip-hop has almost come full-circle in commercial hip-hop. It went from shunned, to praised, back to being a topic that needs to be handled a certain way before it can available for public consumption. Never again will it have the same attractive haze around it. Today, it's just another notch on the "bad boy rapper's" belt; a standard by which we judge credibility.