Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that E-40 was sitting outside the courtroom with Chamillionaire and not Frank Ocean at the Rockets Game.
Long before E-40 became a regional hero in Northern California, he would walk into Vallejo’s Salvation Army and Goodwill outposts with a handful of dimes, hunting for old records to sample. One day he came across a beat-up soundtrack to a children’s cartoon. “I think it was Spider-Man,” the rapper, born Earl Stevens, says from the back of a chauffeured SUV, en route to rehearse for the Recording Academy’s “Salute to 50 Years of Hip Hop” concert at Inglewood’s YouTube Theater in early November.
“One of the parts that I sampled was”—and here 40, one of the great chameleons in a genre full of them, affects the stilted voice of a villain from a 1940s radio play—“Give me that key.”