Paid in Full (album)

• 1. Introduction

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  Paid in Full, the debut studio album by Eric B. & Rakim, arrived on the 7th of July, 1987, and nothing in hip-hop sounded quite the same afterward. It was recorded in a single week, in 48-hour shifts, largely in single takes. Two young men from New York City, working fast and within budget, made something that MTV would later place at number one on its list of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time. How did that happen? And what exactly did Rakim do to rapping that no one had done before? The answers lie in a home studio belonging to Marley Marl, a search for New York's top MC, and a saxophone-playing kid who had been listening to John Coltrane.

• 2. The Search and the Meeting

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  Eric B. was working as a disc jockey at New York City radio station WBLS in 1985 when he went looking for a rapper to complement his turntable work. His search, phrased as a hunt for "New York's top MC", brought Rakim to his door. Eric B.'s friend and roommate Marley Marl opened up his home studio to the pair, giving them a place to work. The first track they cut together, "Eric B. Is President", was released as a single on the independent Zakia Records in 1986. Def Jam Recordings founder Russell Simmons heard that single and moved quickly. The duo were signed to Island Records and shifted their recording sessions to Manhattan's Power Play Studios in early 1987. Rakim's process in the booth was particular: he wrote his songs in roughly one hour while listening to the beat, then read his lyrics off a sheet of paper when recording. In 2006, he admitted, "When I hear my first album today I hear myself reading my rhymes but I'm my worst critic." Eric B. described the album's creation without any grand design: in a 2008 interview, he stated plainly, "To sit here and say we put together this calculated album to be a great album would be a lie. We were just doing records that felt good." The album's success ultimately brought a lawsuit. In 2003, Eric B. alleged the duo had never actually been paid in full for their work, and filed suit against the Island Def Jam Music Group, Lyor Cohen, and Russell Simmons.

• 3. A New Way to Rhyme

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  Rakim's approach to the microphone broke from everything that had come before in early 1980s hip-hop. Where rappers like LL Cool J and Run-DMC delivered their vocals with high energy, Rakim used a relaxed, stoic delivery rooted in his jazz background. He had played the saxophone and was a devoted John Coltrane fan, and that influence shaped his sense of timing. The New York Times critic Ben Ratliff wrote that his "unblustery rapping developed the form beyond the flat-footed rhythms of schoolyard rhymes". MTV put it plainly: "He had a slow flow, and every line was blunt, mesmeric." His rhythm drew comparisons to Thelonious Monk. What made him technically revolutionary was his pioneering use of internal rhyme. Where most rappers of the era built rhymes at the ends of lines, Rakim planted them inside the line itself, weaving sound through the middle of sentences. While earlier MCs sharpened their craft through improvisation, Rakim demonstrated what a writerly, pre-composed approach could do. AllMusic editor Steve Huey characterized the result as "complex internal rhymes, literate imagery, velvet-smooth flow, and unpredictable, off-the-beat rhythms." His subject matter turned frequently inward, covering his own skill and lyrical command. Pitchfork later ranked the album at number eleven on its revised list of the top albums of the 1980s, calling it a "crowning achievement of hip-hop's first golden age".

• 4. Eric B. and the Art of Sampling

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  Paid in Full contains ten tracks, three of which are instrumentals. Eric B. brought a disc jockey's instinct to production, and the album marked the beginning of heavy sampling in hip-hop records. Music critic Robert Christgau noted that Eric B. had incorporated "touches of horn or whistle deep in the mix" of his sampled percussion and scratches. His soul-filled approach to the turntable would shape how producers worked for years afterward. The track "I Know You Got Soul" illustrated that influence most directly: its production featured digitized cymbal crashes, breathing sounds, and a bumping bass line drawn from James Brown, and it popularized the use of Brown samples across the genre. The British band M|A|R|R|S sampled the line "Pump up the volume" from that track for their number one UK single, "Pump Up the Volume". "Eric B. Is President" itself sparked a legal dispute when James Brown sued to prevent the duo from using his music without authorization, a case that opened a broader debate on the legality of unauthorized sampling in hip-hop. The title track, released as a single in 1987, was later remixed by the production duo Coldcut. That remix drew most prominently from "Im Nin'alu" by Israeli singer Ofra Haza. In 2008, VH1 ranked the remixed "Paid in Full" at number 24 on its list of the 100 greatest hip-hop songs.

• 5. Reception Then and Now

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  Critics in 1987 were divided. A contemporary review in The Washington Post singled out "Eric B. Is President" but called the rest of the album monotonous, arguing that its attempts to fuse jazz and hip-hop fell flat. Robert Christgau gave it a "B" in his Village Voice column and ranked it 27th in that newspaper's annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll for 1987. In a later write-up, he named four tracks "groundbreaking masterworks" while describing the remaining six as turntablism with spoken decoration. Over the following decades, the assessment shifted dramatically. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 228 on "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". By the 2020 edition of that list, it had climbed to number 61. Time magazine included it among just eighteen albums of the 1980s on its "All-TIME 100" list; editor Alan Light wrote that it changed the "sound, flow, and potential" of hip-hop. Sasha Frere-Jones, writing in The Rolling Stone Album Guide in 2004, called it "one of hip-hop's perfect records". Alex Ogg, in his book The Men Behind Def Jam, considered it the duo's magnum opus. Rakim walks through the album track by track in Brian Coleman's book Check the Technique. The RIAA certified the album platinum on the 11th of July, 1995, and as of December 1997 it had sold over a million copies.

• 6. The Blueprint's Reach

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  Author William Cobb wrote in To the Break of Dawn that Rakim's rapping had "stepped outside" of old school hip-hop's preceding era, and that while newer rappers grew more sophisticated in vocabulary and dexterity, none had come "nowhere near what Rakim introduced to the genre". The New York Times critic Dimitri Ehrlich credited Rakim with helping "give birth to a musical genre" and leading "a quiet musical revolution, introducing a soft-spoken rapping style". The rappers who cite Rakim as an influence include the Wu-Tang Clan, Jay-Z, Nas, 50 Cent, and Eminem. 50 Cent told NME that Paid in Full was the first album he ever bought, describing how he had recorded hip-hop off the radio using his grandmother's tape recorder and recognizing the moment with Eric B. & Rakim as the first time he felt he had to own something. Busta Rhymes described the album as a record that "caused trouble" but was "one you couldn't top". Eminem borrowed and interpolated lines from Paid in Full on tracks from The Marshall Mathers LP, drawing specifically from "My Melody" for "I'm Back" and "As The Rhyme Goes On" for "The Way I Am". The album cover, which featured Eric B. and Rakim wearing custom-made Gucci pieces crafted by Harlem tailor Dapper Dan, became as recognizable as the music itself. Slant Magazine, ranking the album 32nd on its list of the best albums of the 1980s, observed that Rakim influenced "an entire decade of tongue-twisting MCs" without ever relying on macho jargon.