Archive for the “Favorite 15” Category

Of the Favorite 15s I’ve done so far, this is definitely gonna be one of the most difficult. With most groups, there are several tiers of songs: the pretty good ones, the solid ones, and the great ones. With fifteen, I can normally get all of the greats, most if not all of the goods, and hopefully just one pretty good. No such thing with Tribe. Q-Tip, Phife, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad are right at the top in terms of artistic consistency, with two albums, The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders being near the zenith of hip-hop artistry. I could easily do a Favorite Fifteen between those two albums alone, but I’ma try to include some of those other records, as well. I don’t think I can do this in any sort of an order, though.

-Find A Way – The Love Movement gave us the quintessential unrequited love record. If I remember, the video was pretty interesting too.

- Ham ‘n Eggs – This song is not on the list so much because it’s one of their best, but because I identify with it so strongly. And not their verses, so much. Well, there is that line, “Chicken for lunch, chicken for dinner/ chicken, chicken, chicken I’m a finger-lickin winner” that I quote a lot. But really, it’s the Nappy Dug Out sample that got me at first, then at the very end, when they’re doing the chorus to close out the song, “I don’t eat no ham ‘n eggs, cuz they’re high in cholesterol…yo Phife, do you eat em? Yo, Tip do you eat em? Nope. Not at all.” But they kick to Posdnuos, who breaks it up with, “YUP! All the time!”

- 1ce Again – Beats, Rhymes, and Life wasn’t a bad album, but coming after TLET and MM, it seemed like a more precipitous fall than it really was. I forget if 1ce Again was the first single (it seems quite logical), but at that point, having heard that song and the title of the album, I thought they were going to surpass everything they had done up to that point.

- Buggin Out – One of the songs that added a line to my self-definition soundtrack: “Not the best, not the worst and occasionally I curse…”

- Steppin’ It Up – Tribe with Redman and Busta. Prima facie fire. On second look? (And third and fourth and fifth?) FIYAH! Red closed it out quite well with the top-notch dismount, “me, Kamal, Bus-a-bus, Phife Dawg/ Shitted. Pussy niggas get Lysoled.”

- God Lives Through – To quote myself:

Phife won. In the history of A Tribe Called Quest, this is the only song I ever heard where I thought had the better verse. But this one right here? Phife brought it exceptionally well and Tip didn’t. With the exception of Butter, this might be Phife’s all-time best verse. Seriously, to this day, I don’t even know if I can quote Q-Tip’s verse because I kept rewinding Phife. That’s never happened. Even onea my homeboys who can’t stand Phife had to give it up that Phife owns this song.

- What? – This song probably gets a lotta run from me simply because of the song it precedes, but it’s a good one on its own. I definitely like the fact that it runs a string of questions, ranging from the obvious to the philosophical.

- Midnight – This is an absolutely great song. The first verse, detailings the night time activities of a random dude, is executed with great detail and precision. Not a traditional story in the sense of there being a plot, it’s more of a slice of life, and exactly the type of thing you would expect to hear on a Tribe record.

- Can I Kick It (Spirit Mix) – This was the first Tribe song that got me open. “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo” was interesting, but it wasn’t really killin me. But Can I Kick It? Absolutely. I think one of my bigger disappointments up to that point in my life was getting the tape and hearing that the album version wasn’t the same one that was on the video. The Spirit Mix is the video version, with the little scratching sound.

- Keep It Rollin’ The star of this joint is the Large Professor’s track, based on “Feel Like Making Love,” as recorded by the great Bob James. It’s an absolutely gorgeous track, perfect for cleaning the house on a cloudy, cool day.

- Butter – Phife came off. He had a solo on most of their albums, but this was by far his best work in the group. He killed this joint. And that track? The track is good business.

- Check The Rhime – What! This joint here? This joint right here, homey? Ugh. This was one of the joints that made Tribe move up the rankings with the quickness. Phife put in a solid performance, Tip repped as usual, and of course, the track with the Average White Band sample is crazy.

And these next three are why I can’t rate Tribe records. You can’t have three number ones, but you tell me which is > the others… So we’ll just do it chronological order.

- Bonita Applebaum – One of the first hip-hop love records that didn’t come off as being overly sentimental or corny. This joint is uncommonly good. Cold-blooded, even. The track? Perfect.

- Scenario – There are songs I listen to more at a given time, but there’s just not a better song. There are some that are as good, but I can’t think of any that are better. Every. Single. Thing. about this song is just right. Lyrically, for me, it’s all about Dinco D and Busta. Busta’s whole career comes back to this song.

- Electric Relaxation They blacked out on this. The lyrics are fine, but combining them with the track? There is no escaping it. Hearing it for the first time was like crossing an event horizon. As I said with Bonita Applebaum, there are some songs that are its peer, but none is its superior.

From about 1987-1992, O’Shea Jackson was near the top of the emceeing game. While his name doesn’t necessarily come up in the same conversation as Rakim, Kane, and KRS-One, he definitely deserves to be in the conversation. Look at his body of work during that time: He was the principal writer in NWA (with a big help-out from the DOC, I think), then he put out two classic solo albums, with a dope, dope EP in between. Then came The Predator which, while not classic, was still pretty good. As with Outkast, it’s hard to put an order on this, so we’ll just pull up 15.

A Bitch Iz A Bitch – This song represented the first time I’d heard a woman really cuss hard on a record. I was actually quite shocked. That aside, ABIAB was the prototype of what I once called the “definition” record. Where some records have misogynistic content based on the actions of the characters in the songs, this one and others of its ilk try to distinguish what makes a woman a bitch. The ad-libs are pretty good too.

Straight Outta Compton (extended mix) – I just like the extended version better. Straight Outta Compton was the joint. Period. That’s all.

I Ain’t Tha 1 – The companion song to ABIAB, only with more radio-friendly lyrics. One of my more frequently-used phrases, ’spell girl with a B’ comes from this record. Oh, and the classic, ‘they get mad when I put it in perspective/ but let’s see if my knowledge is effective.’ That’s a GREAT line. Oh, and the other killer, ‘I’ll tell a girl in a minute, yo: I drive a bucket.’

Natural Born Killaz – If Cube and Dre were only gonna have one post-NWA song, I’m glad this was it. This was back during the era when we knew Cube was starting to slip, but it was like being with Dre returned him to his prime. Even though the song was as nihilistic as it wanted to be, it was hot fire. I can still remember the first time I heard it. I almost jumped out the car.

It Was A Good Day (remix) – It Was A Good Day was already a great song, but using “Let’s Do It Again” as the backing track put it over the top. Way over the top. In a way, Cube’s opening lines to the song, “Just wakin up in the morning, gotta thank God” seem to go with the track even more than the lyrics of the original song.

Jackin’ For Beats – The St. Ides commercial got my attention first, but this joint was ridiculous. Ice Cube rapping over other artists’ tracks was pure genius. He crushed it. In a way, it was like he pre-dated what The Roots and The Fugees would do later, performing other groups’ songs. He performed his song on their beats. And again with the line, “But I don’t party and shake my butt / I leave that to the brothers with the funny haircuts.”

A Bird In The Hand – Cube was good about writing about things from the everyman perspective, and A Bird In The Hand was an excellent example of that. While I don’t now, and didn’t then, think the character was as stuck as he seemed to think, I thought it explained the situation very well.

The Product – Speaking of which, if I was going to use a song that illustrated exactly what I thought early Ice Cube was about as an emcee, this would probably be it. This was Cube at his everyman finest. Telling the story of a young man from conception to incarceration, it sounds like something everybody can get next to. Particularly ironic is the tone of the song and the fact that the sample driving the song is “You Can Make It If You Try” by Sly & the Family Stone.

Once Upon A Time In The Projects – Cube’s storytelling is on display here. What impresses me so much about this record is his attention to detail. The unstable couch, the messed up black and white TV, the child with the runny nose and stinky drawls…this song doesn’t even need a video. You can see it exactly as it is.

Dopeman (remix) – Come on.

Fuck Tha Police – Among the whole crew, Cube’s verse stands way out because it puts the whole question of police brutality into a larger context. While Ren and Eazy are primarily focused on the “I’m-so-bad” element, Cube actually spends a couple lines looking at it from a systemic perspective fuck the police comin straight from the underground / a young nigga got it bad cuz I’m brown / and not the other color, some police think / they have the authority to kill a minority That pretty much summed it up for a lot of us, especially in the early 90’s.

Dead Homiez – Was this hip-hop’s first elegy? Whether it was or not, one of the lines that has stuck with me for the last 19 years is I look at this shit and I think to myself / and gotta thank God for my health / cuz nobody really ever know / when it’s gonna be they family on the front row / so I take everything slow / go with the flow/ and shut my motherfuckin mouth if I don’t know…” Those are some words to live by.

What They Hittin’ Foe – Again with Cube as everyman, but this time, he deliberately casts himself in that role. “Fuckin around in a crap game, niggas think I’m soft / cuz now I’m in the rap game and I don’t / hang out as much / bang out dope cuts / standin on stage and I’m grabbin my nuts/

No Vaseline – For my money, this is still the king of the dis tracks. Nowadays, people say so-and-so got “ethered,” referring to Nas’ track about Jay, but neither Ether nor Hit Em Up nor any of the 10000 other dis tracks that have been recorded are really fooling with No Vaseline. Cube straight eviscerated NWA on this track. And then he had the nerve to go and be right? It was crazy.

Parental Discretion Iz Advised / The Grand Finale – I count these two together because they’re kinda like the bookends of the full NWA team, with DOC actually rapping on the tracks instead of just writing for Eazy or Dre. As good as Ren and DOC came off on these tracks, Cube showed why he was that man. On The Grand Finale, he actually busts out one of the greatest forced rhymes I’ve ever heard, bordering on lyrical impressionism: “because I’m gone, you say I left you all/ but I stay in your ass like cho-les-tre-ol”

I have an East Coast bias. I admit it. When you ask me about my favorite groups and songs, chances are it’s gonna have originated in New York. However, when I sit down and think about it for a while, I can get past those ‘first thing that comes to mind’ answers and get into some stuff for which I can actually make a cogent answer. Outkast is one of those groups that I rarely mention right away, but I can never really deny once I get started. Kast is definitely in my top 5 groups, probably right behind De La Soul. Like De La, I think their first four albums put them above just about any other hip-hop group’s four-album stretch. In fact, I’d almost say Outkast’s 1st 4 > De La’s first four, but not by much.

Given that, it’s not hard to get 15, but it is hard to limit it to 15 and it’s even harder to rank em. So I’m not. Except for Number 1. Cuz that joint is SO superior, it can only be at the top (or bottom, in this case) of the list.

Rosa Parks – The song that lauched a $10 Billion lawsuit. For the life of me, I can’t understand what the protest would have been about, because her name was only mentioned in the title, and the chorus, “Ah ha/ hush that fuss/ everybody move to the back of the bus/ do you wanna bump and slump wit us/ wt the kinda people make the club get buck” is hardly disrespectful. All that notwithstanding, the song is dope.

Elevators (Me and You) One of the bad parts of having a collection that goes beyond a certain level is the quality of songs that don’t get too much run. Elevators is cold-blooded. It’s like, I ain’t mad at what I’ve been listening to, but I am kinda mad I haven’t been listening to this joint. Elevators is just a good a time as any to mention that Andre 3000 is a name that deserves to be in that upper echelon of emcees. I’m not doing a ranking any time soon, but he’s up there.

Crumblin’ Erb – A word here about production. While Dre gets noted for his band’s reworking of songs for a live interpolation of a lick, as opposed to a sample, Organized Noize represented on that tip, as well. This is just one of the many examples.

So Fresh, So Clean – You talmbout a cold-blooded record, this is one. Concept and execution are killer.

Wheelz of Steel – At some point, dee-jaying actually fell off of the map in most hip-hop. Early on, the DJ always had a break. Wheelz of Steel at least gave us a taste of scratching, even if it wasn’t necessarily very prominent.

Reset – One of my all-time favorite Outkast songs, on Big Boi’s Speakerbox disc, has one of the verses that typify why I think Big Boi is criminally underrated.

Ain’t it funny how you’re born and then your life begins
Just like a baby all alone, that’s if you wasn’t a twin
You must begin to fend for self when the umbilical’s cut
The doctor put you under the heating lamp, your spirit is touched
You know what, I take that back, why? You was alive
Date of conception, interception cause the sperm did collide
From T ‘n A to DNA, feelings turn to children
The morning after pill didn’t put a halt to our very existance
We livin, breathin, soon we’ll be teethin
Our granny got a gold and now we want one for that reason
An adolescent mind is so impressionable in those stages
But parents got to parent their kids to keep them out of cages
Cell therapists beware of this lugie that I spit
Incarceration without rehabilitation really don’t mean shit
Little Ricky’s home, he gotta serve probation for six months
But Uncle Darnell and Ol’ Dirty Bastard still in the joint

From t ‘n a to DNA?! Come on, man.

Ms. Jackson – Speaking of songs that kick the truth, Ms. Jackson tells it like it is in a whole lotta ways. I frequently think of Kast and De La as similar groups, and Ms. Jackson is kinda like an expansion of one of Pos’ verses:
I recall kissin on my lady/ talkin bout makin babies
now we made the babies but cannot connect as legal spouses/
now me and my daughter reside in different houses…
Typically, Dre has the verses that stand out immediately, but Big Boi’s verses are understated quality.

Prototype – This was the jam. If Blackink hadn’t called it for his slow-jams list, I would definitely have pulled this one. It’s a great coolin out record, as well as a nice love song.

Red Velvet – The song is dope, but the thing that always stands out in my mind is that I had a homeboy who I nicknamed “Velvet.” Every time I heard this, it made me think of him, even though he didn’t like the nickname and there’s really no other connection between him and the song. But this is the type of record that I don’t think people who actually do hip-hop don’t even know exists. What? An anti-materialist rap song? Yeah.

Toilet Tisha – Again, the fellas address a serious topic while still managing to make a good record. Actually, I’m telling it backwards. It’s a dope record that addresses a serious topic.

Funky Ride – This could almost have been a 70’s level slow jam, had it not come out in the 90’s and been quite as explicit. The chorus without the verse would have done it. The instrumentation is near-perfect. In fact, an instrumental of this song could have made my 36:12 one song on repeat.

Git Up, Git Out – Could easily be the number one song on this list. Cee-Lo’s verse is absurdly good. F’real-f’real, they could’ve stopped the song right there, cuz there was really nothing else to add.

Spottieottiedopaliscious – Damn, damn, damn James! As East Coast as I am, and as much as I prefer the boom-bap, there’s really not much foolin with this song. It’s like, exactly why have I been sleeping on this record so much?

B.O.B. Hard core music electric revival. That’s what they’re saying at the end of the song. And that’s what this was. Came outta the blue. Totally different from what we were used to hearing. And cold-blooded. I know some people that never liked it, but this was always a good workout song for me.

Claimin’ True – I like the song and all, but the skit at the beginning is what really sold me. When the old head is like, “Penitentiary full’a niggas thought they wasn’t punks.”

1. Liberation – Yeah, I know they ain’t rappin. But this is it. This song sons some groups’ whole discographies. Ridiculously good. With a ridiculously low play count. But that’s gon be rectified.

I was ridin in the car, listening to one of the songs on this list when it all of a sudden dawned on me that I’d never really focused on any Public Enemy tracks, with the exception of Rebel Without A Pause – and that one specifically because of it’s singular place in my musical canon. So let me say it like this: without having any of the braggadocio that marks classic emceeing, Chuck D was nice with his. Real nice. Was he on that Rakim/Kane/G-Rap/Jheri Curl Ice Cube level? Probably not. But he was far more than functional. When most people talk about Chuck, they focus on the message behind the lyrics and not the lyrics themselves, so much. That’s only natural, because Chuck wrote with a purpose. But that’s not to say that he didn’t have dope rhymes, because he did. In fact, I’d venture to say that if Chuck wasn’t as dope as he was, PE would have never ascended the way they did, and people would never have gotten intoxicated with the idea of hip-hop as an explicitly political vehicle. Or the idea wouldn’t have caught on to the extent that it did.

Having said all that, my PE favorite 10. In no particular order, except #1. Of course.

10. Crayola – The last PE album I bought was There’s A Poison Goin On. Crayola, a screed against commercial radio and its close relationship with the recording industry, was one of my favorites.

9. You’re Gonna Get Yours – I like to point to this song as being a throwback to when hip-hop was literally real because even though the materialistic aspect is there — it is a song about a car, after all — it’s an affordable car. It was an Oldsmobile 98. In fact, if you look on the cover of the 12-inch, you can see that it wasn’t even a new car. Even when Chuck talked about replacing the 98, it was with something else affordable – a Bronco.

8. Burn Hollywood Burn – Chuck. Cube. Kane. Nuff said. What’s funny is that of the three verses on this song, Cube, who may have been at his lyrical apex at the time, was clearly the least of the three. I’m tryina tell you : Chuck was nicer than you realize.

7. Can’t Truss It – The middle verse here is killin it. There were a few songs where Chuck completely blacked out, and this was one of them. Mathematics error notwithstanding, the way he recounts the story of the middle passage first-person but managed to make a dope verse of it? Nah, man. You can’t front on Chuck.

6. Revolutionary Generation – This was the first song I’d ever heard where somebody recanted one of his old songs. In this ode to Black women, Chuck actually admits his culpability in recording “Sophisticated Bitch,” from Yo! Bun Rush The Show. The Baby Huey sample in there was what completely sold me on the song in the first place, though.

5. Timebomb – One verse over the Meters’ “Just Kissed My Baby.” This was the first song that really made me think about Chuck as a lyricist, partially because it’s closer to the classic emcee mold. But when I actually started to break it down one day, I realized Chuck could actually rhyme.

4. Fight The Power – This is probably PE’s signature song, and for good reason. I was singin along the other day when I realized that 1989 was 20 years ago. You talkin about feeling old? Pssshh!

3. War at 33 1/3 – That first verse? Chuck. Blacked. Out. Like, if I were gonna do a lineup of all my favorite verses, I’m tryin to tell you that that would stand up against any of them. I guess this song’s just as good as any to mention the importance of Chuck’s voice. Not so much his figurative voice, but his literal voice. I don’t think too many artists could have performed over Bomb Squad tracks. And that’s not a slight on them, like they couldn’t have tailored their tracks to suit the performer, but these tracks right here? As noisy and busy as they were? Chuck’s just about the only person who could’ve handled them.

2. Welcome To The Terrordome – Again with the noisy track. And again with Chuck blacking out on a verse. My favorite Terrordome memory has to be seeing them in concert and Flav riding a bike onto the stage.

1. Rebel Without A Pause – This is just my personal ultimate record. Nothing more, nothing less. Since I started this blog, I’ve probably talked about it 6 or 7 times. No need to do it again, but suffice it to say that it changed everything.