“We started something”: Did Slade influence hip-hop?

An article from Far Out Magazine explores whether Slade, the English glam rock band famed for their phonetically misspelled song titles, had an unexpected influence on hip-hop's own tradition of slang-spelled track names. Frontman Noddy Holder revealed in a 2015 Uncut interview that the band's habit began with their 1971 chart-topper "Coz I Love You", written phonetically in Black Country dialect, and later claimed this style "caught on" through Prince in the 1980s and subsequently hip-hop artists. The piece treats the connection as intriguing but speculative rather than proven.

The article traces Slade's run of deliberately misspelled hits, including "Take Me Bak 'Ome", "Mama Weer All Crazee Now" and "Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me", which topped UK charts in the early 1970s. It then draws a loose lineage through Prince's stylised titles such as "Take Me with U" to hip-hop's golden-age slang titles like Dr Dre's "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang", Ice Cube's "Dead Homiez" and Wu-Tang Clan's "Protect Ya Neck", a convention still seen in tracks like Gunna's 2023 release "Fuckumean". The author concludes the Black Country-to-hip-hop link is likely overstated but plausible as one small influence among many in music's evolution.