“I’m hip-hop’s Linus,” Rapper Big Pooh declares on his upcoming album, The Delightful Bars: North American Pie. Referring to Lucy’s younger brother from Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, he’s most likely talking about his status as one third of Little Brother, the seminal North Carolinian rap group that also launched the careers of Phonte and ubiquitous producer 9th Wonder. But Linus is also Peanuts’ articulate philosopher, and Big Pooh fits that role as well. He spends a good deal of time on The Delightful Bars looking forward, but he also spends some time looking back. On “Rearviewmirror,” the album’s closing track, he chronicles his ups and downs since blowing up with Little Brother in 2003, while on “Problems” he raps, “Five years since The Listening and I can’t change?/Guess what priorities rearrange/Got fam looking at me like ‘Damn, you strange’/After all this time I couldn’t stay the same/Had to get a new picture, I just kept the frame.”
Big Pooh was gracious enough to speak to Music of the Weak on the eve of The Delightful Bars: North American Pie’s release. According to Pooh, the last five years have been about finding his confidence. “I was the road player, surrounded by super-stars,” he says of his time touring with Little Brother, “Now I’m ready to do my thing.” But it’s a little funny hearing Pooh talk about ever having any lack of confidence. When Little Brother broke out with The Listening in 2003, the group sounded like a fully formed entity, paying homage to the prior fifteen years of rap music, but with its gaze firmly locked on the future. On the opening track, lyrics from Young MC’s “Bust a Move” were sung in the style of a “Regulate”-era Nate Dogg. 9th Wonder spent the rest of the album providing a Pete Rock inspired, staunchly R&B-flavored alternative to the burgeoning chipmunk soul sound that had begun to dominate rap production, while Phonte and Big Pooh rocked the album with loose, fun rhymes that made the whole thing feel like an ambitious foreshadowing of the mixtape age.
“I really need to thank 9th and ‘Te a lot,” Pooh says of his Little Brother collaborators, but he also makes it clear that North American Pie sees him running in the directions he wants to run in, without compromise: “It’s kinda like me spreading my wings.” Right off the bat, the multiple covers for The Delightful Bars—featuring a busty model rolling around in some Day-Glo colored tic-tacs—are a long way removed from anything released by Little Brother, who followed their breakthrough with a dense concept album about racial identity called The Minstrel Show. North American Pie kicks off with a track called “The Comeback.” Though Big Pooh is playful enough to riff on the title’s sexual double entendre, there’s still a serious undercurrent from his need to actually make a comeback—but a comeback from what?
Well, Pooh’s first solo album, Sleepers, had its share of fans—even ending up on a couple of year-end Best-Of Lists—but, according to Pooh, “I didn’t really get to do a lot of promo with it and go on tour with it, because we jumped straight into Little Brother material.” The Delightful Bars, on the other hand, is Pooh’s chance to go big. The North American Pie version of the album is only one of many versions being released digitally and internationally. It’s a pivotal moment for Pooh personally, as well, having recently gotten married (“At the wedding, I had all my friends and family together for the first time in years,” he says, “It was awesome”), but Pooh doesn’t feel too much pressure: “We’re gonna do what we’ve continued to do since day one, which is make good music,” he says, “The goal is always just to get more fans.” It’s a simple, but effective philosophy.
-Martin Brown, 2009
Check out The Delightful Bars at iTunes
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