Obligatory wrap-up post of those songs I've played most during the month when nobody's top 20 songs of all time lists featured M.O.P & Kool G. Rap's Stick To Ya Gunz. It's better than any of M.O.P's big singles and bodies their song with G. Rap on Rawkus, I'll be one blogger clappin' but I ain't applauding you motherf**kers... or, indeed, myself. Shame on us all.
My m8 suggested I do the 20 songs which bring you instant joy viral challenge. I'm not a requests guy, but I am a songs list guy so that's an offer ya host can't refuse. 10 songs by rappers, and 10 songs from Other Genres™. I went with my gut on these choices and I've been eatin' mad kimchi recently so I trust my gut like South Central Cartel trussed 'n gatz. Evidently 1987 to 1992 were the peak of all music for me - I say evidently but I really mean categorically because if you didn't experience those years first hand then you missed out big time, and when I say big time I ain't talkin' about Peter Gabriel's magnum choon, boiiiiiiiii.
What sorta basic bastard came up with the idea that 20 songs is a satisfactory number tho? Call me Marte Blanche because I'm breakin' the rules like Danze & Fame, switching it up to 25 songs, and including this quinary of legit 10/10 jams. John Peel was a nonce, but he was right about Teenage Kicks being a G.O.A.T choon.
Everybody should do one of these as a personal canon. Don't be givin' me no "oh it's so hard for me to choose 20 songs, darling" excuses either. Ain't it funny how the folks who pull that melodramatic shit tend to be middlebrow melon-farmers who only listen to music made between the late 1980s and the early 2000s? GTFOH. No shotz, just factz.
Drexl Spivey is one of the main antagonists in the movie True Romance.
Lil' Ricefield - Him Burton
(From Him Burton single; 2023)
Unfortunately, Seiji Oda has spent 2023 dropping wishy-washy singy Auto-Tune shit. Fortunately, his brother Lil' Ricefield just dropped his first new song of 2023 and it's a nice slice of "what would Dre say on some shit like this?"-core. He's a yellow boy with the weed, he's a taxi.
Juvenile - Ghetto Children
(From 400 Degreez album; 1998)
Ghetto Children as one of the best songs on 400 Degreez? For years I couldn't see it. Haterz tryna make me out as stubborn? I can't be it. That's my fancy way of saying that your musical taste should be ever-evolving and not forever fixed in stone inside your domepiece. You come up with them initial favourite jams, ha! You ain't gotta be stuck with them initial favourite jams, ha!
Unpopular opinion: I'll always prefer Follow Me Now to Back That Azz Up as far as 400 Degreez singles go. There's a Juvenile interview where he says Follow Me Now was the single which #actually propelled the album to multi-platinum status after it became big on Latino radio due to the Santana interpolation. If true, that's some Oye Como Whoa Na type trivia.
Kaliiii ft. DJ Smallz 732 - KToven
(From KToven single; 2023)
Johnboxxx shares like Sonny Bono, black and white keys, DJ Smallz lays Jersey Club Beats over Beethoven piano, the Area Codes lass sounds way better at a 145 BPM tempo. 'Boxxx reckons this song might be the best Ludwig von club version since Walter Murphy's A Fifth Of Beethoven and I reckon he's right.
Bonus beets: very different ambience, but we should always shout out Mobb Deep for takin' Ludvig to the darkest four cornered rooms of Queensbridge on If These Walls Could Talk.
My one contribution to the 50 Years Of HipHip #content nonsense: the t-shirt I got Kool Herc to sign when I saw him DJ Liverpool back in 2000. This was not long after I'd read Style Writing From The Underground and become obsessed with 1970's New York tags, so it was worth sacrificing a fresh tee for. Herc was much shorter than he looked in Beat This: A Hip-Hop History and tried to fool us by playing Fusion Beats Vol 2 and pretending he was doing the mixing on it himself, but he put on a very entertaining show with loadsa classic breaks, and was a convivial raconteur on the mic with anecdotes about his old parties. Mercifully, for such a Real Hip-Hop™ night, we were spared the sight of a buncha annoying breakdancers homoerotically rolling round on the dancefloor together and gurning at each other.
Dan Greenpeace was the support DJ and played a blinder of a set. It woz the night I first heard Spoonie Gee's Spoonie Is Back, Kev-E-Kev & Ak-B's Listen To The Man, Mad Skillz' Ghost Writer and Big Scoob's Kryptonite. Add some classics like Special Ed's I Got It Made and The Beatnuts' Off The Books and Watch Out Now, and you had an upper-echelon Rap connoisseur experience in a Scouse backstreet bar. Greenpeace also played the Cage song his Bad Magic label released on 12" which is surely the only Cage song a DJ could play in such a set. All in all, one of the best No Fakin' club nights alongside Edan's first Liverpool show in 2002 or 2003.
It was a What Everyone Wants blank tee Kool Herc tagged for me and I would kill for a plug on that brand's deadstock t-shirts. Best blank tees in British high Street history or wot? Perfect fit for a lanky lithe bastard like me, sold for £2.99 a pop, and came in a multitude of colours. What Everyone Wants became a citizen of British high street Hades in 2003, but I'd copped so many of their blank tees on my travels that I was still rockin' fresh ones when Sean Price dropped Onion Head.
Furry Kangols at half mast for Magoo AKA the Rap Game Andrew Ridgeley: a G.O.A.T mensch who played his position to the detriment of his own reputation. Us connosiers knew tho because Maganoo blazed those 3 Timbaland & Magoo albums plus songs like Clock Strikes (remix) and Here We Come saying bugged-out idiosyncratic shit which could have only have ever come from his mouthpiece. And what a mouthpiece Magoo had - Real Hip-Hop squares dismissed him as a pre-puberty Q-Tip when he was #actually the revenge of Milk Dee. How very ironic to see those very same Real Hip-Hop squares slobbering over Kendrick "Zeldar from Beldar" Lamar 15 years later. Magoo fluffed youse lads up, so Kendrick could give you an orgasm. Maybe I'm Nicole Brown because you really kill me.
Character and chutzpah are two of the intangibles every rapper needs, and Magoo's Cup overflowed with both. So it's a pity Timbaland didn't give Magoo the track-time on their second and third albums together which he gave him on their debut Welcome To Our World. Here at The Martorialist, we'd trade fellow Virginian Pusha T's entire boring solo career for a couple of Magoo solo songs over peak Timbaland production (Pusha catchin' a stray there like Madonna caught a stray on Up Jumps Da Boogie.) Deep in your hearts all y'all know I'm right, and when I say all y'all I ain't talkin' about the classic single from Timbaland & Magoo's second album, booiiiiiii.
~~ Various Artists - O.B: Original Bangers ~~
1. Gang Starr - Doe In Advance (O.G mix) (1994)
2. Slick Rick ft. Doug E. Fresh - Treat Her Like A Prostitute (movie version) (1988)
3. 2Pac - F*ck All Y'All (O.G mix)
4. AZ - Your World Don't Stop (O.G mix) (1995)
5. The Firm - La Familia (O.G mix) (1996)
6. Young Bleed - A Fool (1997)
7. Edan - Migraine (1999)
8. Trae ft. H.A.W.K & Fat Pat - Swang (O.G mix) (2005)
9. Redman - Can't Wait (remix 2) (1994)
10. Ghostface & Raekwon ft. Method Man & Superb - Flowers (O.G mix) (2001)
11. DJ Mustard ft. Ty Dolla $ign & Joe Moses - Paranoid (2013)
12. Agallah ft. Ruck - Telemundo (2001)
13. OMB Peezy - Lay Down (O.G mix) (2017)
14. UGK - Cocaine In The Back Of The Ride (Southern Way mix) (1992)
15. Mac Dre -Shoulda Been Mo (O.G mix) (1996)
Keep it real, get ya own shit, and be original. Here's some O.G versions which are categorically better than the official versions. Some of these came out billed as remixes but believe me plz they're the original mixes. Envisioned this playlist would be 20 jams deep, but there's some songs Audiomack just won't accept such as Martorialist classics like the original mixes of The Click's Daily Routine, Jackie Chain & Jhi Ali's Rollin', ABN's The Rain and Beeda Weeda & DJ Fresh's Bass Rock Babies Talk about a bummer in the summer eh?
How very apt that YouTube is recommending me U.K Drill songs and Major League Soccer highlights videos: both are artificial novelty spectacles which the native populations have delusions of grandeur about. The only difference is that U.K Drill has managed to produce a handful of good songs when it embraces its novelty factor, while Major League Soccer continues to get worse the more it takes itself seriously as a credible sport. Get Messi and Busquets taking penalties like this IMO.
My fave 2023 Rap song nobody else cares about is Get Somebody Else To Do It by Day Day Sustaaa & Eatem. Even the two rappers don't care about that shit because they've barely promoted it and deleted the teaser clip for the video :(
Homeboy Sandman had been on a great run since his EP with Edan in 2018, but his newmusic has become too priggish and prudish for my liking. He's now an insufferable bore who drones on about being a tee-total vegan anti-vaxer who doesn't own a smartphone on damn near every song. Plus, I can't take "money is bad, yo" rhymes seriously from a guy who constantly begs his fans to donate to his Patreon.
A lotta rappers claim they're big Pop-Punk fans, yet they've never hit up Aaron Cometbus for artwork, they've never rhymed over the bass from Green Day's Longview, and they can't name three Screeching Weasel songs.
My problem with the current wave of Milwaukeee Rap is that most of the songs are first-take brainfarts from folks who are more #content creators than rappers. You say "teenage punk rock energy", I say "throwaways freestyles with very little replay value". Basically, it's music made by ADHD youngsters for ADHD youngsters innit? Plz believe ya host isn't morphing into Mart Adams tho because I occasionally come across a Milwaukeee song which sticks for me: AyooLii's Smackin' Crackin', Zae Shakur's Donuts In A Benz and Myaap's HTS. The latter is some twisty-turny Milwaukeee Slap-Magnifico that's full of hook like Abu Hamza's wife and underpinned by a bassline which hits like Lil' Nico on Lil B.
