That made them a novelty, and it also made them vastly influential stylists. They were a rap group and an R&B group at the same time. But Bone did that while singing, or while doing something that blurred all known lines between singing and rapping. The group’s internal dynamic was right there in the name: They were hard, and they rapped about death and desperation and criminal enterprises. Upon their arrival, Bone were an instant sensation. It was a strange, beautiful, compelling sound, and it made no sense at all.

Here was this group from Cleveland, a place that had never produced another rapper of any national repute, and all five members sounded like Nate Dogg doing the Das EFX flow. In the early ’90s, though, Bone’s dizzy and hypnotic style had no equivalent, no precedent.

Nobody quite sounds like Bone, and nobody really could, but I hear echoes of their music everywhere.

Decades after their emergence, the heady, melodic tongue-flipping speed-rap that Bone Thugs-N-Harmony pioneered has simply become a part of rap’s musical vocabulary. There is simply no way to adequately convey just how weird they sounded. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.

Bone thugs and harmony playlist