Eight Years Later, Joey Badass’ 1999 Endures

Revisiting Joey’s classic debut on its eighth anniversary.

The image is unforgettable: Two teenagers, wearing goofy looking ski masks, are standing in an empty New York City subway station. As a chaotic, old school sounding beat builds behind them, featuring sirens and bomb explosion sounds and anything else that might inspire feelings of anarchy, the words “Survival Tactics” appear between them in big yellow letters.

Suddenly, we’re thrust into a uniquely new version of something we’ve seen a million times before: an aggressive, angry, lyrically dense, undeniably ‘90s-sounding rap song.

As he drops non-stop quotables and double-entendres with easy confidence, close-ups on Joey Badass’ youthful face indicate that this is not a long lost member of the Wu-Tang Clan. In fact, it seems pretty clear he wasn’t even born yet when Enter The Wu-Tang was released.

It would have been easy at the time to write off the song as some sort of old school hip-hop fan fiction. But the execution was too good. The talent was undeniable. And the mystery surrounding a kid who had just turned 17 years old a month earlier releasing something like this was captivating.

A few months later, the full mixtape containing “Survival Tactics” arrived. 1999 was an instant sensation. After hearing the…