I'm Not Crying, You're Crying

Undone by a Decades-Old Sample

France’s Frank Sinatra, Charles Aznavour

“[Charles Aznavour was] a French pop diety” –Stephen Holden

“‘Pac was like Jesus, Nas wrote the Bible” –J Cole

The late great Tupac Shakur was my first, and remains my all-time, hip hop love. Nas came next. His grimy 1994 debut illmatic dramatically disrupted the genre and earned widespread commercial success, but when I started listening to Nas later that decade I was mostly drawn to the more mainstream, polished hits that followed in illmatic’s wake. I inherited a baby blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Siera after we took the keys away from my grandmother, and that CD deck must have played burned copies of If I Ruled the World (feat. Lauryn Hill), Nas is Like, and The Message hundreds of times.

Soon I sought out every Nas track I could find, rewinding back to illmatic and absorbing his short-lived “super group” collaboration with New York rappers AZ, Foxy Brown, and Nature (who replaced Cormega, a far superior artist who proved incompatible with Nas). They went by The Firm.

Produced by Dr. Dre, The Firm’s one and only release The Album was met with underwhelming reception, too pop and mainstream to hold the ears of many Nas fans more accustomed to his earlier, grittier sound. But Dre’s pop production landed squarely in my sweet spot and won me over, and I was seduced all the moreso by the album’s Hollywood mafioso narrative.

The record’s lead track Firm Fiasco pays explicit homage to legendary snippets of voice over from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). Pump that shit right into my teenage millennial veins. While the lyrics and cinematic nods stand on their own, the song’s real magic comes from the gorgeous music sample weaving it all together. Had the streaming service existed at the time, Firm Fiasco would have dominated my 2000 Spotify Wrapped.

Back then all we had was Napster. Access to reliable music research on the internet was equally rudimentary, so I doubt I would have been able to easily locate the source of Firm Fiasco’s triumphant baseline. Not that I was all that curious—In fact, I always assumed it was a Dre original. I only discovered he had sampled for Firm Fiasco by accident when, as has been the case so often lately, my restaurant played the original song to my utter joy and serendipitous satisfaction.

Charles Aznavour’s À ma fille (To my daughter) rocked my world. I understood immediately why it was chosen to lead off The Firm’s album and formally introduce the supergroup as a lyrical crime family. The song turned sixty last year, and were he still alive Aznavour would have turned 100. The Armenian French tenor, who died in 2018, exemplified what could have happened had Tupac Shakur lived a full life:

He released more than 1,000 songs, won the French Cinema Academy’s Best Actor Award, and was a fierce advocate for artist protections and human rights. Beloved in both his native France and his ancestral Armenia, Aznavour served France as Ambassador-at-Large to Armenia and served Armenia both as Ambassador to Switzerland and at UNESCO.

I was today years old when I first learned about this extraordinary artist and humanitarian, and I will remain grateful to my employer for accidentally putting him on my radar, with additional gratitude of course to Dr. Dre for tapping into À ma fille back in 1997. Firm Fiasco, like Goodfellas itself, reveres chosen family. Nas raps:

“Nothing should come before your fam, from kis [of coke] to quarter grams.”

This theme of loyalty and fidelity from generation to generation hits hard in Scorsese’s masterpiece, as in Aznavour’s:

“Cet étranger sans nom, sans visage, oh combien je le hais! Et pourtant s'il doit te rendre heureuse, je n'aurai envers lui nulle pensée haineuse. Mais je lui offrirai mon cœur avec ta main, je ferai tout cela en sachant que tu l'aimes. Simplement car je t'aime.”

(This nameless, faceless stranger, oh how much I hate him! And yet if it should make you happy, I will not have any hateful thoughts towards him. But I will offer him my heart with your hand. I will do all this knowing that you love it, simply because I love you.)

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

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