The Homage: Mafia Culture’s Influence on Rap Music

The relationship between crime and hip-hop runs deep; many rappers are sponsored by criminals, inspired by them, or in rare cases, even lived the life themselves. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, several New York rappers—inspired by the long legacy of films like The Godfather, GoodFellas, and Casino—introduced the world to hip-hop's cinematic equivalent. But it wasn’t just the one-dimensional glory that enamored a generation of hip-hop auteurs—although sometimes it could be that, too. Within these dramatic renderings of mob life, rappers saw the dramatic arcs that reflected the very real dynamics of the street stories that were experienced, observed, or passed on down through the generations.

The Mafia's influence on hip-hop takes on different forms: idealizing the lives of mythic gangsters past and present (Al Capone, John Gotti). Celebrating the many rewards of the fast life, the sudden popularity of suits and wide-brimmed fedoras, or simply emulating the epic scope of the fictionalized, dramatized versions seen in film and on television—the intertwining hip-hop obsessions of realism and flights of kingpin fancy are the absorbing tension at the heart of the Mafioso rap subgenre. Although the peak of the Mafia's influence was largely restricted to New York and the mid-1990s, hip-hop’s embrace of Mafioso tics and tropes was an energizing force, and spawned some of the genre’s best records.

Aside from a few lyrical references to Tony Soprano though, hip-hop’s Mafia obsession is not what it once was. Much as Unforgiven marked the end of America’s obsession with westerns, The Sopranos seems like the place where pop culture’s interest in the Mafia life may have reached its denouement. Yet its influence continues to filter down in unexpected ways. Soon, hip-hop began to produce its own films, telling its own stories on the big screen—like 2002’s Paid in Full, which told the story of Azie Faison, the Harlem drug kingpin—which then in turn impacted hip-hop.

With that said, let’s take a look at some of hip-hop’s most important mob music moments.

Kool G Rap was not just Mafioso hip-hop’s pioneer; he became its most enduring proponent, manufacturing John Gotti rhymes throughout the 1990s. (Although a then-unknown rapper from Houston named Mr. Scarface may have beaten him to the gangster movie punch by a few years, he was named after the 1983 Scarface, a new version of the original Al Capone story about a non-Mafia Cuban-American immigrant.) His first step into mob music began with 1989’s “Road to the Riches,” but G Rap’s creative peak was the epic “On the Run,” from 1992’s Live and Let Die. Playing the part of a flunky transporting cash for the mob, G Rap decides to abscond with half a million dollars. Chased by the Luciano family, G Rap goes on the run (thus the title), until eventually shooting Don Luciano five times and spitting “in his guinea face.” Damn son! Not only was his Mafia obsession super influential, but G Rap’s narrative style is a clear inspiration to rappers like Biggie and Nas—but more on them in a minute.

Though the opening of the song samples the 1989 John Woo film The Killer—not exactly a Mafia film, although it is about a hitman—“Wu-Gambinos” (like Only Built 4 Cuban Linx as a whole) is a classic in the Mafia-rap canon. The year 1995 marked the real emergence of Mafioso rap, and Cuban Linx was a centerpiece record: From “Criminology” to “Incarcerated Scarfaces,” Raekwon transformed day-to-day street drama into a crime story epic, flooding street stories with fresh slang and framing them with cinematic scope. Even the song’s introduction—where different members of the Wu are given nicknames like Noodles—was in part inspired by Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, an Italian film about a character who becomes a major player in New York’s criminal underworld.

Kool G Rap’s 4, 5, 6 continued the rapper’s Mafia narratives, as on “It’s a Shame”(“The boss of all bosses, I own racehorses and a fortress”). But “Fast Life” found Kool G Rap passing the mob-rap baton to Nas, transforming Surface’s ’80s R&B classic “Happy” into an enigmatic canvas on which the two rappers stitched not so much a story as a setting, with glamorous largess and kingpin fantasies that would make Rick Ross seem uninspired in the contrast. A team from Queens “plottin’ up a scheme to get the seven-figure cream,” Nas and G Rap blanket the canvas with bodies rolled up in carpets, “count math from steam baths,” and get guns from Italy. In case the comparison wasn't clear enough, by the end Nas makes it explicit, comparing the duo to “Ghetto wise guys: Lucky Luciano, Frankie Yale, Bugsy Siegel/Green papers with eagles from a trade that’s illegal.”

AZ’s Doe Or Die was another entry in the Mafioso rap canon. Perhaps no song better illustrated the subgenre’s cinematic ambitions than “Mo Money Mo Murder,” written less like a story and more like a screenplay—a screenplay, that is, with an especially rococo lyrical style. AZ and Nas indulge in their tendency to internal rhyme and intricate lyrical architecture: “I’m into bigger cheddar, G’s and better, Armarettas/Armani sweaters, plus these crabs could never dead us.” AZ—whose nickname was Sosa the year Chief Keef was born—even opens the track with a clip from the 1991 film Mobsters, a dramatized account of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Bugsy Siegel’s rise: “We’re bigger than the Jews...bigger than the Irish.” In comparison with earlier examples, like Kool G Rap’s literal mafia narrative, or “Fast Life’s” glamorization, “Mo Money Mo Murder” draws more attention to the kinds of writerly details of scene and setting (“Sippin’ cappuccino, spilled on his silk suits, was scaldin’/Laugh was vulgar, canvas paintings of the Isatollah/And on his arm he wore a priceless vulture”), as well as the ominous consequences, of a life lived illegal.

At this point it should be evident that Nas Escobar is G Rap’s one rival for the most Mafia-inclined rapper out of New York. He solidified his status as one of the reigning names in mob music with It Was Written, from the Italian film score strings of “The Message” (OK, actually it was a Sting sample, but inspired recontextualization nonetheless) and especially “Street Dreams.” While Nas raps about a drug dealer’s destiny (reaching the Florida Keys) the video reinvents Scorsese’s Casino as the hip-hop showcase it was always meant to be.

With storm cloud strings entering like a film soundtrack, Sheek Louch calls himself Sheek Luciano, Jada threatens to turn people “into Jimmy Hoffa,” and Biggie threatens to break both your legs. In a record that transformed Biggie from a corner hustler to the rap game kingpin, this was the Mafioso rap promise of Kool G fully realized.

It wasn’t just the sartorial flair of the cover art on Reasonable Doubt, where Jay’s face is hidden under the brim of his hat, a cigar poking out from between two fingers. It’s not just the money he’s still spending from ’88, the fruits of the illegal life. Instead, it was the bulletproof rap style—Jay sounded like a boss, his confidence so extreme that one didn’t even realize how much was left out, the details obscured. “Crime family, well-connected, Jay Z.”

Nothing says “the Mafia” like threats of violence and a weight problem. “Twinz” is an absolute Mafioso classic, and no one had an ear for mob movie details like Pun: “Meet me at Vito’s with Noodles, we’ll do this dude while he’s slurping spaghetti.” Then of course it all culminates in Pun’s iconic showboating line: “Dead in the middle of Little Italy, little did we know we’d riddled some middlemen who didn’t do diddly.”

With mob movie production and verses spit like dialogue heard over the wire while the Feds listen in, “Phone Tap” was archetypal Mafioso rap music. Of course, if you’re talking on the phone, Nas can’t break into the real details—it all comes in code: “Son, we took an oath, then this life took us both/We rich now, milk the whole cow, split the growth.”

One of the lesser-known albums of Kool G Rap’s oeuvre is the underrated Root of Evil LP, perhaps the last great Mafioso record of New York’s mob-rap reign. Kool G Rap still packed impossible levels of details into each dense stanza, his words coiled into a maze of cinematic narrative: “Moved on it closer get the toaster/Started to feel like death was closer, I hit Capone hard/Murder him and his bodyguard in their car and dust the chauffeur.”

The beat swipes the same sample as AZ’s “The Pay Back” from one year earlier, and in the ornate rap style of obscure Chicago rap duo Jiggs & Cheeks, there is a definite AZ influence. A perfect example of how the Mafioso rap movement in New York was beginning to influence other artists across the country, “Death Before Dishonor” is one track from the group’s only album, 1999’s Jiggs & Cheeks The Don. It was hardly the only example of Mafioso rap on the record, either, as the title suggests. The Don was a blend of jiggy/crimewave rap not unlike the Firm’s album, laid atop a uniquely Chicago brand of gangster rap. Songs like “Show Me tha Money” captured this style of dense cinematic gangland rapping, while “Valentine Massacre” gave the entire record an authentically Chicagoan twist.

With its string patches and one of history’s worst fake accents, Master P introduced his latest album with an explicit Mafia record and reference. Of course, No Limit, in general, owed a sartorial debt to the Mafia as well, resplendent in boxy suits and wide-brimmed fedoras. In this instance, it seems as likely to have come from the West Coast influences that so directly shaped No Limit’s sound—the formal wear of Pac, as well as Snoop, who of course had released his Doggfather album to an underwhelming response a few years earlier, and now rode alongside P in the tank.

Young Bleed, alias Young Bleed Carleone [sic], was raised on South Garfield Street in Baton Rouge, La., which, as he pointed out in an interview with Consequence of Sound, is the name of the same street Al Capone grew up on in Brooklyn. Much of Young Bleed’s music contains Mafia references—like “The Day They Made Me Boss,” from the rapper’s underrated 1998 debut, My Balls and My Word. (If we talked about Scarface references, this list would be 47 times as long.)

Mafioso hip-hop was by and large an East Coast phenomenon in part because the West Coast was so consumed with the vicarious realism of gangster rap at the time. But that’s not to say that gangster rap on the left coast was ignoring the Mafia mythos either. Here, Mac Dre interpolated the theme to The Godfather for this classic record about “Sippin’ martinis, eatin’ scampi and linguini/Makin’ blunts disappear like I’m Houdini.” The record has that comical Mac Dre touch, as if the notion of comparing modern-day drug deals to the Mafioso lifestyle is more about the absurdity than thematic resonance.

Bay Area hip-hop crew the Mob Figaz were disciples of ’90s East Coast rap styles, so perhaps it’s no surprise that some of their early work similarly dresses up street hustles in the dramatic costumes of history’s greatest Mafia flicks. The production likewise hints at the cinematic origins of the group’s inspiration.

In many ways, Rick Ross is an anachronism: from his regal largess to his intricate, illustrative rap writing, Ross resuscitated classic Mafioso rap’s stylistic characteristics and transported them to Miami. The kingpin lifestyle he weaves throughout his work is reminiscent of the similarly intricate rhymes and fantasies of classic New York. Of course, it’s not exactly the same—there’s the stature and poise of Biggie, AZ’s lyrical architecture, and G Rap’s fast life aspirations. A pastiche of the themes of the 1990s’ most popular rap stars, Rick Ross, in many ways, embodies a lost art—even if he lacks the innovative edge of those legends, even though his style may at times feel like a bit more of an optical illusion, he has kept the torch alive.

If we were to highlight every rapper who’d referenced John Gotti in their career, this list would be endless. But Gates—who’s now named two separate mixtapes for The Godfather character Luca Brasi, a moniker that he’s also taken to describe himself—is an exception. One of the most buzzed-about artists in street rap, Gates focuses primarily on first-person narratives, honing in on his own psychological well-being. His incorporation of Mafia tropes tends to be limited to a simile or two (“like John Gotti”) rather than the formal characteristics of Mafia rap past. Yet, even then, the Mafia’s influence lives on in Italian nicknames—less of a musical style and more of a cultural accent.