Still fresh: why Mtume’s Juicy Fruit underpins generations of rap classics

Notorious BIG’s Juicy, released 30 years ago this week, is the story of a rapper coming out of Brooklyn, New York, and rising to the top – a self-fulfilling prophecy that gave Biggie his breakout hit. But the song it sampled, the synth-laden Juicy Fruit by funk group Mtume, has its own rich history in hip-hop after initially topping the Billboard R&B chart for two months in 1983. The track has underpinned Warren G’s g-funk opus Do You See in 1994, Faith Evans’s Faithfully in 2001, Let It Go by Keyshia Cole, Missy Elliott and Lil’ Kim in 2007, and Saweetie’s empowerment anthem Pussy in 2022. All told, more than 100 songs, largely rap tracks, have used Juicy Fruit in one way or another, thanks to a blend of nostalgia, sensuality and utterly brilliant drum programming.
“Juicy Fruit was on the cusp of R&B and hip-hop,” says Mtume band member Phil Field, who played keys and sang backing vocals on the original track, recorded at Ears Recording Studios in New Jersey. Before his death in 2022, bandleader James Mtume described putting the track together in under two hours during a late-night session – he then frantically called Mtume vocalist Tawatha Agee in London where she was singing backup on Roxy Music’s Avalon tour. Summoned back to the US, Agee laid down her steamy vocals – “I’ll be your lollipop – you can lick me everywhere” – in one night before flying back to the UK.
Field says many rap artists have chosen to tap sounds from The After Six Mix, a reprise of Juicy Fruit on the same album, where Fields’ keyboards are even more prominent. “A lot of folks like to hear the keyboard. I’m not strokin’ myself, but I’m just saying,” Field says with a laugh. “They start from part two.”
The song became a favourite of Trackmasters, the Brooklyn production duo of Poke and Tone who produced a slew of classic beats for 90s hip-hop: Poke, AKA Jean-Claude Olivier, heard his childhood best friend listening to it over and over when going through a breakup in 1984. Olivier ended up living and recording with Sean Combs – then known as Puff Daddy, now facing a string of sexual misconduct lawsuits – for two months during the winter of 1993 in Scarsdale, New York, where they produced hits for Mary J Blige, Faith Evans, Total, Craig Mack, Usher and Notorious BIG.
At the time, Combs had been let go from Uptown Records and was setting up his own label, Bad Boy Records. Poke and Combs met up at the Hit Factory back in New York City where Combs brought in a vinyl of Juicy Fruit. “He’s like ‘Yo, we should flip this shit,’” says Olivier, who duly returned to the studio with a beat that sampled it. Biggie was not immediately impressed. “Big is sitting on the couch, he don’t like the record: ‘Yo, this is shit is whatever.’” Nevertheless, he went into the booth and started rapping. “Big don’t write nothing,” Olivier says. “Everything’s in his head.”
Olivier pretty much forgot about the track until months later, in 1994, when Bad Boy Records was in full swing and Combs said he wanted it to be the lead single on Biggie’s debut album Ready to Die. Trackmasters soared because of Juicy, as did Biggie, who told Olivier directly that the record changed his life. The sample changed James Mtume’s life, too – although he sued Sony over the rights to the original song before his death, he described his deal with Combs as: “You get a dollar, I get 50 cents, that was it … Best deal I ever cut.”
Olivier thinks the Juicy Fruit samples evoked nostalgia for a mid-80s period when hip-hop and R&B were crossing into the mainstream, that “cusp” point Field describes. “Hip-hop is derived from rappers rapping on the breaks that DJs were spinning,” Olivier says. “Me and Tone’s approach has always been to make shit feel like [people are] at the park freestyling on breaks. That’s the reason we would sample all these records. Juicy was just a rendition of that.”
That nostalgia runs deep, attests Harry Fraud, the producer behind one of the more offbeat later uses of Juicy Fruit: Action Bronson’s Strictly 4 My Jeeps, which strips away the more familiar parts of the original and leaves only some of the drums, surrounding them with three other samples. Fraud cites Juicy Fruit as being one of the classic drum breaks “that are kind of ingrained within your psyche”, and he’s still in awe of the placement of the rimshots, in between the main snare and the kick. “Those little in-between parts are what make the groove,” he says. “It’s late, but it’s on time.”
Today, more than 40 years since Juicy Fruit and 30 since Juicy, the Biggie track has become better known than the original – but this, Fraud argues, is all part of hip-hop’s evolution. He mentions Like That by Future, Kendrick Lamar and Metro Boomin – which topped the US chart on release earlier this year. It samples Everlasting Bass by 80s rapper Rodney O, which itself sampled Barry White. “That’s the beauty of sampling,” Fraud says. “Each time, it’s introduced to a whole new audience. I hope that continues.”