Channel K (directed by Muses)
Twenty years after they found global fame with their catchy-yet-corny song “It’s Hard to Say I’m Sorry”, Memphis hip-hop duo Three 6 Mafia and B-Real of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony officially reached their next breakthrough. “Power” (2003) catapulted Three 6 into superstardom with the former’s role as an “actor” in the latter’s video for “Pray 4 My City”. Such was the success of the song that the pair collaborated for the third and final time in 2006 on “Verzuz”.
“Power” topped the US Billboard charts as well as reaching No 2 in the UK in 2006. A healthy success for the U.S. rappers but commercially they failed to replicate that success here. Both they and Bone Thugs had yet to really exploit the opportunities of the UK pop charts – the UK has suffered a few years of poor US acts, thanks largely to new visa restrictions introduced by the Tories.
So what happens when your first collaboration tops the charts in a different country and you’re split between the two countries?
As they travel from one city to the next on their latest tour, reports in fan forums from UK hip-hop fans have identified three UK dates on the Three 6 Mafia tour: Oxford on 6 July, Bolton on 10 July and Darlington on 13 July.
The crowd at Oxford’s O2 Academy.
The Twitter account Eject6murdaVegas1284 from our USA readers is informing the UK fans that the “Bandici Boys” and “Bizzle Boyz” of 3 6 Mafia are “only performing one UK date”.
When asked via Twitter if they plan to perform in the UK in July, the Three 6 Mafia reps replied: “Of course, but we’re not going to give a specific date/location.”
According to the tweet, the Three 6 Mafia team does plan to perform at the RockInRave Festival, but the conversation turned violent very soon after it was sent out.
Within minutes, fans were calling members of Three 6 the “Thug Grammarists”. Some of them took a picture of members of the U.S rap collective with the caption, “Bad West Coast”: the photograph was met with hundreds of bad puns (see below).
Who does rep Three 6 Mafia? “Bad West Coast”: Kiyomii Myers (Left)
@Sbongameasts A post shared by Young B Rapper ✔ (@youngbriz1) on Jun 30, 2018 at 3:31pm PDT
The discussion soon turned more violent, with posts by some fans calling the UK groups “Thug Grammarists”.
Offical tweets from both Bone Thugs and Three 6 didn’t comment on the onstage incident, but they did claim to have embraced British rap culture. A spokesperson for Bone Thugs tweeted: “Thank you to all our fans who reached out today to let us know that we were being abused by some ‘Thug Grammarists’ – Stop loving the rough ghetto tales – we are #YMCMB – Making good music today. We represent nobody – go see us [at] our shows and then we come get you.”
During a set earlier in the week at the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, B-Real had called the audience his “brothers” and told fans to “do you bums”.
Three 6 Mafia recently celebrated 20 years of making music. The man with the longest standing record in the group, DJ Paul, 50, recalled a photograph in which he was carried on stage by four others. “It was an I-don’t-care-who-you-are moment,” he said. “Everybody was here because they were friends.”
This article first appeared on the Daily Mail