Paris was ever the savvy operator. The second single from his debut LP The Devil Made Me Do It proved the former stockbroker could live up to ‘the Black Panther of hip-hop’ mantle he’d given himself. On the A-side, his tightly-wound wake-up call about the racist murder of 16-year-old Brooklyn teenager Yusuf Hawkins rode a bass-enhanced rumble through James Brown and Lafayette Afro Rock Band samples that proved three times as long as its hyper succinct LP version. “Who’s bad?” asked Paris on its B-side (which shared a title with a Suicidal Tendencies’ LP that year), forsaking his usual self-produced fix of funk for minimalist synths that put the emphasis squarely on his relentless voice and baritone flow, tossing off rhymes about “a brother with a grudge who can’t be nudged or budged or stopped or stepped aside” – no guessing who – with calm and easy assurance (paving the way, stylistically, for 1994’s Guerrilla Funk). While his unapologetic stance against the powers that be meant Tommy Boy pulled the plug on his next album Sleeping With The Enemy – the incendiary sentiments of ‘Bush Killa’ were never going to flow in the wake of Body Count’s ‘Cop Killer’ furore – Paris deftly milked it for maximum publicity, calmly explaining: “It was intended so we could have access to the media.”