Patrick Swayze’s unsung contribution to the 1990s hip-hop scene
As we’ve talked about on several occasions now, there are countless well-known actors who couldn’t help themselves when it came to a dalliance with recording music, from Bruce Willis to Jared Leto (shudder). It seems any kind of downtime off camera necessitates a call to the agent to get them in a recording booth. But to give the late Patrick Swayze some credit, it seems he actually had more of an influence than most.
Now, admittedly a lot of this was on the hip-hop community, and it was also because his surname just happened to rhyme with the word ‘crazy’, resulting in several MCs using the couplet over the decades, from 1991’s Kool G’s Rap on a track called ‘The Symphony Part II’ – “Reach for the pistol and you’re crazy, try to blast and I’ll be swinging that ass like Patrick Swayze”, to Notorious BIG in 1994, “That’s why I bust back, it don’t faze me. When he drop, take his glock and I’m Swayze.”
You may have noticed a crossover there between the rapper in question not being in a situation anymore, Swayze’s name, and the fact he appeared in the 1992 supernatural hit weepy Ghost, leading to MCs using it as a euphemism for disappearing, firstly on EPMD’s ‘It’s going down’ – “Now I’m Swayze, ghost, the rap host,” and also brilliantly by Andy Samberg on the legendary SNL short Lazy Sunday, “It’s all about the Hamiltons, baby – throw the snacks in a bag, and I’m ghost like Swayze.”
Ice-T took the premise on even further, getting together with his Sex, Money and Gunz crew to create the song ‘Swazy’, which was all about how he and his buddies weren’t ones to stick around after the honour of sharing a bed with a lady, which is a bit stupid, let’s be honest, and they should have known better.
But Swayze, to his credit, seemed absolutely fine with all this, even appearing in a video for Ja Rule’s 2002 track ‘Reign’, and influencing Atlanta star Young Jeezy’s 2007 boast “these other rappers are actors like Patrick Swayze”.
Swayze might not have been a rapper himself, although he did say in 2005 that he was experimenting with “rap rhythms as an emotional undercurrent for ballads,” but he did have considerable chart success in the 1980s with a song called ‘She’s like the Wind’, which was an enormous radio hit around the time he was starring in movies like Road House and Dirty Dancing.
Swayze even co-wrote the track, which was originally intended for a different film, but ended up appearing on the soundtrack for Dirty Dancing, which was one of the biggest-selling movie soundtracks of the decade, with the song going to number three on the American Billboard Top 100.
In 1989, Swayze also co-wrote and performed two songs for Road House and followed that up with songs for both Next of Kin, the same year, and 2003’s One Last Dance, which he also starred in and directed. It didn’t fare anywhere near as well as the films of his heyday, however, with Swayze struggling badly with alcohol abuse by the 2000s.
Sadly, he would pass away in 2009, aged just 57, but his name will certainly always be remembered, and quite possibly borrowed, in the world of hip-hop.
