Calling the Biz: The 25-Year Class Reunion of Handsome Boy Modeling School

Far worse has now commenced that separates the legacy of two principal behind-the-scenes men who stretched the definition of “producer” in hip-hop.

But in 1999, Prince Paul was the anti-Diddy (née Puff Daddy) for simpler reasons. In stark contrast to the Biggie pallbearer who brought rap into its shiny-suit era, Paul Edward Huston was a concept-driven, fun-loving goofus who had ideas of his own about how hip-hop should interact with TV and cinema. Even when he invented the hip-hop skit (a dubious blessing but a hysterical curse) ten years prior on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, I would not call his artistic leanings particularly commercial. It didn’t take long for this invention to become corrupted into what my perspective as a white suburban male in the ‘90s could only call an excuse to rack up Parental Advisory labels, as much a marketing attraction as the music itself. Dr. Dre and Snoop introduced us to “Deez Nutz,” Wu-Tang Clan threatened to club them with a spiked bat, and Biggie himself gave probably too many kids a first sex-ed lesson that left them wondering how pickle juice fit into the equation.

But using these intermission segments to express fantasies both violent and pornographic wasn’t really Prince Paul’s gig; I only know him from records but I’d clock him as a stoner who liked the 1990s equivalent of cueing up his favorite YouTube clips with company. And the final year of the decade remains unquestionably his artistic peak, elevating his interest in connecting plot throughlines to rap on not one but two concept albums.

 

 

In February 1999, you had the more traditionally cinematic and more traditionally rap A Prince Among Thieves, a film-length audio opus. It starred not merely a guest list but a full cast with Breeze Brewin of the Juggaknots in the lead, with supports like Everlast as a cop, Big Daddy Kane as a pimp named Count Macula, a crackhead played by Chris Rock (who owns the film rights but never adapted) and so forth. Unlike a lot of similar “operas” in the music medium, it’s both as excellent as it reads on paper and stays on concept.

A rapped movie, simple enough. With the advent of gangsta the genre was constantly flirting with the possibilities of that already. Handsome Boy Modeling School is harder to explain. Get a Life was a lightly demented Fox sitcom meant to appeal to weirder Married With Children devotees at the end of the ‘80s starring Chris Elliott as an on-brand “psychotic paperboy.” The show wasn’t successful, but me and my dad enjoyed it (under oath I’m pretty sure its use of “Stand” was my first exposure to R.E.M.), and so did Prince Paul, who teamed up with Dan “The Automator” Nakamura to portray two characters, Chest Rockwell and Nathaniel Merriweather, who didn’t exist in the universe of the TV episode they decided to base an entire album on. About male models. Well, a phony course to become male models. Got all that?

Look, as mixtapes and the Internet determined later and then much later, meta-concepts are an excuse to have fun, get attention, etc. from Wale breaking through via his love of Seinfeld to Kool Keith’s on-record personas varying from deranged cannibal to deranged gyno, the latter of which established the Automator as a conceptual producer extraordinaire himself on 1996’s fabled Dr. Octagon. I’m here to tell you that the songs on So…How’s Your Girl? don’t interact with the “Handsome Boy Modeling School” episode of Get a Life at all, and except for a memorable Father Guido Sarducci outro (“if it weren’t for Handsome-a Boy Modeling School, I would-a still have-a 60 dollars.”), the skits just cut up show dialogue over formidable beats. In other words: the meta-concept’s an excuse to have fun, get attention and put Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori and Beastie Boy Mike D on the same song.

 

VIDEO: “Handsome Boy Modeling School” episode of Get a Life 

But star power is for the 2004 sequel White People, which roped in Linkin Park, Pharrell, and John Oates to chart just 30 spots higher than the original. Girl? comes across like one fluid rap and trip-hop session of friends and surprisingly few surprises considering all the sonic openness. “Metaphysical” showcased the aforementioned Grand Royal alums on the stoney tune you’d expect, “Holy Calamity (Beat Witness II)” let DJ Shadow do what he does best on the most traditionally hip-hop track of his early career, and even Sean Lennon’s hardly a shock crooning over basement-soul Money Mark on “Sunshine” on the finest tune either’s ever made.

The only out-of-the-blue thing here besides the album’s existence itself is that it’s where Del the Funky Homosapien truly broke out as the king of nerd rap. Before joining forces with Souls of Mischief and others to form yet another indie-rap consortium Hieroglyphics, he was just Ice Cube’s weirdo cousin, who was indeed funky on early cuts like “Wrongplace” and “Mistadobalina” and his fluent-yet-gawky delivery was half-realized before he found his true community. He’s the first unsampled voice you hear from Handsome Boy Modeling School and you can instantly hear him grab a track like “Magnetizing” and carry arrestingly tuneless piano for six minutes. He and Trugoy from De La steal the show over a crunchy blues-rock vamp on “The Projects (PJays),” the closest thing to what would’ve made sense as a single. Automator and his trusty scratching virtuoso Kid Koala went on to center an entire project around the rapper with Deltron 3030 shortly after, which of course the heads loved.

But the best track is “The Truth,” where Róisín Murphy curls like errant smoke around a lounge tune nailed to a trip-hop beat and gave Automator/Merriweather the idea to do a whole solo spinoff called Lovage where he explored his Serge Gainsbourg side further. But Automator’s own career peak happened a couple years later by putting the beats on Damon Albarn’s original Gorillaz formation and finding success via two Handsome Boy graduates themselves: Miho Hatori on the admittedly fucking annoying “19-2000” and Del on the absolute classic “Clint Eastwood,” named for its Morricone-derived melodica riff. You could say this album walked so Gorillaz could run, from these specific co-conspirators to its beat-oriented eclecticism and strong original visual component. Sure, the Merriweather and Rockwell aliases were personified by fake moustaches Prince Paul and Automator donned for press pics and in-character interviews, but they still expanded hip-hop’s possibilities without a one of their top-shelf collaborators looking like they broke a sweat.

On both his high-concept 1999 masterpieces, Prince Paul gave work to peers he suspected like himself were already being left behind by the genre’s focus on Master P and DMX: Chubb Rock, Grand Puba, Sadat X, Biz Markie. No one can say he didn’t make the most of his grandest opportunities, and in the case of these deep-seated grooves that had nothing to prove, oh my god they’re gorgeous.