De La Soul's Crackhead Song Is A True Story

"My Brother's A Basehead" is about Posdnous's older brother

You would not normally associate De La Soul with crack but one of the greatest hiphop songs about crack is “My Brother’s A Basehead” from De La’s 1991 second album “De La Soul Is Dead.” Part of why the song is so powerful is that the song is real. Posdnous’s older brother really was a crack addict. He once told a journalist, “When my brother was basin’ I had strong feelings about it. Some people may have thought it was too personal for them to write about, but I really didn’t care.”

The crack era was serious. In the mid to late 80s, in major cities, there were armies of crackheads scrounging for every dollar they could get, and drug dealers warring over every block. Crack is why the homicide rate for young Black men skyrocketed and why the fetal death rate rose sharply. The number of break-ins and robberies rose—brazen addicts would run into homes and steal TVs and VCRs or break into cars for their radios. Anything that could be sold for a quick buck was a target. In the big cities it felt like there was an all-out assault of drugs and bullets and theft and crack zombies. Criminologist David Kennedy once said, crack blew through America’s poor Black neighborhoods like the four horsemen of the apocalypse had traded their horses for supercharged bulldozers.

KRS-One told me, “Crack came like a monsoon. Everyone in the ghetto got drenched. Business was good, so the competition was murder. The gun epidemic screeched in. Territory wars went nuclear. The innocent got killed with regularity. Basketball courts became war zones.” Nas told me, “Crack sucked the life out of people. They’d lose not just their weight but their minds. It destroyed people. When you became a crackhead you lost your soul and I started to feel like New York had a sort of a gloom about it.”

The impact of crack went far beyond the users. It destroyed whole families. NWA’s “Dopeman” is amazing at describing what it’s like to be a dealer, but no song is better at giving us the pain of dealing with a crack addiction in the family than “My Brother’s A Basehead”. (Yes, including Tupac’s iconic “Dear Mama.”) In “Basehead,” crack was literally in the house—it was in Posdnous’s family’s house—just as it had figuratively invaded the house that is Black America.

I talked to Prince Paul, De La’s producer, who produced “Basehead.” Paul said, “I remember Pos just really being bothered. He was recording the record and really expressing a lot of emotion. I mean, the song sounds kind of lighthearted,” which is true, the song’s top layer is funny and almost whimsical, but the lyrics are a depressing tale of a whole family being pulled down by one member’s addiction. “It was something that bothered him,” Paul said, “and it came across in that studio session.” Paul said the song came together rapidly. “It was a very quick song to record because Pos knew what he wanted. I remember having the beat going in, recording it, and it just felt heavy. I was like, is this really happening?”

Paul knew Posdnous’s brother and he knew it was a real story. So he also knew that making a public statement about him like this was a big, emotional deal. Paul didn’t have to do a lot during this recording because Posdnous knew what he wanted to do with the record, but he did coach Pos to be more evocative. “As a producer, I want people to feel how I know you're feeling right now, and I knew it was for frustrating for Pos and I wanted people to feel his frustration. I wanted to make sure that that was in his vocal tone and his performance.”

Paul said, “I'm almost thinking that Pos put it out there to almost wake up his brother, you know what I'm saying? Like, he was saying, ok he'll listen to this and, maybe I can't tell him in words, face to face how I feel, but this is something that might grab his attention and let him know that this is bothering our family. This is bothering me. We're disappointed in you.”

Part of why “Basehead” is so deep is because it’s so precise about addiction. At one point Posdnous rhymes, “Said there was a voice inside you that talked…” and that hit me very deeply.

I know what it is to be an addict. I’m an addict who got control. Somehow. For many, many years—decades—I smoked weed every day. I couldn’t stop even in the times when I told myself I wanted to stop. It was an addiction that I felt in my skin—if I didn’t smoke by a certain time, I would get frustrated and even angry. My skin would start to itch and feel hot. It was low key withdrawal. The thing that helped me crawl out of that place was realizing that the addiction had formed a voice inside my head. For a while my internal voice and the voice of the addiction seemed to me like they were the same. I couldn’t tell them apart. In time I realized, no, the addiction had a voice that was talking to me. It was a voice inside me that was like a parasite in my thought process. It pushed every conversation back to the notion of consuming. It argued in favor of using right now, no matter how ridiculous the suggestion was. If it was sunny, the voice would say, it’s sunny, we should smoke. If it was rainy, the voice would say, it’s rainy, we should smoke. If it was morning or night, weekday or weekend, the voice always had a reason to smoke. It was persuasive and relentless. The addiction was like a person inside of me that I had to negotiate with and fight with. If I said no, it just waited a moment and asked again. It took a lot of emotional energy it took to fight off this obsessive voice. But when I realized that it was the addiction talking, I was able separate the addiction’s voice from mine and begin my journey to sobriety.

It’s easy for a writer (of any sort) to describe a crackhead by saying he’s scratching his skin or he looks deathly thin. Anyone can observe that. But to talk about the voice inside the addict is a hidden detail that takes intellectual work to find. For Posdnous to mention that was powerful to me.

Posdnous once told a journalist that when he made the song he wasn’t on speaking terms with his brother. He said, “Even though he’s trying to do better now, he’s fucked up so much in life that I really can’t deal with him. He knows I’ve written the song but obviously he can’t do shit about it.”

At the end of “Basehead,” Posdnous’s brother does not quit. He moves to New York City where, presumably, he can indulge his addiction as much as he wants. But, according to Prince Paul, in reality, his brother went to rehab and got clean.

“All ended well,” Paul said, “and he’s healthy now. And who's to say, you know, maybe that record was that thing.”