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Music

Used to Used to Get It in Ohio: Cam'ron's Overlooked Classic Just Turned Five

Cam'ron's "I Used To Get It In Ohio" just turned five, so it's time to reflect on how amazing it is.

Sell your motorcycle. Buy a golden retriever. Ask your boss if you have a 401(k). That’s right: Cam’ron’s Purple Haze turns 10 this year. You're older than you think.

But before you fold up your capes for storage and put the pink Range Rover on Craigslist, remember that it has only been half as long since the one they call Killa dropped one of his finest songs. Sure, it was a single so ill-suited for radio that it didn’t even chart. No one requests it in clubs or at house parties after “Oh Boy” stops playing. Its producer was all of nine years old when “Horse and Carriage” was out. But it was necessary; Cam had something to tell us, to remind us. Before he was inventing slang and tormenting animal rights activists, he was a kid from Harlem who learned how to hustle. It was the tail end of the decade, and he was looking back—and instead of seeing the stardom and the tours and the endorsement deals, he saw himself criss-crossing interstates hundreds of miles from home. He used to get it in Ohio.

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“(I Used To) Get It In Ohio” is the villain’s theme from a mob movie. From the opening lines (“Thinkin’ ‘bout Guy Fisher/Never met him, but god damn, that’s my nigga”), Cam is sitting comfortably in his self-mythologizing wheelhouse. No challenge is too big: he ducks squad cars and takes over entire states like it was his birthright. And there’s some sophistication to all of this, too—the detailed movements through Chicago in the first verse are proof enough of that. Cam’s goons might “dearly depart ya” in broad daylight, but that’s just everyday business. And the boss keeps his hands clean.

If Cam is the supervillain, AarabMuzik is the muscle standing behind him. A foreboding piano line offsets the frantic, pulsing beat; the house of cards comes crashing down whenever Cam says so. “Ohio” is not a song built on complex themes. This is an uncompromisingly efficient drug dealer doing what he has to do to survive and prosper, and the music reflects that. It’s bleak. It’s mean, it’s dirty—the mix is far from pristine—and it never relents. Cam starts the track by shouting out locales (“What up Arkansas? Minnesota? Kansas?”) that allowed him to lose weight and ends with him arranging even more drop-offs. There’s no hand wringing, no serious threats, and certainly no moralizing.

Cam’ron was Rick Ross before “Rick Ross” was Rick Ross. Sure, Cameron Giles can back up his rhymes with reality, but Cam’ron is undoubtedly a character. This allows him to move from vulnerable to utterly merciless at the drop of a hat, so long as it’s what’s best for the song. It isn’t hard to imagine a track where Cam kicks around the consequences of his actions; here, they go unexamined. Cam has always instinctively understood that not every song has to represent the artist’s entire worldview. The other advance single from Crime Pays, “My Job”, is a lighthearted everyman lament. “Ohio” is anything but that, but the album—like Cam’ron’s career—is not an attempt to reconcile the two. Cam uses each song as a vehicle to ride to opposite ends of the same spectrum, because he’s great at both and because why not?

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Anyone alive in the late ‘90s and early 2000s can tell you that Cam’ron is wildly influential. His fashion sense has been absorbed into the ether, forever the image of antagonistic hip-hop excess. What can be easier to forget is that his music itself is a blueprint for so many rappers. Lil Wayne’s stunning run in the middle of the 2000s owes as much to Cam on the creative end as it does to Baby in the boardrooms. The third verse of “Ohio” is not only one of the best in his catalog, but also a perfectly distilled sample of Cam’s style. This is a man in love with language. There are few qualities more frustrating in a rapper than a worship of multi-syllabic rhyming above all else. It makes otherwise coherent rappers fill their bars with nonsense words, phrasing things in ways they never would had the rhyme scheme not dictated they do so. But look at these lines from “Ohio”:

Y’all make a brother laugh, me, I took another path
Come into my habitat, hovercrafts, bubble baths
Duffle bags stuffed with cash, fell in love with math

Not a single syllable is wasted. Cam has always been at his best where humor and heartlessness meet. He first fills that alternate path with cartoonish luxury before rattling you back to reality with a duffle bag full of money. And for all the lyrics in all the songs dedicated to making money, how many pack as much color as Cam saying he “fell in love with math”?

(Two years later, Kanye West would crib the hovercraft/bubble bath rhyme for Watch The Throne bonus cut “Primetime”. If his credentials as a Cam’ron superfan are ever in doubt, remember that when Funkmaster Flex asked him about Cam and Jim Jones dissing him over the “Runaway” beat, he could only respond “Dipset is so necessary”.)

Those bars are followed by a brilliant string of different-colored objects, a game of duck-duck-goose that involves guns, and a promise to send his foes “up to Je´sus”. It’s a jaw-dropping passage filled with the peculiar blend of wit and menace that makes Cam’ron so fascinating. For four-and-a-half minutes, you’re torn between cheering for the guy and wanting to lock your doors and hide from him. You ask yourself if it makes sense to support someone so cruel. You wonder if Cam’s enemy has really been “bitch-made since sixth grade”. Then you take your cape out and hang it back in the closet. Maybe just one more year.

Paul Thompson still gets it in Los Angeles, but also on Twitter - @pthompson3507