Maybe this track's producer (and Sean Kingston's guardian angel) J.R. Rotem has a time machine that we don't know about that he uses to check out pop hits of decades past as a source of inspiration. And on his last trip to the ’90s, Mark Morrison's endemic hit, "Return of the Mack" piqued his interest. When he returned to present day, he couldn't just allow the track to remain solely in infrequent rotation on dance radio stations, so he reconstructed it into a bombast of baller bravado for L.A.'s Nipsey Hussle. On this SoCaled-out version, Nipsey is bringing swagger back. We're not sure if "swag" has been gone long enough (or even at all?) for it to need to return, but maybe if we had our own time machine, we could reacquaint ourselves with our old slang lexicons and discover that "mack" was to the mid-90s as "swag" is 2010.
Photographer Ross McDonnell
January 19, 2010
