André 3000 paid homage on a September 2014 NPR podcast, Microphone Check (yep, that's its name), when he said, "Das EFX – people don’t mention them a lot – but to me it was about who had the most interesting things, interesting flows. And when it came to that... Das EFX had their thing that was different from everybody else."

Released on April 7, 1992, Dead Serious introduced the planet to the dread-headed wonder twins, Das EFX, who were at one point called Sad EFX, but thankfully switched up the letters, an acronym standing for Dray and Skoob. The EFX signifies the reverb they preferred on their vocals and base in their Brooklyn studio.

Krazy Drayz is from Teaneck, New Jersey, Skoob is from Brooklyn, but the two met while students at Virginia State University, an HBCU in Petersburg, where a homie-in-common introduced them at a party where they freestyled together and decided to join forces to perform at a Delta sorority "star search." 

As mythology goes, Das EFX, sometime later in 1991, after having recently recorded "Klap Ya Handz" in Brooklyn, performed the song off campus in Richmond, VA, at a small club in yet another talent show sponsored by EPMD. Das "lost" the competition, but Parish Smith told Skoob and Dray to meet him outside and a few minutes later asked if they preferred the $100 (the bag for winning the talent show) or a recording contract. Das made the decision to become part of The Hit Squad, along with Redman, Keith Murray and K-Solo. 

They dropped out of college and started to work diligently on their debut project. The title, Dead Serious, speaks both to their work ethic and dedication to make a go in the music industry and serves as explanatory ethos to Dray's Jamaican mother who was perplexed and not too pleased at her son's decision to leave school. 

But it’s hard to be disappointed by the impact Dead Serious made out the gate. Their first single, "They want EFX" hit #1 on the US Hot Rap Singles chart and climbed to #25 on Billboard's Hot 100. The album went platinum in '93 and from the intro, sound, and video, the whole culture knew this was something very special and very different.

"I riggedy-rhyme like no one", Krazy Drayz says accurately, braggadociously on "Mic Checka," the second single off of Dead Serious. Immediately, the listener concurred, and the short-lived era of "iggety"-rhymes were ushered in and out fashion. As the crew tells it, the "iggety" style was a way to be creative and distinct but also served a functional purpose. It was a space and breath filler so as to NOT take a pause between words. It was something they tried, an experiment to achieve circularity with their breathing and wordplay.

 But the "iggety" suffix attached to words seemingly at random was also a kind of handoff from the coded speech of Blues and Jump Blues. While working as a dishwasher, Little Richard would tell his boss off, exclaiming, "a wop bop-b-luma, b-lop bamn boom," whose meaning evaded even the originator. But "Tutti-Frutti, Oh Rooty" is coded speech for Queer sex that filtered (unknowingly?) into mainstream vernacular because of the fun and ingenuity of the language. (I imagine the hilarious irony of a homophobe ordering and digging in at IHOP.)

On "They want EFX" they rhyme, "I spiggedy spark a spliff and give a twist like Chubby Checker" referring to their verbal dexterity, twisting words around like the dance and like a spliff, but also in reference to the background vocals of Chubby Checker's 1960 smash, done in the abridged syllabic utterance of doo-wop. (Triple entendre don't ask me how.)

Das stands in a diasporic tradition of the boogie-woogie, pidgin terms from West Africa and Bantu for "dance". Das EFX is dancing with language and linage. Krazy said in a June 2018 interview with DJ Self on Power 105, "Rhyming has always been like double dutch."

Das EFX used the "iggety" as an extra beat or pause to stutter step around the bar in order to have the pattern break or bend in off and thrilling directions. 

In addition to the innovation of the "iggety" style, Das are virtuosic when it comes to the utilization of the simile. Seemingly pulling from a gamut of childhood games, songs, cartoons, advertisements, sports and television shows, Das's references are a quilt-work of the childhood of '70s and '80s babies. Public intellectual Dr. Cornel West described Hip-Hop as, "The articulation of a generation of latch key kids," and Das is emblematic of those points of reference. A freewheeling associative braiding of our collective youth. Dead Serious has a kind of nostalgic levity, harkening to an era where we made do with little afterschool while our parents were out working in the crumbling empire. 

Hip-Hop is the product of latch key kid genius, the frankenstein re-stitching of a broken and fragmented dominant culture at the crossroads. Hip-Hop's pastiche or collage work is foundational in its aesthetic practice as a counter and subculture. A way to challenge the mainstream, dominant, linear narrative is to employ other aesthetics and modes of storytelling. Das, as (in)credible practitioners, unleash a non sequitur,, non-linear, post-meaning dream- scape all over the track to signify both their underground, "straight from the sewar" status and acumen as lyricists. 

The stream-of-thought displayed on Dead Serious is akin to flipping the knob of a TV or thumbing a remote control (if your TV had one); one moment we are attuned to a baseball game, the next old sitcoms, a jingle from a company trying to sell us something, a cartoon catch-phrase. Hip-Hop has a way of filtering the myriad of sounds, ideas and images thrown at us into a space where we can sort, reflect and digest in the vacuous cacophony and even try to make some meaning of it all or at least have some fun while doing it. 

Pre-Chronic, as the stark realism of the West Coast swept over ideas of what the industry thought would sell, a devasting result of capitalism's desire for monoculture, Das was having fun. Hip-Hop was fun, though you might not have known it looking through the record bin. But in the "underground" a kind of line was drawn: Das reminded/demanded a culture and generation remain artistically (care)free, delighting in the playful sonics of language. 

For all the hardcore, mean mugging Hip-Hop does — and did in the early '90s — Dead Serious is impossible (still) to not have fun while listening to and attempting to rhyme along with. There is not only the joy in the rapid use of their simile and metaphor that makes me think Lil Wayne must be an acolyte, but also the sheer exuberance of this lyrical freedom; to say anything, at a time when Hip-Hop became officially big business. Das made and sold millions, but seemed steadfast in their inventiveness, having and poking fun at the facade of a youth culture forced to grow Dead Serious.