The hits have come more slowly since, but they’d already left their mark-in modern hip-hop, the line between rapping and singing has all but vanished, and Bone Thugs’ rap/R&B hybrid clearly helped spur that evolution. Ooooh, oooo, cleveland oh yeah Bone Thugs sing wit me yeah Hook Cleveland Rocks, Cleveland Rocks Chorus overlappin hook Cleveland is the city that we come from Cleveland is the city- City that we come from Cleveland is the city that we come from Cleveland is the city- City that we come from Verse 1: Krayzie Nigga wuz born and brought up. Bone Thugs’ members went in 10 directions at once, with a dizzying array of solo albums and smaller group projects, before fully reuniting the following decade. After 1997’s sprawling double-disc The Art of War, which included the slow-rolling smash “Look into My Eyes,” intra-band conflict derailed their career for a time. He featured on early single “Foe Tha Love of $,” their second Top 40 hit, but it took a posthumous tribute to Eazy, “Tha Crossroads,” to make Bone Thugs superstars (and Grammy winners). West Coast G-funk, generous with hooks and indebted to ‘70s soul and funk, was a clear influence, so it made sense that Bone Thugs’ major break came courtesy of N.W.A.’s Eazy-E, who signed them to his Ruthless label. They started in Cleveland, where no top-selling hip-hop act had come from before, and their music was different from the outset: The quintet of Bizzy Bone, Flesh-N-Bone, Krayzie Bone, Layzie Bone, and Wish Bone specialized in intricate high-speed rhymes about street life that carried unusual melodic contours and multi-part harmonies.
When they formed in 1991, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony were onto something new-their melody-first approach to hip-hop sounded particularly fresh and pointed to how rap would progress in the coming decades.