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With their long hair and ill-fitting Indians gear, Bone Thugs looked like more countrified versions of Compton and East Oakland’s street reporters, yet in their lyrics they added an element of morbid spirituality that mixed the traditions of black Christianity with the occult.

Rap was just beginning to realize that all its stars might not come from the coasts and some shots had already been fired from Chicago and Flint, but no one expected that the Midwest would claim its place through the gloom of Cleveland. They were four skinny boys who made their corner of E 99 & St Clair sound like the gateway to hell and brought a horse drawn carriage on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards. In the mid-’90s the Cleveland-born quartet of Krayzie Bone, Layzie Bone, Bizzy Bone and Wish Bone were one of the biggest and weirdest acts in hip-hop, if not in all of popular music. Since then Love has been in charge of braiding, fro-ing, combing out, blow drying and ponytailing the members of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s hair, even though private planes and endless cashflow are no longer their reality. “Every time I wanted to go home they started throwing money at me,” she says. She ended up on the road for eight weeks. When she tried to get a ticket back to California they told her she couldn’t leave them and gave her $1000 to go shopping for clothes.

The morning after the ceremony, Love woke up and all the management folks she had been dealing with were gone and had been replaced with a new crew for their tour that was about to start. With paper maché or some shit still in their hair, they convinced Love to come with them across the country in a private plane. The shoot went late, of course, and Bone Thugs had to get to New York for an awards show. Her first gig was a music video whose name she can’t remember, but based on the vague details she gives, it was probably “East 1999” from their first full-length E 1999 Eternal. April Love met Bone Thugs-N-Harmony out in LA in ’94 and started doing their hair shortly thereafter.

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