No One Yelled Like Fatman Scoop

Photo: Johnny Nunez/WireImage When they weren’t shooting the shit between songs or screaming over records, overnight DJs for New York’s landmark rap station Hot 97 would find themselves with brief pockets of downtime. Isaac Freeman III, known to fans as Fatman Scoop, used these rare quiet moments to write, frequently calling DJ Riz, his partner in the rap duo Crooklyn Clan, to run through potential lyrics for their club anthems. Scoop was once a rapper, but the lines he’d workshop for Riz, on club classics like “Where U @?” and “Be Faithful,” weren’t exactly rap. They were closer to stage directions, the kind of guidance you might find if parties came with instruction manuals. It’s amusing to picture Scoop in pained concentration, scribbling rudimentary commands to women to put their hands up, to throw different denominations of legal tender in the air, to make noise or shut up. For three decades, Fatman Scoop, who passed away on August 30 at the age of 56, was rap’s preeminent hype man. In a way that is true for few other recorded artists, his art didn’t thrive in his lyrical content — on his biggest hit, “Be Faithful,” his most memorable line is...