Not a lot of hunky, Houston-bred classically-trained dancers inspire much in the way of hip-hop culture, but somehow, Patrick Swayze did. Regardless of how his movies will age, he'll always have a second legacy as the inspiration for two wildly common slang expressions used in many rap songs.
Fortunately for Swayze, his last name rhymes with "crazy," and rhyming and talking about one's unhingedness are both vitally important to rap. In 1991, Kool G Rap spit a Road House reference on Marley Marl's "The Symphony Part II." It goes like this: "Reach for the pistol and you're crazy / try to blast and I'll be swinging that a** like Patrick Swayze." Nearly two decades later, Young Jeezy proclaimed in "And Then What" that he was "so crazy" but other rappers are phonies, merely "actors like Patrick Swayze."
But "Swayze" had meaning to rappers beyond its basic rhyme quality. In the 1990s, after the release of Ghost, "Swayze" came to be hip-hop shorthand for "gone." Take EPMD's 1992 tune "It's Going Down," which includes the line, "Now I'm Swayze, ghost, the rap host." Two years later, Notorious BIG said in 2Pac's "Runnin' (Dying to Live)" that after he shoots a guy, he'll "take his Glock and I'm Swayze."
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