Here is some of my favorite rap music.
- "Twice the First Time", Saul Williams
Saul Williams is a rapper/spoken word artist who militantly refuses to acknowledge a distinction between the two sides of that slash. This was his "first" song, before he started making albums, it showed up on some compilations and since has been a bit forgotten (omitted even from the discography on his Wikipedia page). It's still my fav of his, a traffic pileup of violins and beatboxing. One of the strangest and most beautiful pieces of hip-hop I've ever heard.
- "untitled 02 | 06.23.2014.", Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar thinks big— his albums have huge concepts and are stuffed with ideas. Which makes Untitled Unmastered, an unlabeled collection of unused songs from the To Pimp a Butterfly era, a little easier for me to digest because tracks stand alone more. This one track's amazing, downtempo dark jazz over a trap beat.
The second half of this song is universally agreed to be a style parody of Drake, but it doesn't seem mean-spirited to me. (That would come later.)
- "Black Ice", Goodie Mob ft. Outkast
This is an Atlanta group from the 90s whose name expands to "the Good Die young, Mostly Over Bullshit", and who introduced the world to Cee-Lo Green (not present here). The mood here is absolutely immaculate and gives a good intro to the timbres the Dirty South was introducing the world to at this moment. Also, a video featuring Big Boi walking a dog in an Astros jersey with the old design, the good one; tragically I cannot find a usable embeddable copy of this video online, but I grabbed a still for you. Look at the good boi (the dog. I mean the dog)
- "LOOK OUT FOR DETOX", Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick is now a 17-Grammy-winning institution, but his introduction to the world, outside indie mixtapes in LA, was this incredible, minimal YouTube video from 2010 originally posted as promo for a never-released Dr. Dre album. Not helping Dr. Dre much here I guess, but as an intro to Kendrick Lamar it was absolutely unforgettable, just a verbal onslaught in which Kendrick does not even stop to breathe.
- "Dead in Motion", Antipop Consortium
This group (and its members' solo acts) have a sprawling, poorly preserved discography with some true high points; this is from 2002, when they briefly broke through into near-public-consciousness with Arrhythmia, a fun album that plays with electronica production (yeah, this is the album with "Ghost Lawns").
The video here is a deconstruction of "Hamburger Hill", a 1987 film that is mostly remembered for a subplot exploring the experience of Black American soldiers in Vietnam.
⬇️ Click below for more Saul Williams / more Outkast / "hidden track" ⬇️
- "Coded Language", Saul Williams
Okay so I feel really bad about not linking you the album version of this (which is produced by Krust of Roni Size & Reprazent), but I really want you to hear how incredible Saul Williams is unaccompanied. This is from a 2004 appearance on MTV Def Poetry Jam and is just an amazing piece of performance. The piece is, uh, a sort of position paper. Watch the video.
Right before breaking up Outkast dropped a double album where each CD was effectively a solo album by one of the two members. Andre 3000's disc ended with this epic 5-minute slice of IDM production and mind-twisting rap wordplay, in which Andre gives us a complete autobiography up to 2003 when the song was recorded and then halts with "…and that's as far as I got".
COHOST BONUS TRACK
- X. "Untitled 05/Nardis", Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Terrace Martin, Chris Dave
Somebody sent me this on Mastodon after I posted "Untitled 02". So Kendrick's got this thing for jazz, right? He has a lot of tracks where he could have just sampled something but instead he brought in some actual jazz musicians to drop a new composition. Anyway, this is a recording where a group of the musicians who worked with Lamar on "To Pimp a Butterfly" and "Untitled Unmastered" come in and do a 20-minute free-but-not-too-free live jazz set anchored on a mashup of Kendrick's "Untitled 05" ("…and that means the world to me") with Miles Davis's "Narvis". It's good!
