Foreword Ice-T
Introduction
Style Maps, Explained
1979 “Rapper’s Delight” The Sugarhill Gang
1980 “The Breaks” Kurtis Blow
1981 “Jazzy Sensation” Afrika Bambaataa and the Jazzy Five
1982 “The Message” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
1983 “Sucker M.C.’s” Run-DMC
1984 “Friends” Whodini
1985 “La Di Da Di” Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick
1986 “6 in the Mornin’” Ice-T
1987 “Paid in Full” Eric B. and Rakim
1988 “Straight Outta Compton” N.W.A
1989 “Fight the Power” Public Enemy
1990 “Bonita Applebum” A Tribe Called Quest
1991 “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” Geto Boys
1992 “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” Dr. Dre, featuring Snoop Dogg
1993 “C.R.E.A.M.” Wu-Tang Clan
1994 “Juicy” The Notorious B.I.G.
1995 “Dear Mama” Tupac
1996 “California Love” Tupac, featuring Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman
1997 “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” Puff Daddy, featuring Mase
1998 “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” DMX
1999 “My Name Is” Eminem
2000 “Big Pimpin’” Jay Z, featuring UGK
2001 “Takeover” vs. “Ether” Jay Z vs. Nas
2002 “Grindin’” The Clipse
2003 “In Da Club” 50 Cent
2004 “Still Tippin’” Mike Jones, featuring Slim Thug and Paul Wall
2005 “Gold Digger” Kanye West, featuring Jamie Foxx
2006 “Hustlin’” Rick Ross
2007 “International Players Anthem” UGK, featuring Outkast
2008 “A Milli” Lil Wayne
2009 “Best I Ever Had” Drake
2010 “Monster” Kanye West, featuring Rick Ross, Jay Z, Bon Iver, and Nicki Minaj
2011 “Niggas in Paris” Jay Z and Kanye West
2012 “Same Love” Macklemore and Ryan Lewis
2013 “Control” Big Sean, featuring Kendrick Lamar and Jay Electronica
2014 “Lifestyle” Rich Gang, featuring Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Index of Searchable Terms
Foreword
Ice-T
I did this interview with a twenty-year-old girl. She asked me, “Ice, when did you sell a lot of records?” I said, “When people went to the record stores.” She said, “What’s a record store?” I said, “Well, like, Tower . . . but it’s gone . . . Wherehouse . . . ?” I couldn’t name any record stores that were still open. She said, “Like Best Buy?” I said, “Really, they’d rather sell you a refrigerator than a record.”
♦
A lot of people, when they rap, they say they wanna be the best. They want to be rich. They want to be famous. My only objective was to get out of the street. My objective was to change my occupation, to just become a rapper. I knew my days were numbered to low digits in the streets. I wanted out, but I didn’t know how to get out. When I saw rapping—honestly, when I was in the streets hustling, I thought it was silly. I liked it, but nobody was getting money. And me being a hustler, you gotta get some money for me to really respect you. I was on some street shit. Right now, if you go to a real-life drug dealer in the streets, he might be like, “Fuck rap.” The brain is in another place. It’s kind of corny to you. People who are breaking the law, they look down on everything else. So, I was listening to rap, but it wasn’t triggering me to do it yet. Then I heard Schoolly D’s “P.S.K.”
Melle Mel was the first one I’d heard who put any real thoughts or ideas into a song. He did it on “The Message” in 1982. That was what kind of pulled me in at first. Then I was in this spot hustling, I had a gun on me, and I heard “P.S.K.” come over the mic and I was like, “This shit sounds like how I feel.” The way Schoolly D was spitting it—he was talking about being in the streets; he wasn’t real explicit with like what would come later, but it was the seed. When I heard it I immediately was like, “Whoa, that connects to my life.”
So now I saw this lane where I could have the things, the money and the cars—see, because hustlers and players, they want flashy shit. That’s all a hustler’ll think about. He wants girls, he wants jewelry, he wants cars. I did, too. And I was getting it on the street. But when I saw a lane where I could have all that and not go to jail, it was like, “Aw, yeah, that’s what I wanna do.” But I knew I had to get better at rapping. Even by then, by the mid-’80s, there was a hierarchy of talent. But again, people wanted to be the best. I didn’t. I just wanted to be named among the rappers because that meant I was a rapper and not a street hustler anymore. That was my goal. I just wanted to be named. If someone said, “Kool Moe Dee,” then I wanted someone else to say, “Ice-T.” That’s all I wanted. I wanted to be included. I couldn’t give a fuck about being the best. If someone said, “EPMD,” I just wanted someone else to go, “What about Ice-T?” That was all that mattered.
The most important moment of my rap career is different from my biggest moment personally, even though one kind of led to the other. My most important moment was when the “Colors” video hit. Colors was a movie starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. They were cops in it and it was set in L.A. when L.A. really had a bad gang problem. I’d been rapping for a while, I had an album out. But I hadn’t popped yet. When Colors came, Dennis Hopper—he directed it—he asked me to do the song for it. I knew there was going to be a lot of controversy around it so I did it. When I did the song and the video, it took off, that’s when I got that national attention. “Colors” woke the country up to me. That was 1988. It wasn’t long after that that I spoke for the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C., and then later was on Oprah. “Colors” was why. And right after “Colors” was The Dope Jam Tour, my biggest moment.
The Dope Jam Tour was just . . . I was out there with Doug E. Fresh and Kool Moe Dee and Eric B. and Rakim and Biz Markie and Boogie Down Productions; all these greats. It meant so much because that was the first time I got to get across the country and really see with my own eyes that I had fans. It’s one thing to think you have fans or hear you have fans. It’s another thing to actually see them. That tour was the first time I saw that they knew me. That’s such a big thing. You could have fans in London but until you go there you don’t really know it.
My first show on the tour was San Antonio, Texas. I was the opening act and they went fucking bananas. I was just blown away that they were excited to see me. I was coming from playing small clubs, playing garage parties and small bullshit shows, and then to be able to play an arena and have the whole crowd go off, that’s when it really sinks into you like, “This shit is real. I got real fans out here.” I knew after that I was always going to be mentioned with the rappers. I knew I was becoming important.
♦
A song that’s “important” is a song that changes the route of the music or introduces a new element to the music. Like “Fight the Power,” that was Public Enemy in 1989. The video showed people marching in the street. That was the first time, to me, a rap group looked like a political movement. That was a huge change. That turned Chuck D into a spokesman instead of just a rapper. If somebody does that, it changes the course of music. When I came out and I was cursing and talking about drugs and the cops, no one had done that. It changed the course ag
ain. Important songs birth new things: new rappers, new groups, eventually new movements altogether. If a song comes out and it’s a new style and it flops, nobody’ll take that route. When it comes out and it hits, it becomes a subgenre. It’s not restricted to violence, either. The Native Tongues movement—De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, people like Queen Latifah, all that—that was a lane. That was important. It was on the other side of what we were doing. It was necessary. Picture it like branches on a tree. Rap started out in this straight line going up like a tree and then spread out into all these different things. The songs that caused those changes, they’re important.
If I’m picking important songs, songs that are going to last forever, that changed rap, I’ll say “It’s Like That”/“Sucker M.C.’s” by Run-DMC in 1983. I’ll say “Rapper’s Delight,” of course. There was rap before then that wasn’t recorded—Spoonie Gee, Cold Crush Brothers, the Treacherous Three. But “Rapper’s Delight” was the first commercially successful record. That was 1979. I’ll say “Eric B. Is President” by Eric B. and Rakim because when I was making my first album I was in New York and that record was everyfuckingwhere. Rakim—to me, he invented the flow. Kool Moe Dee and T La Rock had introduced rhyme patterns that were a little more difficult than the Sugarhill Gang or Busy Bee Starski. But Rakim took this technicality and made it cool. Schoolly D’s “P.S.K.” in 1985 was what inspired me to make “6 in the Mornin’,” and that was a big song that caused a lot of changes. Toddy Tee was an inspiration of mine for that song, too. I can’t leave him out. And “Fight the Power,” that one always should be included.
Rap will always evolve. This stage we’re in now, there’s all this singing. It’ll turn into something new and then that’ll turn into something new, too. Rap’s gonna be around forever. I don’t know where it’s headed, though. They probably didn’t know in 1979 what we were gonna be doing in 1986.
Introduction
It would seem to me that the best way to begin this book would be to explain exactly what is going to happen in it, so that’s what I’ll do: The whole entire point of this book is to identify which rap song was the most important rap song each year from 1979 to 2014, so that’s what’s going to happen.
Now, to be clear, there are two very critical points in that sentence that need to be fleshed out. The first is the thing about it being one song per year and the second is about picking the “most important” song.
One song per year. Even though it seems like a small distinction, picking one song per year from 1979–2014 as the most important is a lot different than, say, just picking the thirty-six most important rap songs of all time. Here’s an easy example: There’s no way ever that “Grindin’” by the Clipse could ever be considered more important to rap than Nas’s “N.Y. State of Mind.” It just couldn’t. That’s a thing that’s easy to understand and an easy concession to make. So if the book was just about the thirty-six most important songs in rap of ever, then “N.Y. State of Mind” would get in and “Grindin’” wouldn’t. However, in this particular setting of this particular book, “Grindin’” doesn’t have to compete with “N.Y. State of Mind” because “Grindin’” was released in 2002 and “N.Y. State of Mind” was released in 1994. So “Grindin’” slides in while “N.Y. State of Mind” doesn’t because 1994’s spot was gobbled up by Biggie’s “Juicy.” So it’s new conversations, really. All of a sudden you have these decisions you have to make where you have these very transcendent years where rap was just obscenely good and doing obviously important work and it’s a true firefight picking one above all the rest, but that’s what has to happen. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” and Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” are both divinely significant, but you can only pick one because they both arrived in 1982. N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton” and Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” and you can only pick one. Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” and Snoop’s “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” and you can only pick one. On and on and on.
The “most important” song. “Most important” does not always mean “best” and “best” does not always mean “most important.” There are for sure instances where those two things overlap—“Mind Playing Tricks on Me” by the Geto Boys was the most important song and the best song of 1991; Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” was the most important song and the best song of 1992—but there are also instances where this doesn’t occur. Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” was the best song of 2004 but it wasn’t the most important, because it didn’t (really) accomplish anything outside of its own success. Puffy’s “Can’t Hold Me Down” wasn’t better than Biggie’s “Hypnotize” in 1997, but it was more important. The difference might seem semantic, and maybe it is, but an easy way to think of it is: What sort of impact did the song have on rap, or on the surroundings of rap? That’s usually how you determine the difference between what’s important and what’s just fun to move your body and arms and legs to.
The question that follows, then, is natural: What was the criterion? How did a song make itself eligible to be chosen?
For a song to be eligible to be picked for a year, either its release date as a single was used, or, in the event that it differed, the song could also be picked for the year the album it was on was released. For example, Tupac’s “California Love” was officially released as a single on December 28, 1995. So it was eligible for 1995. However, it was on his All Eyez on Me album, and that album was released on February 13, 1996, so “California Love” was also eligible for 1996 (which, incidentally, was the year it ended up being chosen for). Beyond that, no other considerations were taken into account. It didn’t matter if it was a stand-alone song that never made it onto an actual album, and it didn’t matter if it was the B side of a record, like what was going on with early rap.
There are other things in the book. There is a lot of art because I like art. There are charts and graphs and other things like that, because I like those too. There are footnotes and sometimes those footnotes have important ancillary information and sometimes they talk about Arsenio Hall. You’ll see a fair number of these things called “Style Maps” or “Style Grids,” which are explained in the next section. Each chapter also has an argument in it where a very good writer or editor who is not me lobbies against the song I chose as the most important for a year and offers up an alternative choice. The writers and editors are from places like Rolling Stone and the New York Times and MTV and Vice and Pitchfork and Grantland, and so that’s just a different way of saying that they’re all smart.
So that’s the book. I am certain there will be choices in here that you agree with and choices in here that you do not agree with. That’s generally how these types of things go.
Style Maps, Explained
There are seventeen different “Style Maps” that work as accompanying art for chapters in this book. A Style Map is a visualization of the way a person is rapping at a particular time during a particular song. That might seem like a complicated thing, or maybe even an annoying thing, and I suppose maybe it is an annoying thing, but it’s definitely not a complicated thing.1 The main function of a Style Map is always to look cool, but sometimes their other main function is to act as a reinforcement of the main point of a chapter.
Here’s how they work: OK, let’s say with the 1979 chapter, that chapter’s about the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” There’s a Style Map there. Over the course of that song, the guys are on there rapping rap in a number of different styles and tones because they’re expressing a number of different ideas and thoughts. Key moments get taken from the song, placed on a timeline map, and then given a symbol to represent the style.
Regarding the symbols: There are more than twenty-five different ones in total (each Style Map has no more than seven, though). Most of the styles are paired with symbols that make sense; The symbol for “Introspective” is a brain, the symbol for being “Observational” is an eyeball, the symbol for being “Declarative” is
a fist, etc. Some of them are paired with a style that only kind of makes sense but maybe not really: The symbol for “Lifestyle” is a car, the symbol for “Name Brand” is a tennis shoe, the symbol for “Considerate” is a teddy bear, etc. And a few are paired with a style that would seem to not be connected at all, and in those instances mostly it’s just because I thought they’d look fun: The symbol for “Descriptive” is a turtle, the symbol for “Comparative” is two hands making the “whatever” W, the symbol for “Thrilling” is a lightning bolt shooting out of a cloud, etc.
Regarding the styles: It’s easiest to explain those with an example, so let’s do that, and let’s stick with “Rapper’s Delight” since that’s where we started. At the 9:14 mark2 of that song, Wonder Mike raps, “Like Dracula without his fangs . . . ” It’s part of this whole bit he’s doing where he’s laying simile on top of simile (“Like a rainy day that is not wet / Like a gambling fiend that does not bet”). Right there, he’s being Comparative. It’s important to note that part because, as you’ll read, “Rapper’s Delight” was the first commercially successfully rap song, which means that it was the first rap song a lot of people heard, which means that it was an instantly influential thing. Comparative rapping has always been an especially popular form of rapping. It’s a thing that still happens very often today, and it will be a thing that happens until forever. So that line gets pulled out, highlighted, and then assigned the aforementioned symbol that represents that style. There’s another part in the song where Big Bank Hank raps, “Now there’s a time to laugh and a time to cry,” and that’s him being (or at least trying to be) Insightful, and so that part gets pulled out and highlighted with a different symbol (an owl). Half a minute later, Hank raps, “I didn’t even bite a goddamn word,” and that’s him being Confrontational,3 so it gets pulled out and highlighted with another symbol (a bulletproof vest, in this case). They all follow that same template. In the instances where a chapter was slightly longer than another one and there wasn’t enough space to accommodate an entire Style Map, you’ll find a “Style Grid,” which is a modified version that acts in the exact same way. Really, it’s all very intuitive. I suspect you’d have been able to figure it out very easily without this explanation.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 1