Lil Noid - In the Dark (1994)
I was working on a short article about Juicy J recently, and in the process got derailed by an accidental fascination with Lil Noid, a relatively peripheral figure in the Triple Six constellation. This sort of thing happens pretty regularly in the research-not-research stage of a writing project, which is often just a form of procrastination that’s only sometimes, incidentally productive. In this case, it was triggered by one song, “Late Last Night,” credited to Juicy even though every verse is Noid’s.
It’s an unsettling listen, fairly representative of the Memphis vibe at the time as it’s essentially a catalog of violent impulses and directionless anger. Juicy’s hook, “Late last night, lying in the bed, eyes red,” describes a point of view that’s usually implicit and unstated in their music: the stoned, impotent-feeling speaker staying up too late and getting angry at everything. I was even more impressed by Noid, though, who has this really fragile and strange timbre to his voice. He sounds like he’s on the verge of either crying or just zoning out and wandering off. It’s a voice that’s ideally, uncannily suited to that haunted, early 90s Memphis sound.
The song led me to a tape Noid released in 1994, the perfectly named Paranoid Funk, which is as good as I’d hoped, full of the eerie, swamp noir aesthetic that Kelefa Sanneh once called a “thoroughly accidental sort of low-budget Southern trip-hop.” The tape was produced entirely by Blackout, who was still in high school at the time (captain of his school’s drum line, natch) and who would go on to work regularly with Playa Fly and Gangsta Blac. I’m guessing the private press reissue bubble has burst, if it ever existed at all, but I can’t help wishing it would catch up to Southern rap for exactly these sorts of releases.
Noid was arrested at 18, a year after Paranoid Funk, and would ultimately do seven years, missing the rise of Three Six completely (not that he would have been along for that ride either way, as the trail of disgruntled Hypnotize affiliates testifies). I know this happened because he says so on his facebook page. He also says other things, like “My mind is beyond time, My thoughts are undying,Like the planets in the orbit when they perfectly align..”
There’s a video interview from 2009, in which Noid talks modestly about his early days: “At the school table, you’d beat on the table and rap. I just happened to be the rapper who could beat on the table and rap at the same time.” He touches on the strangeness of his voice: “People always used to tell me, ‘There’s something about your voice, like you’re creepin’ up on people. How do you sound like this?’” Noid, it turns out, is short for Paranoid, a nickname he was given as a kid. The interview gets even more interesting when he talks about the Paranoid Funk days, that period right before he went to prison, when he became increasingly frustrated about his financial dependence on Juicy, struggled with coke addiction, and wound up spending time in the same penitentiary as James Earl Ray, the man who in 1968 shot Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis.
The whole thing reminded me of this Tom Bissell essay about how arbitrary literary fame is. He writes about his role in republishing the works of an author whose reputation had faded, and how paradoxically upsetting the experience was: “I felt something akin to what I imagine haunts the recipient of a Hail Mary touchdown pass. Not only was the ball not meant for him, it was not meant for anyone. The joy of victory is cut with a terrifying void. Outcome is particulate; modulating the tiniest variable can spell ruin.”
When I interviewed Juicy, I tried to start a conversation about what happened to the countless Memphis artists who didn’t make it, his former peers. He brushed it off, which is fair. It’s probably a difficult thing to think about. “I just stay focused on what I’m doing,” he said, “I really don’t even know what happened to the others.”
