When Adario Strange visited Reggie Noble for his first-ever Source cover story in November 1994, the music journalist did not meet the same Redman that later interviewers would: humble, engaging, eager to please. Instead, Noble brought his face inches from Strange’s, breath hot and eyes rolling. “If someone was to come into this room right now and pop you and me in the head and kill us,” Noble demanded, “when we turned around, what would we see? Would we see the devil sittin’ there in that seat ready to blow our head off, or would we see a regular motherfucker?”
Redman was in a strange headspace in 1994. Most of his professional and personal life—and, since he’d been living on Erick Sermon’s couch since he got kicked out of his parents’ house as a teen, the two were one and the same—had disintegrated around him. Sermon, his mentor, was in the midst of a painful split-up with his creative partner, PMD. The Hit Squad, the extended family of East Coast rhymers that took in Redman alongside Das EFX, K-Solo, and Keith Murray, took sides like children in a divorce.
No score yet, be the first to add.
The split was messy and ugly, with figurative and literal shots fired, some of which left bullet holes in Sermon’s house while Redman still lived there. His friends were maybe trying to kill each other; the tour to promote his debut, Whut? Thee Album, was kneecapped by the squabble. Two years earlier, he’d been a part of one of the most vibrant extended families in rap. Now, he was almost completely alone.
By Noble’s own account, he spent these years dusted on a cocktail of drugs, primarily acid and PCP, and there were multiple signs during the run-up to Dare Iz a Darkside, Redman’s second album, that things were off. The Source story was not a fluke: Bad energy radiates from him in every surviving interview clip from the era, his eyes glazed and darting, body language tense and charged. He looks wary, belligerent, like someone you would not want to tap on the shoulder.
“I don’t remember none of that process,” he reflected years later, attempting to recall the making of Darkside. The album remains something of a little brother in Redman’s discography, neither the album that broke him nationally (that would be 1996’s Muddy Waters) nor the album that announced him as a solo force. “That’s my least likable album,” he said once. It’s also his purest.
For Redman, being likable was a responsibility. Before he rapped, he was a DJ for DoItAll, of the group Lordz of the Underground, performing under the name Kut-Killa. As a solo artist, he carried the hype man’s sense of duty: There was always a crowd to rock, a battle opponent to decimate, cheap seats in the back that deserved their show, too. Dare Iz a Darkside represents the one time in his long career that Reggie Noble forgot to be ingratiating. The imagined audience in his head disappeared. Left to his own career devices and marooned in a sea of bad neurochemicals, he turned the lights down, cranked the bass up to numbing levels, and blacked out.
