#murda one

Motivational music in the Morning ... Too Short feat. Studd, Murda One & Joe Riz, Bad Ways (Audio) ... from the Album: Gettin' It (Album Number Ten) (1996)

#MMitM1 #Rituals

Who is Too $hort: Todd Anthony Shaw — born April 28, 1966 in Los Angeles, raised in Oakland — is a pioneer of West Coast hip-hop, among the first acts to receive recognition in the genre during the late 1980s. His lyrics were often based on pimping and promiscuity, but also drug culture and street survival. He began recording in 1983, cultivating a regional following with independent projects tailored for his native Oakland. His fourth album Born to Mack (1987) sold an estimated 50,000 units from Shaw’s car trunk, leading to a commercial re-issue by Jive Records.

The Album: Gettin’ It (Album Number Ten) was announced and marketed as Too $hort’s “final album,” although his career would continue. It peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and became his highest-charting album, also becoming his third number-one album on the Top R&B Albums chart. Pitchfork in 2023 called it Too $hort’s “imperial ’90s peak” and “a slick and funky landmark of pimp rap,” summarizing it as “a grand, reflective finale where $hort grapples with his rap game mortality and legacy — sometimes thoughtfully, other times recklessly.”

The Featured Artists: Too $hort invites Studd, Murda One, and Joe Riz — all four parties taking turns testifying about their bad habits and tendencies. Everyone involved turns in a competent, believable verse. These are members of Too $hort’s Dangerous Crew circle — Bay Area voices whose lives mirror and extend the themes of the song.

What the Song is About: The song is structured as a collective confession — four men stepping up one by one to testify to the specific ways they live badly, the habits they can’t break, the behaviors that define them and that the people who love them hate. The hook frames it perfectly: “Bad ways / real bad ass ways / they hate my bad ways.” Too $hort’s verse is about player lifestyle and infidelity — seducing a woman who’s in a relationship, leaving her man at the bar while they drive off in the Benz, spending days with her: “Don’t take it personal, it’s just my bad ass ways.” Studd’s verse is the most vulnerable and autobiographical — opening with robbery and violence, then pivoting to his mother: “This lil’ broad said I’m livin in my last days / my mother love me, she say she hate my bad ways / but still she blame it on herself for doin what she done / it wasn’t fun, she moved us in the ghetto slums.” He closes: “Survival is whatever you can.” Joe Riz delivers the most reflective verse: “Drama from my Momma, disowned by my Daddy / what should I do? / They don’t hate me really, they hate my bad ways.” Murda One moves city to city with a .38, checking his game, reclining in his Cadillac, staying high. The genius of the song is the collective testimony format — no one is alone in their bad ways. They are shared, communal, passed down, produced by environment. And yet each man claims them individually, with a kind of defiant ownership that is simultaneously self-awareness and self-destruction.

The Parliament “Flash Light” Sample: “Flash Light” is one of Parliament’s greatest recordings — built around Bootsy Collins’ bass, Bernie Worrell’s synthesizer, and George Clinton’s production genius. It is joyful, funky, celebratory music. Placing it underneath a song called “Bad Ways” — testimony after testimony of robbery, infidelity, addiction, and survival crime — creates the same productive tension that defines the best G-funk: the music says celebrate, the lyrics say reckon. The dissonance is the point.

————— Theological Viewpoints —————

— The Collective Confession as Sacred Form: Four men standing up one by one to name their sins publicly is structurally identical to the confessional tradition in multiple religious communities. The Catholic confessional, the AA meeting, the Black church testimony service — all operate on the same premise: that naming what you have done in the presence of community is transformative in a way that private acknowledgment is not. “Bad Ways” is a secular testimony service. No absolution is offered. No altar call follows. But the naming is real, and the communal witnessing of the naming carries its own weight.

— “My Mother Love Me, She Say She Hate My Bad Ways” — The Wound of Disappointed Love:** Studd’s verse contains one of the most theologically resonant lines in the entire song. The mother who loves her son and hates what he has become — this is the structure of the most important love in the theological tradition. God’s love in the Hebrew Bible is repeatedly described as parental: “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you” (Isaiah 66:13). “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast?” (Isaiah 49:15). The love is unconditional. The grief over the choices is also real. These two things coexist without contradiction. Studd’s mother is not abandoning him. She is carrying both — the love and the heartbreak — simultaneously. This is the most accurate portrait of divine love the song contains.

— “She Blame It on Herself for Doin What She Done / She Moved Us in the Ghetto Slums” — Structural Sin and Maternal Guilt:** The theological tradition distinguishes between personal sin — the choices an individual makes — and structural sin — the conditions that constrain and shape those choices. Studd’s mother blames herself for moving her family into the ghetto. The self-blame is real but also displaced. She did not create the housing policies, the disinvestment, the school-to-prison pipeline, the drug markets. She navigated a system designed to limit her options and did the best she could within it. Liberation theology insists that holding individuals responsible for structural conditions is a form of ideological violence — it privatizes what is public, personalizes what is political, and prevents the collective action needed to address the actual causes.

— “Survival is Whatever You Can” — The Ethics of Necessity:** Studd’s closing line is the most morally complex statement in the song. It is simultaneously an excuse, a reality, and a cry for understanding. The theological tradition has always grappled with necessity as a moral category — Thomas Aquinas argued that a starving person who steals bread commits no sin, because the right to life supersedes the right to property. The “bad ways” described in this verse — robbery, violence, the hustle — are not celebrated as virtues. They are claimed as necessities by men who had few alternatives and fewer resources. The theological question is not whether the acts were right. It is whether the conditions that made them feel necessary are themselves a moral crisis. They are.

— “They Don’t Hate Me Really, They Hate My Bad Ways” — The Distinction Between Person and Act:** Joe Riz’s closing line contains the most spiritually sophisticated insight on the entire track. The person and the behavior are not identical. The mother who hates your bad ways still loves you. The community that condemns your choices has not condemned your soul. This is the foundation of every restorative justice framework, every rehabilitation model, every theology of redemption: the person who committed the act is more than the act. The bad ways can be left behind. The person remains. Too $hort and his crew perform this theology without naming it — but the insight is there, in the hook, in the testimony, in the space between the self and the ways.

Knowledge Shared:

1. Name your bad ways honestly — the act of testifying to your own destructive behaviors, publicly, without excuse, is the first condition of any genuine change. You cannot address what you will not acknowledge.

2. Your environment shaped your habits but doesn’t have to define your future — Studd’s verse traces the direct line from ghetto slums to bad ways. Understanding the origin is not the same as accepting the destination.

3. Your mother’s love and your mother’s disappointment can coexist — the people who love you most are capable of hating what you do with your life. Both are real. Neither cancels the other.

4. Survival requires doing whatever you can — but know the cost — the line “survival is whatever you can” is honest about necessity. But survival strategies have long-term costs that short-term necessity makes hard to see. Know what you are trading.

5. They hate your ways, not you — the distinction is crucial. The people who reject your behavior have not necessarily rejected you. This distinction is the foundation of every meaningful relationship that survives destructive seasons.

6. Bad ways are communal, not just individual — the posse cut format reveals that these habits and choices are shared across the community. What feels like personal failure is often the common condition of people shaped by the same environment. Solidarity in the acknowledgment changes what the acknowledgment means.

7. Parliament’s “Flash Light” beneath testimony means joy and reckoning belong together — the most honest accounting of your failures doesn’t require a funeral soundtrack. The groove is still there. Life continues. The acknowledgment and the funk can occupy the same space.

Emerald City Creative Entertainment Artist Rude Voo Set To Release His New “Murda One” Single

The latest signee to the Emerald City Creative Entertainment label, Rude Voo is gearing up to release his debut single, “Murda One” for 2019. Originally from Jonesboro, Louisiana, Rude Voo now resides in Seattle, WA, where he linked up with ECCE. “Voo has that southern feel to his music and everything is true to his heart and real life”, says label head and manager Sean Sibert. (more…)