Too $hort’s long lyrical legacy

If you were writing the hip-hop dictionary, this Bay Area legend would be responsible for a large portion it. And listening to Too $hort is like taking in a history lecture on the rap culture and the slang that just rolls off the tongue today.

He came around in the ’80s, when he planted seeds of inspiration that would manifest itself in the work of huge rappers such as Snoop Dogg and Outkast.

Naturally, his earliest influences came from New York City.

“Right when I moved to Oakland, that’s when Sugar Hill Records started dropping a lot of stuff,” Too $hort told me. “It was Grandmaster Flash, Sugarhill Gang, the other records after ‘Rapper’s Delight’ . . . It’s like 1980 . . . and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Man, I could do this.’ ”

Too $hort took what he was hearing from the East Coast and added his East Oakland flavor, adopting the language of the colorful pimps in his neighborhood. He coined words like “biatch” and “mack.” “The word play was important,” he said of his style. “The slick OGs in the streets dropping a little rhyme, the little one-liner, a little punch line . . . We interpreted that s - - t into hip-hop.”

Another example: the phrase “heezy fo scheezy,” which he and fellow Bay Area pioneer E-40 dropped in “Rappers’ Ball” as they were playing around in the studio.

“That was something going around the Bay. It was coming from the pimps . . . Then Snoop Dogg did ‘fo shizzle,’ and it took on its own life.”

I always considered him the Hugh Hefner of rap, and a certain lyric about toes cemented that. Wacky lingo and clever lines became his calling card.