19/12/2020
Too Short and E-40 Are Doing Verzuz the “Bay Area Way”
It’s difficult to imagine two rappers whose approaches to a beat diverge more sharply than Too Short and E-40. Tomorrow night, the final 2020 installment of Swizz Beatz and Timbaland’s Verzuz series will pit Short—the Oakland legend who delivers laconic pimp raps in a near-nasal register from deep in the beat’s pocket—against the Vallejo-bred 40, whose voice warps and contorts like an Animaniac. The two Bay Area veterans have known each other since the mid-1980s, and explain that they’re treating the exercise as more of a celebration than a cage match. “I don’t wanna approach this like I’m trying to beat E-40,” Too Short says over Zoom, while receiving a haircut. “I’m approaching it like it’s me and E-40 versus the entire planet.”
In conjunction with their Verzuz event, 40 and Short have dropped new albums––Terms and Conditions and Ain’t Gone Do It, respectively––which are packaged together on digital streaming platforms. (This is not the first time they’ve worked together: there’s the 2012 double-disc album originally called The History Channel, and there are one-off collaborations going back to the Clinton years.) The pair share an easy rapport, and pepper their conversation with the tics from their music: Short with his matter-of-fact, bad-uncle advice spun into parables, 40 with his expressive voice and invented syntax.
