Happy 30th Anniversary to Too $hort’s ninth studio album Cocktails, originally released January 24, 1995.
Todd Shaw a.k.a. Too $hort enjoys using his albums as extended victory laps. He’s an artist that’s been rapping for well over four decades, and famously evolved from slanging tapes out of the trunk of his car to become an indie label artist with a strong local following, and then on to earning broader status as a platinum-selling artist with a national and global following. During the first decade of his career, various albums served as signposts of the man who put Oakland hip-hop scene on the map leveling up.
With Cocktails, his ninth album, Too $hort was interested in more than just basking in the glow of his Platinum success. While Short Dog’s In The House (1990) and Shorty The Pimp (1992) may have been a couple of the aforementioned victory laps, Cocktails plays like a defiant middle finger. Aware of the lack of respect that his music received from various hip-hop purists, Short spends large portions of Cocktails bemusedly telling his critics to fuck off while he makes his money.
A solid commercial success when it was released, Cocktails quickly went gold and eventually certified platinum. However, it’s one of Too $hort’s most underappreciated recordings. While the singles are all quite good, none of them are considered among Short Dog’s greatest hits. Still, three decades later, it stands as one of Too $hort’s towering artistic achievements. It feels strange to say that a platinum album doesn’t feel as fully recognized as it deserves by even his core fanbase, but Cocktails falls into this category.
Cocktails is Short Dog’s most thematically rich and multi-faceted album. Too $hort chooses not to coast a decade into his recording career, turning out an album with his overall best lyrical and musical performances. Yet, he seemingly approaches the album like its business as usual. “We ain't no punks, we can't be played,” he raps. “Still in the game, still getting paid.”
Cocktails was also the first album Too $hort recorded after he shifted geographic locations. He had long recorded out of Oakland, but in 1994 he pulled up stakes and shifted his base of operations to Atlanta. While it was a controversial decision in the Bay Area, the move made some sense. Georgia’s state capital was already a city on the rise, recognized as a growing Black Las Vegas or Black Mecca, and was a couple of years away from reaching its peak on the global stage. Cocktails was recorded entirely at Dallas Austin’s D.A.R.P. studios and featured appearances from many personalities who’d also either changed locales or were frequent visitors to the city.
Too $hort has rapped to live instrumentation throughout his career, but sample-free tracks are central to Cocktails’ identity. Much of the album’s production is credited to longtime collaborator Ant Banks and the Dangerous Crew, Short’s “in house” band. The band’s ranks included Shorty B on the Bass, Pee Wee (known as a member of Digital Underground) on the keys, and Tony T on the drums. Get In Where You Fit In (1993) signified the beginnings of the shift towards an organic, funk-driven sound, but Cocktails represents the full realization of this direction.
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The band displays its funky stylings on “Ain’t Nothing Like Pimpin’” and “Don’t Fuck For Free,” which, respectively, start and end the album. Both are anchored by thumping basslines, and both center on Too $hort’s prowess as a ladies man and game spitter. Furthermore, Short makes it clear on these tracks that age and experience haven’t mellowed his outlook on life and women, nor his abilities as a pimp.
Despite Short and company’s geographic homebase during Cocktails’ recording, but the album is very much rooted in Oakland. Short honors the city and his past music throughout Cocktails. The album’s modified title track and first single, “Cocktales,” is one example, as it serves as one of his numerous sequels to “Freaky Tales,” the song that made Too $hort notorious in the Bay Area and beyond. “Cocktales” functions as a much raunchier version of the original; it’s easy to forget that for all its sex-styled lyrics, “Freaky Tales” is pretty darn tame, especially by 1995’s standards. This track features Short listing many of his sexual conquests, boasting what women do for him in explicit detail over slick guitar licks and a wailing keyboard groove.
“Coming Up Short” sounds like it could have been lifted from Life Is… Too Short (1989). Too $hort mocks shady females who scheme and hope that he’ll get them pregnant so that they get a piece of his riches via child support. As with many of Too $hort’s tracks, it’s not the most enlightened content, but like many songs in his discography, he pulls it off with his limitless panache. In a particularly funny extended passage, he muses about how his life would change if he knocked up one of these women. He envisions his own version of Hell where he’s Todd Shaw instead of Too $hort and where “bitches won’t want me, ’cause I’m all washed up, broke, fat and funky.”
Short takes things back to his earliest recording days with “Game,” a duet with Old School Freddie B a.k.a. Fred Benz. $Short and Freddie B go way back, first meeting each other on the bus during their younger years and recording songs together since 1979, and then attending Fremont High at the same time. The pair would rock house parties as a team, and eventually recorded entire tapes/albums together, slanging them throughout Oakland during the early to mid-1980s. Short said that Freddie didn’t appear on any of his earlier official releases due to the latter’s legal issues and subsequent incarceration.
“Game,” produced by LA Dre, has all the musical trappings of one of the pair’s mid-1980s team-ups. Both Short and Freddy B adopt their old school flows and deliveries, spinning more tales of their sexual conquests. Short even proclaims on the track that “We the two n****s who invented the word 'BI-ATTCHH!!'” He’s not wrong.
Cocktails also features some great Bay Area rider music. “Can I Get a Bitch,” a duet with rapper/producer Ant Banks, is a dedication to the city of Oakland and their longevity within the rap game. The two boast about their impact as artists and recall how their lives were shaped by Oakland. The track’s chorus is the leading call-and-response chant of “Bi-Attttchh!!!” (there it is again), which is simultaneously incongruous to the song’s subject matter and still completely fits with the vibe.
“Top Down,” the album’s third single, is another straight-ahead anthem. Short cruises along the streets of cities around the country in his drop-top, appreciating the sunny weather and connecting with his fans. Across the mellow grooves, Short Dog emphasizes how money and fame haven’t changed him, and he still remembers his humble origins.
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Cocktails features a pair of solid posse cuts. “We Do This” has a pair of verses from MC Breed, as well as appearances from Oakland’s Father Dom and 2Pac. Pac gives a largely understated and underappreciated verse, detailing the significance of Oakland to his upbringing. Meanwhile, “Giving Up the Funk” is the album’s Dangerous Crew-centered collaboration, where Banks, Pee Wee, and Goldy lay down smooth player shit. The Dangerous Crew band also recreate the certain groove to the Bride of Frankenstein’s “Disco To Go” as the musical backdrop, which ends up sounding funkier than a sample of the record.
“Sample the Funk” is an even more overt middle finger to artists who rely on sampling. Short, who produces the track, has the Dangerous Crew band replay large portions of Ohio Players’ “Funky Worm,” which, by the mid-1990s, had been utilized on countless songs. He mocks those who have to pay exorbitant sample clearance fees, while he maximizes his money through the use of a skilled live band.
Too $hort also lays out his retirement plan, noting that, “I'm makin' one more album and then I quit / And only one thing could make me say I'm not / And that's one million dollars on the spot / Upfront cash, money, no compromise / No schemes, no scandals, don't front and lie.”
Of course, Short Dog would follow this map damn near to the letter soon afterwards. He “retired” after his subsequent album, Gettin’ It (Album Number Ten) (1996). Predictably, the retirement was a ploy to get out of his initial contact with Jive Records and sign an even more lucrative deal with the same label.
“Paystyle,” the album’s second single, is another blatant thumb to the eye of hip-hop traditionalists. It’s not as much an anti-freestyling track as it is Short’s dismissal of his critics, particularly those who belittled his skills as a rapper. He directs much of his ire at East Coast emcees who don’t respect his work and that of his fellow west coast brethren. He derides emcees obsessed with flashy lyricism and technique, telling them to “jump your ass on the train wit your backpack tight.” He further eschews the idea of rhyming in a cypher, opting instead to connect with his fans, and drives home the point that he 1) goes to the studio and gets things done (“I made nine albums in nine years”) and 2) moves a lot of units with the output of these recording sessions.
In the midst of all of this, “Thangs Change” is perhaps one of the most unique songs in Too $hort’s catalogue. Produced by Short and Spearhead X, it begins and ends conventionally enough, with Jamal and Lil Malik (then members of the duo Illegal) delivering seemingly freestyled verses over a soulful piano track. But sandwiched in-between, Short gives a detailed dissertation on the moral decline of the United States.
Over two verses, Short laments a pervasive culture where people don’t respect their elders, violence turns friends against each other, and sex is omnipresent on TV and in movies. Yeah, it’s more than a little odd to hear Short bemoan a society where “women used to like to wear decent clothes / Now they curse like men and dress like hoes.” However, Short makes it clear that his raps are a symptom rather than the cause, arguing as effectively as anyone that his music is the product of the time. “If it was 1950, do you think I’d sell?” he ponders. “No, they’d probably throw me straight to jail.”
Too $hort has released a lot of material since the arrival of Cocktails. I don’t know if he’s ever sounded like he’s had as much fun as he had on this album. And while he’s certainly released a good amount of dope material across the past thirty years, very little of it is as ambitious as what he attempted here. Cocktails is even more rewarding now than when it first dropped, aging like fine wine. It deserves a place among his top releases.
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