The low production values on a lot of early hip-hop classics, including Audio Two’s “Top Billin” and BDP’s “Criminal Minded,” makes them relatively hard to listen to today. Jam Master Jay really held this group together, as neither Run nor DMC were especially gifted rappers. Total novelty act, but I admit, I love hearing how quickly Chip-Fu can drop rhymes. Dre rap about how marijuana causes “brain damage/and brain damage on the mike can’t manage” about five years before creating his magnum opus and naming it after the drug. These guys came along a little too late, when the west coast scene was paramount and east coast groups had a harder time breaking through even if their sound was more overtly commercial. His second disc was a wildly experimental jazz/rap/ambient fusion that was way ahead of its time, and he took a long break before coming back with a late-90s disc after his conversion to Islam that had one standout track, “Make It Plain.”ĩ2. Remember House of Pain’s line in “On Point” about how “I used to rap with the Divine Styler?” He was actually a hell of an MC, and just about anything from that first album is worth listening to. No shot of crossover success for a group that rapped almost entirely about their Islamic faith, but the speed and quality of the rhyming here is remarkable. “Holy Intellect” – Poor Righteous Teachers That’s too bad, because they were one of the most interesting acts of the late ’80s/early ’90s, but between this and the forgettable “Kiss You Back” their run was good for about an album and a half.ĩ4. It was written as a novelty, it became a hit as a novelty, and like most novelty hits it wrecked the artist’s career when they couldn’t produce another song just like it. Unfortunately most of their catalog sounded dated within a decade of its release.ĩ5. It’s hard to express their mainstream influence unless you lived through it they had street credibility but were inoffensive enough to be marketed to white, suburban audiences. More here for its importance than the quality of the rhymes. The song was surpassed by its own marketing. I’m not doubting the anti-police sentiment behind it, but the title is so clownishly incendiary that it was a lock to get negative attention in the mainstream media, which would sell more records. I always wondered if this was mostly a publicity stunt (that worked). Perhaps the greatest opening lines in the history of hip hop: “I got a letter from the government/The other day/I opened, and read it/It said they were suckers/They wanted me for the army or whatever/Picture me givin’ a damn, I said never.”
“Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” – Public Enemy Snoop Dogg references this song at the beginning of the second verse of “Gin and Juice.”ĩ8. No disrespect to MC Breed, who died of kidney failure when he was 38, but 2Pac is the main attraction here, one of five appearances for him on this list. “Gotta Get Mine” – MC Breed featuring 2Pac (Corrected on 7/7 – added this song to remove an ineligible song from higher on the list.)ĩ9. Ice Cube’s lyrics often led to controversy – something I doubt he minded since even bad publicity sells records – but I don’t think the anti-gay lines in this song would fly today like they did in the early ’90s.
Samples an early hip-hop classic, “The Message,” that was already dated before the 1980s ended, with guest vocals by Das Efx on the chorus. That cutoff means no Jay-Z or Eminem and virtually no Nas or Outkast, to pick a few examples, but with one exception (a song recorded before the deadline but released afterwards) I stuck to the deadline for all tracks. I’ve limited the list to songs released, either as singles or on albums, prior to 1996. And it’s about how the songs have held up over time, not which songs I liked when they first came out or how they fared on the charts.
This is list is entirely my opinion, and maybe 90% of it is just about how much I personally like the songs, with the other 10% reserved for the song’s influence or importance in hip-hop history. It started out as a top 40, then a top 50, then 75, after which I figured I’d just push it to 100. I’ve been working on this post since late February, but it’s finally done now that the draft crush and our summer east coast swing are over. I’m a huge fan of old-school hip-hop music and have wanted for some time to put down some kind of ranking of my favorite songs from that era.
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