Myka 9 of Freestyle Fellowship Originated the Bone Thugs Flow
This article was originally published as a chapter in Myka 9’s My Kaleidoscope.
The claim has been made that Bone Thugs-N-Harmony borrowed some of their melodic sing-chopping style from Freestyle Fellowship, especially Myka 9’s first verse on “Mary” — Do you wanna know how to control and separate your ego from your soul, come follow me come follow me…
MYKA 9: “People think that Bone Thugs bit ‘Mary.’ I ain’t trippin’, people do what they do. Bone Thugs was the shit. I heard their demos. I used to be friends with Eazy (RIP), and he was like, Should I sign them? And I was like, Yeah you should sign ’em! In my mind, I’m thinking, they sound a little like us, hey, keep them doors open. I played Eazy our stuff at Earle’s hot dog stand and in his SUV. We shared what we were working with on occasion. I met all the Bone Thugs cause my homie DJ U-Neek in LA used to produce them.”
In November 1993, Eazy-E signed Bone to Ruthless Records and added “Thugs-N-Harmony” to their name. Their Ruthless debut Creepin on ah Come Up (1994), produced by LA’s DJ U-Neek and DJ Yella, featured more melodic flows than their first release Faces of Death (June 1993).
ABSTRACT RUDE: “Eazy had been to the Good Life and had tried to sign different people. He had interest in that talent pool for sure. When Bone Thugs first came out, and you were a Fellowship fan, you were a little offended by it.”
OG Good Lifers Riddlore and NgaFsh (CVE) weighed in on the connections between the Good Life and Bone Thugs.
RIDDLORE: “The only connection I know between the Good Life and Bone was a rapper named Teeski. She is the cousin and roommate of DJ U-Neek. They would be at his house and she would play Good Life music for them.”
NGAFSH: “I am a Bone fan and they had nothing like the way they rap until they hooked up with Eazy… I did my research on them back then since I was a fan, and they had no styles in their music I could appreciate like I do before coming to the West.”
The allegations of a Fellowship influence on Bone Thugs were talked about for so many years that eventually interviewers directly asked Bizzy Bone of Bone Thugs to address the issue.
BIZZY BONE: “No BS, I’ve heard the same thing, but I think it was the vibe, the Midwest vibe… If you go back to Faces of Death, in ’91-’92 [released ’93], that documents that we were there. Everything is from the heart, everything is original and sometimes when you gather a great idea, a lot of people are a part of it… I think Freestyle Fellowship are like the Mayan pyramids and I think that Bone are like the Egyptian pyramids. It was the same kind of concept, but nobody had contact with the other. It was something that was going on. They’re definitely innovators, but it’s just a different kind of way.”
In 2022, Krayzie Bone claimed ignorance of Freestyle Fellowship: “I don’t even know who that is.” Whether they intentionally bit or not, Myka innovated that style and released it on wax first.
ABSTRACT RUDE: “We had defenses of Myka 9 that he didn’t even have for himself because he was so content with who he was and what God had given him. It was more the want of Fellowship to have more success because we felt they deserved it. But you know what, that’s life. I couldn’t deny that Bone Thugs had some originality in how they put a twist on it. I always thought Krayzie and especially Bizzy were both actually super dope. Bone Thugs put khakis and do-rags on the jazz, that’s what they did.”
This is an excerpt from Myka 9’s My Kaleidoscope, edited by Patrick Parker & Kamal Darling and published by Parker Pubs. My Kaleidoscope features lyrics to 69 songs, classic photos, introduction by Abstract Rude, and an in-depth oral history covering his entire career from 1980s b-boy battles to the Good Life and Project Blowed and beyond. It’s all love!
