Flipping A Giant
What it takes to flip Cam'ron's "Killa Cam" featuring Opera Steve
The Diplomats, better known as Dipset for the rubes, the uneducated, and the uninformed, used to be those dudes! They’re old and weird now, but they were truly unstoppable in the early 2000s. Jimmy Jones? At times inconsistent, but resurging. Freekey Zeekey? A legend in his own right. Juelz Santana? I’m all over it. Cam’ron? Infallible in all that he says and does. Well, most times. Sometimes his sports-based conversations with Ma$e on It Is What It Is can go sideways, but that’s neither here nor there. By rap purists, he was considered one of the worst rappers of the 2000s, but they were just hating. Cam’ron rules. Dipset had a firm grip on the rap landscape for a long time. However, I was not there, and therefore I cannot and will not speak on it.
I will, however, speak on the sheer and immense weight of Cam’ron’s legacy. To be blunt, it’s big. Huge, even. From the ridiculous samples and nearly satirical sartorial choices to the over-the-top bars, vast and extremely varied vernacular, and untouchable flow, Cam’ron’s swag is all over the current hip-hop movement, despite the fact that many artists may not even realize that they are jacking him some way or another.
The finest example of this is, of course, “Killa Cam,” the self-mythologizing anthem from 2004’s Purple Haze. There’s not much I could say that hasn’t been said a million times before, but I’ll do my best to be different (you know this!). It launched this fool Opera Steve’s entire career and is most likely still paying his bills. He only did the hook! It cemented the New York-via-Kingston, Jamaica production duo The Heatmakerz as two of the best in the business. It proved that Cam’ron can do anything with the kind of panache that only he possesses, even if the old fussies weren’t rocking with him at first.
“Killa Cam” is a time machine, always ready to transport listeners back to Harlem in the early aughts, and people will want to ride it until the end of time itself. That said, enjoying the track and reinventing it are totally different things. Hip-hop, as we all know by now, relies on samples of old records—typically jazz, soul, or rock—to both make a statement and grab attention. Cam’ron himself is a prime example of this. He cut his teeth by rapping over flips of Queen, Mavis Staples, and Billy Joel, and that’s cool. But flipping a rap giant and making it your own is a different thing entirely.
Someone can be a fan of a song and flip it, but some tracks are sacred. They’re not supposed to be sampled because their greatness cannot go any higher. If someone wants to flip a song like “Killa Cam,” they need to be absolutely certain of their unfuckwitable-ness and of their ability to make something new from the old guard, which is an extremely tall task. Luckily for us listeners, two of the “Killa Cam” time machine’s bravest (and most recent) straphangers are Reese Youngn and wildkarduno, who, thanks to their obvious affinity for Cam’ron, fucked around and tried.
Reese Youngn hails from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. He consistently puts out a brand of pain music that only he could get away with. Not to jump directly into comparisons, but if guys like Jaydayoungan and Yungeen Ace were fueled by pain, then Reese is fueled by agony. He puts his entire heart and soul into this shit, and you can hear it as he wrenches his vocal chords into a knotty howl. His strangely emotional delivery mixed with his brusque vocals make his music stand out in a landscape that was at one time saturated with pain music.
After going viral for his warbling, aggrieved remix of Coi Leray’s “No More Parties,” Reese has found himself a nice little career. His music is nothing like “Killa Cam,” nor is it like any of Cam’ron’s other music. But Reese loves a good sample, and the Heatmakerz-crafted, Opera Steve-assisted track, despite its status, was ripe for the picking. Though Reese’s “Killa Kam (G Mix)” was released back in 2020, he finally uploaded it to streaming earlier this year, and thank god he did.
Where “Killa Cam” is ebullient and boastful—Harlem to its core—”Killa Kam” is sorrowful and tinged with the sharp pain of regret. Reese uses the exact beat that Cam’ron used to cement his legacy as Harlem’s flyest, but instead of canonizing himself for sainthood, Reese comes out as a sinner looking to repent. He covers topics from his past that he’ll never be able to outpace and will be forced to grapple with forever: feeding his friends to the streets, losing them before he realizes it, and making sense of the aftermath. The lyrics are raw and unrefined, and his delivery only adds to it.
Reese is really going through some shit on this track, and you can hear it in his voice. As he raps, “My n**** died, his momma cried, ain't give me no hug / She said I fed him to the streets like I ain’t got no love,” his rough croak of a voice magnifies the gravity. At first his voice is so commanding that he sounds unbreakable, but at the end of this bar (and every other, for that matter), he falters, showing the cracks in his armor. In those brief moments, it’s not hard to tell that Reese really feels this shit, almost as if he wishes he could change it all.
On the other hand, we have wildkarduno. Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, uno, similar to the Cam’ron of old, does a little bit of everything. He eats plugg just as easily as classic ATL trap, and when shit goes sideways, he’s ready for that too, ready to feast. His strength is that he can easily bend his style to meet any beat of any genre, and it’s always going to be tough. That said, until late July of this year, he’d never really tackled anything as monolithic as “Killa Cam.”
On July’s cyberundergr0und-hosted mixtape Evil Hero, uno takes on a smorgasbord of instrumentals, pushing his limits and seemingly having the time of his life. He touches on old Gucci Mane on the aptly named “Old Gucci,” straight plugg on “Dstnd,” and whatever the hell they were trying on the Old Atlanta-tinged “Watxh Yo Shoes.” The tape has intense highs and lows, but when the music is good, it is unbeatable. When the music is not so good, the tape is also intensely beatable. (“Be A Sign” comes to mind.) On “Listen,” the second track, it sounds like uno could say just about anything and it’d still go nuts.
In the spirit of playoff baseball, the song is a power hitter in the contact hitter slot. By the time “Listen” rolls around, the opener “Rookie” has already set the tone with a moody, piano-driven base hit where uno boisterously declares that he’s not here to play. Indeed, he is not. As “Listen” is only an 80 second blast, uno doesn’t have a lot of time to work. He doesn’t need it. Thanks to SenseiATL’s ability to handle a twitchy chop of Opera Steve’s vocals on “Killa Cam” over a pulverizing instrumental, uno has more than enough firepower to goose a home run in half that time.
And he does just that. By and large, “Listen” is just one way for wildkarduno to talk his shit in a new way. Whoever is in opposition to him is irrelevant. All we need to know is that they aren’t shit, they were never shit, and they’ll never be shit. The fact that he raps over such an conspicuous sample is a flex in itself. Typically, uno’s beats are so muddied by bass hits that the sample (and his vocals) are drowned out. “Listen” airs everything out despite the fact that uno isn’t really supposed to be sampling “Killa Cam.” It serves as a vessel for uno to position himself as the best to ever do it, whether he’s gassing or not.
Why uno and SenseiATL flipped “Killa Cam” is largely unimportant. It’s fucking cool, especially in this context. “Killa Cam” is a legendary song, and to flip it in such a minimal way shows uno’s and Sensei’s confidence. They’re probably not the guys that should’ve sampled it, but who cares? They did it anyway. This shit was never meant to meet Cam’ron’s original, but in the end, is came damn close.
The same goes for Reese Youngn’s interpretation of the source material. Reese is no Cam’ron (or Opera Steve, for that matter), and I don't think he should ever even try to be them, not that he would. His delivery matches Cam’ron in that both rappers were spitting like nothing could touch them, but Reese diverges by proving that he’s human for a few very brief moments at the end of every bar.
What’s more, the creativity and versatility that he displays on “Killa Cam (G Mix)” is justification enough to cite Cam’ron’s original. His creative motion alone embodies everything that “Killa Cam” is about. He doesn’t need to jack Cam’s sauce, so it’s a flex that he decided to flip it and do some fuckery on it. The juxtaposition of Reese’s interminable pain and Cam’s eternal jubilation of self is nothing short of inspired.
The same goes for wildkarduno. Though he’s a bit lacking as a wordsmith (still great at rapping!), uno’s spirit and enthusiasm more than make up for it. He and Cam both have confidence and bounce for days, so the flip wasn’t wasted in the slightest. uno’s energy alone links him to his source material, and it carries him to slightly lower but still impressive heights.
When it’s all said and done, it’s unlikely that either rapper will reach the high-flying verbal gymnastics of Cam’ron when Dipset was firing, but who could? Cam had the pen, the swagger, and the unbeatable flow, combined with the perfect supporting cast to take on the world. For Reese and uno to believe in themselves enough to even attempt to flip a song from a giant like Cam’ron is a superhuman feat. The fact that they rapped their asses off is just icing on the cake. What more can we ask for?
The realest since kumbaya!