When I say Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and “The Crossroads” your memory probably goes directly to the classic we all know and love. The track that paid homage to the late great Eazy-E after his passing and the song that brought Bone Thugs-N-Harmony to the masses when the track spun again and again on the radio and the video was played constantly on MTV and BET. It’s a classic song no doubt… Just watch the video.
I was 15 when this album dropped and a core memory for me is watching Bone perform this track live on one of the award shows… Was it MTV Awards? BET Awards? I don’t remember. And while I look it up right now and find out, I’ll leave these words where they are. I’ll also just say I remember everybody wearing white and I think they came in on white horses? Is that right? Again, leaving these words in here and this is what I remember. Let’s see how right or wrong I was here…
okay… no horses in sight… why did I think about white horses here? I don’t know… updating my mind to remove the horses and replace it with what I just watched. I love Bone… Pause… I know Bone Thugs and remember being in 7th grade lifting weights to “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” while rolling up dead leaves in my parents’ backyard trying to get high… Or at least what I thought smoking weed was… yup… pre-internet sheltered white kid trying to live that rapper life. I never got high off of those dead leaves… Just had a crazy sore throat that ruined my lungs at soccer practice later that afternoon. And since I just mentioned “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” we gotta go back…
It was Rap City that first put me onto BNTH and from there I was hooked… I bought that EP with “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” with the quickness at The Wherehouse as soon as I could. The EP, Creepin on Ah Comeup was so good. And when E. 1999 Eternal came out that was a no brainer to take money from grandma to go buy the CD… That whole project though… classic. I’m sure if you’re reading this I don’t have to tell you how dope the album was and is. But for the 2% of you not hip to this album, I got you…
I mention this album and you probably think 2 things… “1st of Tha Month” and “The Crossroads” right?
But to the real heads out there…. the real Bone Thugs fans out there… you know what’s up… you know the fact that 99% of the world doesn’t know… I feel like the 1% of us over here are peas in a pod knowing this about Bone… we know the secret and want to tell more people but who of our friends is really going to care some 30 years later? So we just go back to our cassettes, CD’s and vinyl and even our YouTube accounts with this secret knowledge… The secret… Hmmm… Well… what if I tell you that “Tha Crossroads” you know and love wasn’t even on E. 1999 Eternal. Do I have your ear now? I bet I do… What if I told you that “Tha Crossroads” you know and love was on the rerelease of the album which got added once Eazy-E died… Wait… Where am I going with this… What if I told you that there was a track called “Crossroad” which was different from the version you know and was actually the track included on the OG version of E. 1999 Eternal? Do I have your attention? Okay cool… Now tell your fam to leave you alone for a few minutes so you can peep….
You mind blown right now? This track is a little bit better fit on E. 1999 Eternal than the 2nd version that we all know and love… Right? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiighhhhhhhhhhhhht? I love both tracks… But I also respect the history and the FACT that it was the original “Crossroad” that Bone and Ruthless and Eazy decided to have on the project… A classic project nonetheless. But how many of you know the OG version? And cmon… WHY ISN’T THIS VERSON ON SPOTIFY, APPLE MUSIC, TIDAL, and more???!?!??! Sample clearance issues.. No way… So why… Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy??? And why did they straight up replace “Crossroad” with “The Crossroads”?? They couldn’t have just put “The Crossroads” as a bonus track on the album and left the original project intact?
Okay…. Nowwwww…. How many of you know about Bone Enterprise? I’ll have to save that for another time…