LL Cool J: ‘I was hanging out with some of the most dangerous characters in New York’

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Kelly Rissman

US News Reporter

The walls of LL Cool J’s office in his New York home groan under the weight of framed gold and platinum discs. But these trophies aren’t mere self-celebratory décor – they serve a serious, inspirational purpose for the rapper, actor and entrepreneur. “When I look at these discs,” he murmurs, humble as rap’s finest braggart can be, “they remind me that everything is still possible, that I can do more. They’re symbols of ideas and dreams I had that came true. And they remind me I can do it again – I can make a huge, impactful record again.”

It’s a dream the man born James Todd Smith has been working towards for over a decade, one that finally reaches fruition with The Force – his 14th album, and first in 11 years. The reason for the long lay-off? His role as special agent Sam Hanna, the clown-fearing hero of TV crime procedural NCIS: Los Angeles. “I signed on to the show and, quite frankly, thought it’d be over in a couple of years and I’d be back doing my thing. But it took off.”

Indeed it did. But as LL enjoyed 15 lucrative years apprehending onscreen baddies, off screen he pined for his true love, hip-hop. He’d tried juggling the two, recording 2013’s “experimental” Authentic while NCIS was filming but, sodden with unlikely guest stars, the album was a rare critical and commercial dud. “You can’t be a part-time artist,” he says now. “I was on set, making creative decisions over the album by phone. It didn’t work.” He stored his rap ambitions in the closet, strapped on his fake firearm and walked back in front of the cameras (with one eye out for the clowns). But as NCIS: Los Angeles finally began to wind down, the erstwhile rapper “got that itch again”.

LL first caught the bug during hip-hop’s infancy. His childhood in Long Island, New York was marred by violence – in one altercation, his father shot LL’s mother and grandfather (they survived, just), while later his mother’s boyfriend regularly beat the boy. But rap offered an escape: when he listened to early stars like the Treacherous Three, the Crash Crew and The Fearless Four, he says, “I felt peace. Hip-hop gave me bliss, and I wanted to follow my bliss. I went all in: I put pen to paper, and I kept writing and rewriting until what I was writing gave me that same feeling.”

LL cut a batch of primitive demos, which fell into the hands of Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin, then founding Def Jam Recordings. LL’s first single, 1984’s “I Need a Beat”, became the label’s third 12-inch release. His second, “I Can’t Live Without My Radio”, hit No 15 on Billboard’s R&B chart, followed by Def Jam’s first album, LL’s 1985 full-length debut Radio. While the industry still considered hip-hop a novelty, LL’s success – shifting 500,000 units in months, eventually going platinum – changed all that. And he quickly decided he wouldn’t fall into the trap of becoming a one-hit-wonder, like so many of rap’s early stars had.

“Run-DMC was talking about making their fourth album, their fifth album – and, one day, their ninth album,” he remembers. “And it clicked in my head: I could keep going, too. Nothing lasts forever – but it can definitely last a lifetime.” He drops into the braggadocio mode that characterised his early records. “I have the courage of a thousand lions: if I believe I can do something, you won’t be able to convince me otherwise.”

His work grew more sophisticated, adulterating the fierce swagger with role-play, storytelling and, on “I Need Love” from second album Bigger and Deffer (1987), hip-hop balladry. He didn’t fear the mockery of his peers for momentarily ditching the machismo and displaying his softer side. “Only weak people are scared of appearing vulnerable. I was hanging out with some of the most dangerous characters in New York, the guys they made [hard-edged 2002 drug-running thriller] Paid in Full about – hustlers, gangsters. I could make a vulnerable song like ‘I Need Love’ because I was supremely confident in who I was and what I was doing.”

Bigger And Deffer went double platinum, and LL’s pockets swam with cash, much of which he spent on cars and thick gold chains. He squandered a fortune, but quickly earned it back, grounded enough to avoid the career-ending mistakes of many of his peers. “My mother told me, ‘Todd, you’re a handsome boy – anything you put your mind to, you can do it,’” he grins. “But my grandmother said, ‘if a task is once begun, never leave it till it’s done. Be thy labour great or small, do it well or not at all.’ She’d holler at me, ‘You’re not little Lord Fauntleroy!’” He dissolves into laughter. “She taught me humility. Cockiness, confidence, even arrogance – it all had its place: on the record. But you leave that behind you once you walk off the pitch – you got to keep things in perspective and not take yourself too seriously.”

As his contemporaries crashed and burned, LL Cool J nurtured a long, diverse career. There was the occasional speed bump; 1989’s Walking With a Panther was coolly received by critics and “only” went platinum. Again, LL’s grandmother stepped up, advising him to “knock out” the naysayers; he returned the following year with perhaps his greatest album, the pugilistic Mama Said Knock You Out. Its title track opened with the command, “Don’t call it a comeback”, but the double-platinum album was just that. “I was in the mud a little bit then,” he nods now. “There was definitely pressure to silence the critics. I just wanted to show what I was capable of.”

Further hit albums followed, including 1995’s Mr Smith, which played his lover-man persona to the fore, and 2000’s GOAT featuring James T Smith: The Greatest of All Time, which, despite its woefully unwieldy title, became his first chart-topping full-length recording. Simultaneously, the rapper was diversifying. He’d made his onscreen debut in 1985’s Krush Groove, loosely based on Def Jam’s early days, but by the Nineties was starring in his own sitcom, In the House and scoring lead roles in crime thriller In Too Deep, shark movie Deep Blue Sea and Oliver Stone football drama Any Given Sunday, in which he starred opposite Jamie Foxx.

This latter pairing exploded into fisticuffs, as LL allegedly walloped Foxx in the chops after director Oliver Stone amped up tensions between the two, to get the onscreen relationship he wanted. “[He] revved it up,” Foxx told Howard Stern in 2017. “I was a huge fan of LL, and Stone kept saying, ‘That’s gonna hurt you and my f***ing film if you still think this guy’s your hero.’ It got kinda crazy. We were clocking each other. LL’s a big motherf***er. But at the end of it, I said to him, ‘No matter what, you’re still my hero, man.’”

“Jamie and I was just having fun,” LL says now, not wanting to revisit the scene. “We had a ball.” But as his new career took off, LL felt conflicted. “The more successful I became in acting, the less I wanted to do it, as it was taking me further away from music. I later realised I could find the right balance, that I could do all these things I wanted. But it took time.”

The road to The Force was long, and not without false starts, including an aborted dry-run with Dr Dre. “My songwriting wasn’t up to standard – my Bernie Taupin wasn’t living up to Dre’s Elton,” he says. Then Phife Dawg, the late rapper from New York legends A Tribe Called Quest, came to him in a dream. “Phife’s like, ‘Yo, that new record with Dre is gonna be dope’,” LL remembers. “But he gave me a look – like the Cheshire Cat swallowed a canary – that made me feel like he was bulls***ting me, that what I was working on was s***.” Spooked by the dream, LL called ATCQ’s erstwhile leader, rapper/producer Q-Tip. “I told him, ‘I want us to work together on an album. I want pickle juice, hot sauce, crispy skin on the chicken. I want pimentos in the potato salad – spice flavours.’”

That’s exactly what Tip delivers on The Force; LL describes his productions as “a sonic landscape I could sink my teeth into”. The music inspired him to be more adventurous in his lyrics: “to talk about new things, not just girls or romance on every track”. The album’s uncompromising opening track, “Spirit of Cyrus” – a collaboration with Snoop Dogg – certainly redraws LL’s paradigm, a chilling chronicle of a “black vigilante” settling scores with his AR-15 and M-16 rifles. It’s a dark fantasy, inspired by real-life events that hit a little too close to home.

“This cop, Christopher Dorner, went on a rampage killing people because of racism he felt he’d experienced within the LAPD,” LL explains. Dorner’s rampage lasted for nine days in February 2013, and saw him murder four people – three policemen and the daughter of a retired captain he believed had wronged him – before he took his own life. As the police manhunt heated up, LL received a call from a friend “in law enforcement, who told me, ‘They’re after this killer cop, and he looks just like you. They’re not looking to take him alive, so you best stay indoors, or you could get caught up in something.’”

“After Dorner died, I read up on his ‘manifesto’,” LL continues. “I really went down the rabbit hole. A lot of what he was saying was like a metaphor for stuff that was happening at the time, a deep, interesting story people could relate to. I was inspired to take the gloves off and write the track.” It is, by some distance, the hardest, edgiest work of LL’s career, a snapshot of an America fragmenting into bigotry and violence, LL muttering, “they pushed me to my limit/ Racism’s a disease, it’s only right that I kill it”.

This potent statement arrives as the US faces a fevered, critical election. But while he supported Biden and Harris in the 2020 election and has often denied being a Republican, he – as NPR phrased it – “set off a firestorm” with “Accidental Racist”, his controversial 2013 collaboration with country star Brad Paisley that anticipated the racial tensions within America that have only heightened since Trump’s successful 2016 candidacy for the presidency.

LL won’t be drawn into commenting on this year’s vote. “I’ve decided not to have my activist hat on,” he says. “I really want to focus on my art.” It’s clear he’s drawing a line under making any further political pronouncements for the present, although he believes “things will work out. Democracy will have its place and America will survive, at least until we go out like the dinosaurs in a mass-extinction event.”

Elsewhere, The Force finds LL rapping of hustlers and killers (“Saturday Night Special”), musing on identity (“Black Code Suite”), reflecting on his remarkable career (“Runnit Back”, “30 Decembers”) and indulging in the occasional sex rap (the X-rated “Proclivities”). It’s a dark, satisfying, sophisticated record, and he’s rightly proud of it. “I wanted to show you could continue to make dope stuff and mature as an artist in hip-hop,” he says. “Because – to speak really candid – we’re used to artists coming out with mediocre offerings that aren’t as impactful or innovative as their first few records.”

“I wanna show you can be creative in your 40th year of hip-hop, just like a film director can be creative 40 years in,” he continues. “There’s no reason why an artist in hip-hop can’t continue to be innovative, so long as they stay curious and keep caring and coming up with new ideas.” LL says he feels like he did just before Mama Said Knock You Out dropped: “I love the low expectations, playing from behind. It inspires me.”

He sees himself almost as an underdog now, an odd position for so successful and beloved an entertainer – one firmly embraced by the mainstream, the first hip-hop artist honoured by the Kennedy Center, an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, recipient of four NAACP Image awards – to assume. He says that his mainstream status doesn’t compromise his edge as an artist – a statement The Force’s forthright content bears out. “You just gotta be true to who you are,” he says.

When he wrote The Force, he took inspiration from Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, “artists that wrote about the things that are important to them. I’m not gonna be a prisoner to some mainstream image of myself – what ages well is making what you mean to create. So I said, ‘you know what? I’m just gonna write me some cool s***.’” He looks up to his wall of shiny discs and grins wide. “Imma come from the heart, and let the chips fall where they may.”

‘The Force (Frequencies of Real Creative Energy)’ is out on 6 September via Def Jam Recordings/Virgin