Happy 30th Anniversary to Coolio’s debut album It Takes A Thief, originally released July 19, 1994.
Artis “Coolio” Ivey Jr. was one of hip-hop’s most intriguing characters. By the time he started his rap career, he’d already grappled with crack addiction and been incarcerated in prison. When he broke through as a solo rapper, the Compton-based artist was one of the most commercially acclaimed of his era, earning accolades, record sales, and awards throughout the mid-1990s.
Coolio’s debut It Takes A Thief, released 30 years ago, was one of the last gangsta rap albums of its kind. It delved into the tragedy of growing up poor and Black in Southern California, but still mined the humor that constituted everyday life in his neighborhood. Coolio created memorable songs out of joy, but often seemed like he was laughing to keep from crying.
It took a while for Coolio to get his solo career as a rapper going. As a member of Nu Skool, he released “(I Wanna Know) What Makes You Dance” in the late 1980s. During a time when gangsta rap was beginning to take hold of the Los Angeles rap scene, it was a dance-oriented electro-rap track, and was a modest regional success.
He earned national attention as a member of The M.A.A.D. Circle and was an important part of the group’s debut, Ain’t A Damn Thang Changed (1991). Though WC was the star/frontman of the group, Coolio proved to be a talented lyricist throughout the incredibly dope album. So going out on his own wasn’t a stretch.
Coolio was known for his distinctive look, sporting a headful of braids, each seemingly pointing in a different direction. During a time when G-Funk and live instrumentation were becoming the dominant sounds, he still preferred to use sample-based material. Bryan Dobbs a.k.a. Dobbs the Wino handled the production for much of It Takes a Thief. Dobbs and Coolio seemed acutely aware that an enjoyable sample and a catchy hook often went a long way in establishing whether the song was a hit.
Take “Fantastic Voyage,” the song most frequently associated with It Takes A Thief. Certified platinum and the catalyst for the album’s overall platinum sales, the song became the template for much of Coolio’s career, or at least his singles, whereby he raps over a sample of a recognizable, but not too recognizable, pop hit, often repurposing the song’s hook to match the subject matter. In this case, he uses Lakeside’s song of the same name.
“Fantastic Voyage” was ubiquitous throughout the summer of 1994, earning heavy radio play and video rotation on MTV. Though the song was severely overexposed, its message is legitimately moving, as Coolio envisions a paradise of sorts to escape from the violence and drug abuse that plagued many African American communities during the time period.
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Since “Fantastic Voyage” is very much It Takes A Thief’s signature song, many retroactively consider it was the album’s first single. That would actually be “County Line,” a track that highlights Coolio’s sense of humor. Coolio spins a tale of having fallen on hard times, forced to head to the overcrowded Department of Social Services to file General Relief (a.k.a. Welfare). He amps up the observational humor as he describes spending hours standing in lines, navigating pointless paperwork, and negotiating with surly county employees to get access to food stamps and free butter and cheese (“Oh, please!”). All the while, he tries to avoid the various drunks and junkies who recognize him as a rapper.
Coolio also uses humor to describe some less than savory practices on It Takes A Thief. “Smoking Stix” is one of the first songs dedicated to smoking PCP/Sherm that I’m aware of. He makes a track dedicated to the realities of smoking cigarettes in embalming fluid a party track of sorts, flowing over a sample of BT Express’ “You Got It, I Want It.” He plays his past penchant for theft for dark humor on “Sticky Fingers,” boasting, “Some fool got shot, now I’m going through his pockets / He won't be needing no dollars where he's going / And when I get to hell Imma act like I don’t know him.”
“Mama, I’m in Love With a Gangsta” mixes humor with poignancy, as Coolio crafts a story about the difficulties of maintaining a relationship while incarcerated. The track is a duet with rapper LeShaun (best known for “Doin’ It,” her collaboration with LL Cool J), where the pair portray a couple corresponding with each other while Coolio is incarcerated. While some of the song is played for laughs, on the whole it’s an examination of how frustration and loneliness can ravage such relationships, while each partner tries to support the other using whatever means at their disposal.
At other times, Coolio takes ridiculous subject matter and deals with it in a dead serious manner. “Ghetto Cartoon” is his much darker version of Ice Cube’s “A Gangsta’s Fairytale,” as he describes a blood-soaked three-way gang war in A Land Called Fuck between Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Bugs Bunny. Here Pixie and Dixie are out-of-town shooters from Chicago, and Tom and Jerry carry out a jailhouse execution to prevent Huey, Dewey, and Louie from snitching.
Coolio pulls no punches when examining his own background, delving into the tragic and often dangerous aspects of his upbringing. He treats these tracks as confessionals, delivering unvarnished descriptions of the often life-threatening habits he engaged in to either survive or cope. He explores growing up in abject poverty on “Can-O-Corn,” dealing with severe food insecurity and a family member’s drug addiction, eventually joining a gang, and acquiring less-than-legal talents as a means to stay alive.
The aforementioned “Sticky Fingers” may make light of Coolio’s smirking dedication to his penchant for theft, but the album’s title track strips away any perceived glamour of committing crime. Using a sing-songy delivery, Coolio makes it clear that burglarizing homes in the small hours of the night or straight up mugging neighborhood residents is nasty, and occasionally deadly, business. “You don't wanna see me coming down the street when I’m broke and it’s dark,” he warns. “So run your motherfucking pockets ’fore they find your ass dead in the park.”
He gets deeper into the more difficult aspects of his background with “N Da Closet,” which details his battles with drug addiction. He paints a very unflattering picture of his life during the mid-1980s, strung out on crack cocaine, estranged from his family, and committing crimes to support his habit. The song ends with his redemption, as he muses, “There's one thing about it when your life is fucked / At the bottom the only way to go is up.”
Even with all the serious and reality-based material, Coolio does take a few opportunities to demonstrate his skill at emceeing. He talks some serious shit on “Hand On My Nutsac,” rapping over a sped-up loop of “Talkin’” by White Heat. He’s joined by protégés Billy Boy and “PS” on “Thought You Knew,” with all kicking raw rhymes to a sample of Malcom McLaren’s “ Hobo Scratch.” He even reunites with M.A.A.D. Circle cohort WC on the thumping, DJ Crazy Toones-produced “U Know Hoo,” where he hails his crew’s ability to “start shit in an empty room.”
It Takes a Thief ends on a wistful note with “I Remember,” where Coolio is joined by the aforementioned Billy Boy and J-Ro of Tha Alkaholiks. Over a sample of Al Green’s “Tomorrow’s Dream,” all three reminisce about simpler, but not necessarily easier, times. For Coolio and J-Ro, it entails enjoying their respective youths in Southern California, playing tag and Pop Warner football, hitting up the corner store for Cheetos, and playing arcade games. Billy Boy recalls his at times difficult transition from living in a small town in the Rust Belt to Compton. The song is one of the first produced by Gary “G-Luv” Herd, who has built a career over the last two decades as The Architect.
It Takes a Thief was the first step in a very successful voyage for Coolio. While other Tommy Boy signees chaffed at the label’s requests for their artists to make repeated variations of their big hits, Coolio seemed game. And it certainly worked out for him: the GRAMMY winning “Gangsta’s Paradise” is one of the best known hip-hop singles ever, and many subsequent releases were hits both commercially and on the charts.
Coolio’s death in 2022 hasn’t led to a grand reevaluation of his output, but his discography deserves more respect than it’s received. He could effortlessly navigate the lines between tragedy and comedy, providing grounded views of his past while being hopeful for the future. It’s a balance that only a select few artists have learned to negotiate, and fewer still did it as well as Coolio.
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