Way Back: Warrior's Drum (1995)

“My slang can bang, so I guess I be the man

You couldn't hang wit my style, if you invented the Ku Klux Klan”

-King Just on “Warrior’s Drum”

Fresh off the underground hit “Warrior’s Drum” that dropped in 1994, King Just released his debut album, Mystics of the God on Black Fist and Select Records in May 1995.

Like the Wu-Tang Clan that came to define the area, King Just also hails from Staten Island, New York. Though he had an affiliation with the crew and features with Method Man, his career never quite took off like all theirs did.

“Warrior’s Drum” was the first of three singles from the album, and was produced by RNS, a local Staten Island producer whose loan of his EPS Sampler to RZA resulted in the first Wu-Tang album.

And there's a thousand M.C.'s, lined up against the wall

TIMBER, they all gonna fall

Critics felt that by 1995, Just’s style came a bit too late to be considered original. He has the energy of a Busta Rhymes and makes the Shaolin and Drunken Fist references of the Wu. The detractors may’ve been right. Even if the music was hot, we had established acts from the same region that were eerily similar by the time his momentum picked up.

A review of King Just’s first single, “Warrior’s Drum” from The Source magazine in 1994.

In another era, Just could’ve been the high-energy act that Busta and DMX created long careers as. He could’ve been the one to bring Staten Island’s underground style to a commercial audience like Wu-Tang. Unfortunately, coming up from the mid-90’s, he’s just another fly MC that came and went. At least he had a solid first album and a killer single in “Warrior’s Drum”.

And I rhyme to get paid, cuz when I raid

I wouldn't wanna hear ya style wit a hearing aid