So You Won’t Be Lonely: 20 Years at “Tha Crossroads” with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony
Their signature single was released on April 30, 1996—let’s raise a chalice of Fruitopia and toast to that shit
This is a story about the most life-affirming 90s rap singalong about death. This is a story about symbolic theme park names, friendship, frenching, self-seriousness, style, superiority, success, weed, finding the right companion, Jewish goodbyes, Uncle Charles, mortality, and masterpieces.
But first, this is a story about a bus full of 8th grade kids headed for Great America in 1996. It was a confusing time, as all times are, but for a day at least our plans were not nebulous. Our sights were not aimless. We were alone together, hurtling towards the best theme park around.
There was an energy on the bus that felt like we were taking a triumphant collective bow in front of an audience of ourselves. It felt like we’d won something. We weren’t just going to ride rides; we were going to ride rides on a school day because we’d fucking made it. After three years of growing less stupid and more ridiculous, we were finally wrapping things up at Mill Valley Middle School. Now we could focus on the important stuff, like trying to remember where the cameras were on the big roller coaster so we could give it the finger on our way by.
Some prescient genius brought along a boom box for the ride, and either the same or a different genius brought along a CD single of “Tha Crossroads.” If it had been a CD single by No Doubt or Smashing Pumpkins or, yikes, Bush, this story would cease to exist. But it was Bone Thugs-n-Harmony beaming into our bus from the streets of Cleveland, breaking down the nefarious borders that separated kindred spirits into cliques. And on that day their harmony was extra righteous. We listened to it so many times. Every time louder, until we were at max volume. It felt like an actual goddamn moment.
“Tha Crossroads” was and is and forever will be the soundtrack to the first time I was old enough to experience nostalgia-for-the-present, the kind of warm and vivid flash of a moment that you already remember fondly even while it’s still happening. We sang and we sang and we sang.
We sang, “And we pray and we pray and we pray / every day every day every day.”
We sang, “And I’m gonna miss everybody.”
We sang, “I miss my Uncle Charles, y’all!”
We sang, “Would somebody anybody tell me why / we die we die.”
We sang, “I’ll see you at Tha Crossroads / so you won’t be lonely.”
And then we got there, to Great America. And we did remember where the cameras were on the Demon roller coaster. And we flipped them off. And we ran to the photo booth as soon as we got off, and found ourselves, and laughed but didn’t buy them.
Some kids were probably making out, smoking weed, doing karaoke, eating churros, dodging chaperones, wearing Tevas, throwing up, blaming farts on each other, cutting lines, carving initials into splintered railings, pretending not to be scared of heights (or anything else).
Then everybody got back on the bus and sang “Tha Crossroads” some more.
And this all might have even happened. It could’ve just felt like everybody. Some things make you feel like that.
A few days later, I gave one of the most preposterously self-serious graduation speeches a big-hearted asshole fourteen year old could possibly give.
The speech could have accurately been titled “Someone Had to Speak: And So I Will Speak Quite Ponderously For Five Minutes And Pretend I Don’t Spend Most of My Time Wondering When Someone Will French Kiss Me.”
I was 14 years old. I was up on a stage. I was on the gleaming golden cusp of adulthood. I was wearing a black collarless button-down with white suede shoes. I was looking out at all my friends, my classmates, our parents and teachers, and trying so hard to say something substantial. Something meaningful.
I was talking about new freedoms (and, hey, how they come with new responsibilities!). I was challenging myself and my classmates to keep up with the news, for some reason. I was doing my best to make everyone think about what this day meant. About our lives to come. About what we have done and should be doing in the future. About The Future. About Behavior. About us as People.
Today, with gorgeous hindsight, it’s clear that I was essentially dry-humping the idea of importance, having no actual experience in the arena.
After I’d finished puberty’ing my way through the speech, I sat down and immediately went back to thinking about baseball, about seeing Independence Day, about Amy from summer camp, about whether she’d be there again this summer, and about whether we’d french.
If I’d wanted the bigass commencement address moment to really mean something, I could’ve just read the lyrics from “Tha Crossroads.”
“Bone bone bone bone / bone BONE bone BONE bone / now tell me WHAT YOU GONNA DO / when there ain’t nowhere to run / when judgment comes for you / WHEN JUDGMENT COMES FOR YOU.”
Now that would have rung the bell. Things about life and death have an advantage in that way. Because life and death isn’t even about life and death, at least not always. “Life and death” is just shorthand for Big Stuff. How you react to things beyond your control. How you judge yourself, and how you’re judged by others. And what you can do about all that.
Death is change. Change is the only constant. Everything changes. Change is death. Change is life.
Bone Thugs-n-Harmony turned out to be the perfect group to sing about the way death informs life because, ultimately, the real subject is change. And they changed the way music could sound. Before, there was singing, and there was rapping. Now there was both at once. Like if sunrise and sunset overlapped.
And they knew they were changing the sound of hip-hop. In a 2014 interview with XXL, Krayzie Bone said, “[It] was the start of a new sound. When we dropped it, we changed the sound and the pace, because people couldn’t believe we were rapping like that and singing… We changed the whole DNA, even to this day. It was the beginning of the change. As far as Bone Thugs, we’re those dudes that came in different, paved our own lane as innovators with what we did, didn’t sound like anybody, were always different, and we had a hell of an influence on music in general.”
So it was a new sound. But they don’t give out Grammys for Best New Sound; they give out Grammys for Best Rap Performance, which Bone Thugs-n-Harmony won for “Tha Crossroads.” In music, the difference between being a headline and a footnote is having the songs to go with the style. And they had songs for days. For years, for decades.
Those songs are why the Independent in San Francisco was sold out and packed solid on a foggy Monday night in June 2010. Flesh was out of prison and the original lineup was back together. We showed up to hear “First of the Month,” and “Thuggish Ruggish Bone,” and “Look Into My Eyes,” and “Notorious Thugs,” and “Thug Love,” and probably not “Ghetto Cowboy,” but definitely above all for “Tha Crossroads.”
They took the stage singing “Carol of the Bones,” and immediately told the crowd, in no uncertain terms, that the more weed we threw up on stage, the better the show would be. We obliged. They smoked up. We smoked up. And off we went.
They ran through new songs from the reunion album, Uni5. Then a medley of songs about weed. Then a block of songs featuring collaborators who couldn’t be there (2Pac and Biggie were up in heaven and couldn’t make it; Phil Collins was presumably in London). Then another medley of more songs about weed. Then came the real hit parade. Then, finally, the first notes of “Tha Crossroads.”
A decade and a half later, and we still sang along.
I closed my eyes. The sparkling chimes and lilting piano swept me up into a cosmic audiovisual mashup of the music video and my own life. I was in church with the Bone Thugs, then we were on a mountaintop singing, and there was that sinister man, the creepy reaper, snatching the souls of my dead loved ones. It wasn’t Uncle Charles now, it was my Uncle David (I miss my Uncle David, y’all), and my grandfather, and instead of a baby in his arms, the reaper had my pet cat Prince. I was chasing him up Mount Tamalpais, and he was getting away, further with every heartbeat. But then the crowd surrounding me, along with the reunited group onstage, hit the post-chorus verse with a swell of purpose, shouting, “Can somebody, anybody tell me why we die we die?” And I caught up to the reaper in time to see him transform into an angel, and he flew with his quiver of souls up to heaven.
I don’t believe in heaven, but I think we can agree that the good souls go up.
Then they played some other shit, and we all shuffled out of the venue in a happy haze.
I came home from the show inspired and smoky-eyed, went straight to the computer and started typing. And now I present to you the unedited transcript of my post-show mindset, recently rescued from an old computer for this very occasion:
“I’m high as fuck right now. Precursors and antecedents. Crazy. You’d be silly not to be silly right after all that. Everything compelling. Everything acted upon. Lazy, Krayzie, Bizzie, Wish, and Flesh showed up in the Western Addition of San Francisco.
Do you remember the guy in Bone Thugs that always seemed a little bit chunkier and more serious than the rest of the Bone Thugs? The guy that would turn straight into the camera, look right at you, and rap-sing his parts in a more threatening but also earnest way? Well he’s still chunkier and more serious than the rest of the Bone Thugs. He’s their Gene Simmons, but awesome and not shitty.
“San Francisco, we gonna take it back to ’94 with this one.” — Thuggish Ruggish Bone was the 2nd or 3rd song. It was like when Iron Maiden played The Trooper while it was still light out in Concord. A badass bold move. Like we got so much steak here’s some as an appetizer.
First of the month is a deeper song than I’d given it credit for previously. But it’s always been there, and that seems obvious now. I’ll just assume I’m the one late to the party on figuring it out. At its most basic level, it’s about when the worry subsides, when the pressure is released. The first of the month isn’t just a time when you get a check. It’s a place in your head when everything clears. Literally, figuratively, other-things-ly.
Something to be said for developing a rap style that always sounds like the sing-songy portion of a chorus even when it’s still the verse. Because then when the actual chorus hits, and there’s extra harmony, and a real hook instead of a verse disguised as the hook, well it swells your membranes and that’s why they sold (according to their bio) 50 million records. And who am I to fact check Bone Thugs’ bio?
“Whatcha gonna do / when judgment comes for you?” Keeping that in mind, acting upon it, being incrementally better as a human who’s alive, that’s all you could hope, that this is something people think about.
Music this good makes me hate trash like Smashmouth so much more. Fuck them forever.
The so-long portion of the show — the part after they’ve verbally acknowledged that they’re on the way out, the show’s ending, these songs are the last songs — was noticeably protracted when stacked up to the normal so-long portion I’m accustomed to. In my family we call this the Jewish Goodbye. But the Jewish Goodbye I just learned tonight is also a Bone Thugs goodbye. So we have that in common.”
It’s time for five motherfucking facts about “Tha Crossroads!”
Fact 1. One of the great questions of our time is Who is Uncle Charles? Well, here’s Wish Bone with the explanation: “Uncle Charles was my mother’s brother. He had retired, but he’d worked for Ford so he had a little bit of change. He was real fly. He’d get up every day and put on a suit. He drove Lincolns and Cadillacs. He was the uncle who’d come around and take us to the movies; everybody got five dollars. But he was also the one that was really behind us in our music career, because that’s what he wanted to do too. He used to listen to our little mix tapes we’d bring home, just encourage us. All our talent shows he’d be in the front row, every one.” (Source: 2007 interview in the Cleveland Free Times)
Fact 2. Maybe the craziest thing about re-listening to “Tha Crossroads” all these years later, is that the chorus doesn’t hit until more than two minutes into the song.
Fact 3. It samples the Isley Brothers “Make Me Say It Again Girl.” Because there were so many Isley Brothers, and so many Bone Thugs, “Tha Crossroads” held the extraordinarily specific record for “Most Co-Writers of a #1 Song (12 credited!)… until Mims grabbed the title with “This Is Why I’m Hot” in 2007. This seems like a solid opportunity to point you toward Lil Wayne’s superior cover of that Mims song.
Fact 4. CD singles began their death spiral in the late 90s thanks to Napster and CD burners (and that is a sincere thanks). Also known as “maxi singles,” these were a great way to bump perfect songs in, say, a tricked out Mitsubishi Eclipse you bought at a police auction, when you didn’t have $16 to spend on a full album, or when you didn’t want to spend $16 on a bad album. Examples of the latter include Busta Rhymes rapping over the Nightrider theme, and a pre-Thong Song Sisqo.
Fact 5. If you sing out “I’ll see you at the crossroads” and the other member of your household sings back “So you won’t be lonely!” then you know you have married well.
Great art is so damn sexy. Which is cool because it starts in such an unsexy way: people struggling to make some shit up. It’s one of those things we don’t think about that often. How the one thing all masterpieces have in common is they begin with the artist alone in a room, making something out of nothing, pulling inspiration out of thin air and translating it into something expressible, tangible, memorable and, who knows, maybe even sellable.
I love picturing musicians in the act of writing the biggest songs ever. Songs so triumphant it’s hard to imagine any person made them actual things that exist. I’m thinking Freddy Mercury writing “We Are The Champions.” Bruce Springsteen writing “Born To Run.” Kate Bush writing “Hounds of Love.” Prince writing “Purple Rain.” N.W.A writing “Straight Outta Compton.” Billy Joel writing “Piano Man” (like it or not, you have to believe there came a moment where he said to himself “Nailed it.”)
“Stairway to Heaven” is more a signifier than a song at this point, which makes it seem all the more impossible that someone ever wrote it, that it didn’t always exist. (I know that someone is named Jimmy Page, but I’m more impressed in the general sense that humans, as part of the animal kingdom, are capable of shit like that.)
In a (kinda special) way, the more overplayed songs get, the more incredible they become. As these megahits detach further and further from their points of origination, the songs themselves fade into the background of their own sonic fingerprints, and what I end up hearing isn’t a song anymore so much as an artifactual miracle-synthesis of intent, circumstance, vision, taste, and luck. Except for “Brown Eyed Girl,” which always sounds like the devil’s nails on a chalkboard made of my eardrums, and should be mercilessly ejected into deep space forever.
But when songs manage to be at once super-popular, super-lasting, and super-good? When they aren’t just fascinating, or representative, or significant, or canonical… but just plain rad? That means they nailed it. And I don’t know if you can tell based on the thousands of words that led you to this sentence, but it’s my belief that Bone Thugs-n-Harmony fully nailed it with “Tha Crossroads.”
What’s the most you can ask from a song? Good ones make you feel something. Make you think something. They make you move, and move you.
The best ones take the confusion of a given point in time, a random point in life, and pull off the impossible trick of making that moment both understandably specific and profoundly universal. They make some sense of the inexpressible individual feelings you’re having, and also deepen your connection to everyone else.
The best of the best, they connect us to ourselves and each other across space and time.
I was in middle school when “Tha Crossroads” came out. We were a bunch of kids singing along to a super catchy song that happened to be about the inability to comprehend death, the unfairness of death, the holes left in our lives by those who depart, our response to their departures, the questions we ask of ourselves and our gods, the way we explain life and the loss of it to ourselves and our friends, what we can change, and what we cannot.
I’ve tried so hard, then and now and in between, to say something substantial. I’ve dry-humped the idea of importance. And all the while, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony were there, making sweet love to meaning.
If you could speak for all the living to all the dead, what would you say?
What’s the one promise you’d make, and why would you make it?
“I’ll see you at Tha Crossroads / So you won’t be lonely.”
Michael Grant is always looking for a good Fruitopia connection. You can contact him at ohimsosure-at-gmail-dot-com
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