Ask anybody in Yonkers about The LOX and you get the same answer. Jadakiss, Styles P, Sheek Louch, Yonkers, done. Nobody brings up the part that actually explains how it happened. It runs through another Yonkers artist.
Three Kids And Two Other Names
Jason Phillips, David Styles and Sean Jacobs met as high school students in Yonkers. Before they were The LOX they were something else, twice. First the Bomb Squad. Then the Warlox. The third name is the one that stuck.
They were making demos the way everybody did then, on tape, hoping the right person heard it. They cut theirs with Jaz-O, a Brooklyn rapper who had brought up Jay-Z.
The Handoff
Mary J. Blige grew up in the Schlobohm Houses in Yonkers. By the mid nineties she was the Queen of Hip Hop Soul and one of the biggest artists in the country. She was also still paying attention to what was coming out of her own city.
She got hold of the group's demo. She passed it to Sean Combs at Bad Boy Records. He signed them.
That is the whole hinge. Three kids from Yonkers with a tape reached the biggest label in rap because somebody else from Yonkers put it in the right hand.
Everybody Else's Records First
Getting signed did not mean getting an album. For a stretch The LOX showed up on other people's hits instead of their own. The biggest was "It's All About the Benjamins," released in 1997 with Lil' Kim and the Notorious B.I.G. It climbed to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. On the rap chart it went to number 1.
If you had the radio on in 1997 you heard three guys from Yonkers constantly. You just might not have known that yet.
Their Turn
Money, Power & Respect came out on January 13, 1998. It reached number 3 on the Billboard 200. It hit number 1 on the R&B and hip hop chart. It went platinum.
Their first album. A million copies.
The LOX have been going ever since, together and apart, and all three still come back to Yonkers in interviews the way people come back to a hometown that made them. Which it did. Worth remembering that the door got opened by a woman from the Schlobohm Houses who did not have to open it.
Photo credits: Eddy Rissling for The Come Up Show, dephisticate, Amber and musicisentropy, all via Wikimedia Commons.
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