EPMD / Strictly Business (Expanded Edition) / 1987
It's My Thing
confident, combative, celebratory
A crowd-hyping boast track built around EPMD's James Brown-sampled catchphrase, alternating call-and-response chants with verses of pure competitive self-assertion. Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith trade rhymes warning off biters and lesser MCs while framing their own performance as effortlessly superior, all staged as a live concert experience.
braggadocio originality vs. biting crowd control/performance competition and territory authenticity in rap craft
Who's speaking
The two MCs speak in first person directly to an audience and, intermittently, to rival rappers who might steal their style; the crowd itself is addressed as a participant via the repeated call for louder response. The voice is boastful but not menacing in a literal sense -- the threats are stylized battle-rap posturing.
What happens
The song opens by staging itself as a live event, a packed stadium and a call for crowd noise, before EPMD introduces themselves as the dominant new voice out of Long Island. From there it settles into a loose verse-chorus cycle where each verse elaborates a different angle on the same claim: originality, control of the mic, physical menace toward biters, and technical superiority. There's little plot progression; instead the song builds through accumulation, each verse restating the thesis with new imagery until the final verses widen into full self-mythologizing before the chant fades out.
How it's built
The track relies on a chorus/hook built from the title phrase repeated in call-and-response fashion, interrupted by verses of comparable length. The stutter-hook and 'louder' ad-libs function almost like a drum break, giving the song a live, DJ-set-like architecture rather than a strict pop verse-chorus shape. There's no clear bridge or key turn; the structure is cyclical, designed for a set rather than a narrative arc.
Section by section
Opening call
The song frames itself as a live event before any rapping begins, using stadium imagery and direct address to the audience to establish scale and spectacle before the lyrical content starts.Introductory chant intated:],
Craft
- extended metaphor of disease/contagion
- Biting a rhyme is described as an infection that makes a rival's body weaken or heat up, turning creative theft into a kind of illness that spreads once exposed to the source.
- simile stacking
- The verses pile up comparisons -- boxer, psychic, dove, milky way, thriller -- to build an almost absurdist catalog of superiority, a hallmark of late-80s battle rap where density of comparison signals skill.
- call-and-response
- The repeated audience prompt functions as both structural device and rhetorical proof of dominance -- the crowd's volume literally becomes evidence of the MCs' authority.
- threat as boast
- Violent imagery (getting shot, being in the danger zone) is deployed not as real menace but as hyperbolic reinforcement of skill, a genre convention rather than literal narrative.
Reading it
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Context
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Listen for
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About EPMD
EPMD is an American hip hop duo from Brentwood, New York. The duo's name is an initialism for "Erick and Parrish Making Dollars", referring to its members: emcees Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith.
1986 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue