The lady voice of the Lake

Good news, gentlemen : I've just received an email from Complex.com asking me to assemble a list of the top ten Rappers who sound like construction workers in real life yet rhyme in strangely effeminate voices during their Rap dayjobs; ergo, I'm currently neck-deep in Youtube interviews with Lil' Dap, Boo & Gotti and the sickly sounding weed carrier from Azie's Blood On My Money CD trying to determine whether their speaking voices are closer to Randy Savage than Miss Elizabeth, but all y'all habitual readers of The Martorialist take priority over any soulless freelance gigs, so here's a primer for the Complex piece with the two best songs by the genre's foremost exponent Lake AKA Lakey The Kid AKA Q.B's ultimate bulletproof Rapping superthug extortion artist whose voice sounds amusingly SISSSAAAYYY on the mic :

Lake - 30/30
(From My Brother's Keeper album; 2006)



Lake - Death Row Is Back!
(From Lake's Home... Death Row Is Back! mixtape; 2005)


The former is his solo highlight from the album he recorded with Cormega, whilst the latter is his beatjack of Dre's Been There, Done That which was released to signify that he was the first signing to Suge and Eric B's failed attempt at a Death Row East in the mid '00s after it became clear that Crooked I couldn't make a good song to save his life. As a fully paid up Q.B Dunn-Rap connoisseur who done shook dice with Karate Joe on the 41st Side I obviously consider both songs indisputable classics that are as good as anything off Illmatic, The Infamous and The War Report, but will concede that Lake has never quite managed to record any music that's as brilliant as his Sub 0° DVD name-calling-session with Prodigy. Not quite as hilarious as the legendary Hell Rell Sub 0° DVD riposte to that interview where Tru Life and Memphis Bleek zinged Dipset, this is still ripe with gossip about the machinations of Q.B Dunn-Rap and the many mythical names from Mobb Deep's Thank you! lists. Even if you've seen it before (hell, I've posted here previously) it's still worth a once-yearly pilgrimage viewing if you happen to be the type of Rap fan who holds J-Love's best of Big Noyd mixtape closer to their heart than any Jay-Z album, bar Volume One :