![]() ![]() I want to talk to you.” He and his men duly surrendered.īack in 1893, even as the Evans-Sontag gang were on the lam for dynamiting a Southern Pacific train and making off with thousands in coins, Evans’ wife and his teenage daughter, Eva, were appearing onstage in “Evans and Sontag, or, the Visalia Bandits,” a potboiler about the train robbery.Ī San Francisco Examiner reporter asked Eva whether she had stage fright at the prospect of her performance. Realizing that the game was up, he sent out his little boy to the sheriff with a note: “Come to my house without arms and you will not be harmed. A train-wrecking crew, led by a man who hadn’t made good as a gold miner, decided to intercept other men’s gold at a less labor-intensive stage of things.Ī train plies Cape Horn near Colfax, Calif., on a vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection.Įvans, who lost an eye and an arm in the shootout, escaped from prison and was tracked to his Visalia home. It looks like the first such train robbery in California was in 1881. As miners began hauling gold and silver out of the hills and streams of California and Nevada, it was first the stagecoaches ferrying the goods to and fro that got held up and plundered for the loot.īut trains, those huge cars carrying hundreds of times more weight than horseflesh can, beckoned felons from the highways to the railroad tracks. New crimes usually ride hard on the heels of new technology. The mauled scatterings of boxes and packages along the train tracks look like the crime scene from a Christmas Eve Santa sleigh-jacking. Train robbery lore has become so outsized in our mythic history - Jesse James and Butch Cassidy and the Dalton gang - that what’s happening now in Los Angeles, with Union Pacific being ransacked of consumer cargo, is startlingly low-tech, haphazard thievery in an age when you can steal millions with a mouse click. ![]() ![]() They really did derail trains to get at the loot. But for now, check out The 50 Best Storytelling Rap Songs.They really did holler, “Stick ‘em up!” They really did tie bandanas around their faces, and blow open railway car doors and safes with dynamite (although not always with the intended results). What did we miss? What shouldn't be on the list? What should've ranked higher or lower? Shout at us in the comments. This is a list of the greatest storytelling raps in hip-hop history, from cautionary tales of lost souls on the road to ruin to locker room grade cataloguing of bedroom exploits to autobiographical yarns from over-sharing MCs sorting out their personal problems though the music, and of course, complex stick-em-up stories full of more blood and betrayal than Al Pacino's Scarface. Suddenly what started out as giddy toasting over party music had evolved into something closer in spirit to the gifted griots of African history. As hip-hop has matured as an art form, writers have come along who have taken the craft to new heights with their storytelling talents. The mark of a good rapper is the ability to string words together into captivating rhymes, but the mark of a great one is the ability to weave those rhymes into stunning narratives that grip and maintain the listener's attention through the end of the song.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |