101 great Rap album tracks and mixtape joints of the noughties

So this was originally intended to swiftly follow my best Rap singles of 1999 - 2009 list back in early 2010, but good gracious, even though that singles post was bodacious, hyperlinking the bloody thing was so arduous that attempting another best-of-the-decade list required far too much patience. Two years on and an idle Rap blogger can now pay a pittance to Indian gentlemen for HTML services, so here's another mammoth noughties Rap tabulation to inflict my tastes on t'internet. Same rules as the singles post apply, although this one is restricted to the slightly different timespan of 2000 - 2010 and isn't presented in any kind of hierarchy of preference. Lists of fury, yawl.

1. Casual - Studio D (2001)
2. T.I - Kingofdasouth (2003)
3. Young Dro - Man In The Trunk (2006)
4. Sadat X ft. Heltah Skeltah - The Great Diamond D (2005)
5. Grand Puba - Let's Go (2007)
6. Young Bleed - I Couldn't C' It (2000)
7. C-loc, Max Minelli & Boosie - Throw It Up (2004)
8. Boo Da Boss Playa ft. King Goldie - Rainbow (2000)
9. Max Minelli - My First Verse (2004)
10. Young Ready ft. C-Loc & Max Minelli - 1 Rubber (2007)
11. Camp Lo - How U Walkin' (2002)
12. D4L - Scotty (2005)
13. Trap Squad - Tea Bag Dat Hoe (2006)
14. AZ - Wanna Be There (2002)
15. Nas - No Idea's Original (2001)
16. Cormega - Verbal Graffiti (2002)
17. Mac Dre - Me Damac (2004)
18. Z-Ro - Respect My Mind (2005)
19. Trae - Real Talk (2006)
20. A.B.N - Umm Hmm (2008)
21. Cam'Ron ft. Prodigy - Losing Weight (2000)
22. The Diplomats - Gangsta (2003)
23. Agallah - Gun Go (2004)
24. Jim Jones & Stack Bundles - Ya Dig? (2008)
25. Max B - Lip Sing (2008)
26. Mic Terror - Juke Them Hoes (2007)
27. E-40 - It's All Gravity (2002)
28. Turf Talk - 24 Feelin' Way O.G (2004)
29. Maino - Role Model (2008)
30. Lil' Boosie - Trouble Man (2005)
31. Lil' Boosie & Webbie ft. Pimp C - Finger Fuckin' (2003)
32. Webbie - Porch (2003)
33. Lil' Phat - I Do My Shit (2008)
34. King Geedorah - Fazers (2003)
35. Megalon - Rain Blood (2002)
36. Fam-Lay - Skrung Owt (2006)
37. Suga Free ft. Morris Day - She Get What She Pay Foe (2004)
38. DJ Quik - Jupiter's Critic And The Mind Of Mars (2009)
39. Devin The Dude - Go Somewhere (2002)
40. Messy Marv - "B" (2006)
41. Havoc ft. 50 Cent & Big Noyd - Bump That remix (2003)
42. Prodigy - Raining Guns And Shanks (2007)
43. Big Noyd - Heartless (2008)
44. Twista ft. Jazze Pha - Badunkadunk (2004)
45. Beanie Sigel ft. Peedi Crakk - Flatline (2005)
46. Freeway - You Don't Know (In The Ghetto) (2003)
47. Edan - Run That Shit (2001)
48. The Jacka - Murder Somebody (2006)
49. Husalah - Fighting The Feds (2007)
50. Go-Rilla Pimp$ - Pimp Olympics (2003)
51. Bo$$ Hog Barbarians - You Got Mail (2005)
52. UGK - Look At Me (2001)
53. Jadakiss ft. Nas - Show Discipline (2001)
54. Styles P - Kill That Faggot (2006)
55. Mike Jones ft. Bun B & Lil' Keke - Know What I'm Sayin' (2005)
56. M.O.P - Roll Call (2000)
57. Juvenile - Numb Numb (2003)
58. Lil' Wayne - B.M J.R (2004)
59. Mannie Fresh - Fight Song (2004)
60. Mitchy Slick ft. Damu & Don Diego - Yeah Dat (2001)
61. Big L - The Big Picture (Intro) (2000)
62. Lil' Wyte - Icy White Soljas (2004)
63. Project Pat ft. Beanie Sigel - Purple (2007)
64. Bailey - Fuck Yo' Couch (2006)
65. Paul Wall & Chamillionaire - N Luv Wit My Money (2002)
66. Ghostface Killah ft. Raekwon & Slick Rick - The Sun (2001)
67. Scarface - Safe (2002)
68. Geto Boys - 1, 2 And 3 (2005)
69. Tragedy Khadafi - Neva Die Alone Part 2 (2003)
70. Gucci Mane - Nickelodeon (2008)
71. Waka Flocka Flame ft. Pastor Troy & Slim Dunkin - Fuck The Club Up (2010)
72. Black Moon ft. Sean Price - Looking Down The Barrel (2003)
73. Rock ft. Sean Price - Fuck Dat Rapper (2008)
74. Lil' Flip ft. Shasta - 8 Rulez (2002)
75. 8Ball & MJG ft. Tiny - Thingz (2000)
76. Black Rob - Help Me Out (2005)
77. G-Dep - Child Of The Ghetto (2003)
78. Mystikal - Big Truck Boys (2000)
79. Jae Millz - Sober (2008)
80. Soulja Boy ft. Gucci Mane & Yo Gotti - Shopping Spree (2008)
81. Yukmouth - Stuntastic (2003)
82. 50 Cent - Rotten Apple (2002)
83. G-Unit - True Loyalty (2003)
84. All $tar - Keep Doin' My Thang (2008)
85. Boyz 'N Da Hood - Trap N*ggaz (2005)
86. Young Jeezy - Don't Get Caught (2005)
87. Curren$y - Scared Of Monstas (2009)
88. Wise Intelligent - A Genocide (2007)
89. C-Nile ft. Juvenile & Skip - U Know Me remix (2004)
90. B.o.B ft. Lil' Boosie & DG Yola - Fuck You (2008)
91. Gang Starr - Sabotage (2003)
92. Blaq Poet - Bang This (2005)
93. The NYGz - Get 2 Tha Point (2004)
94. Haystak - Hell Naw (2008)
95. OutKast ft. Killer Mike - Snappin' And Trappin' (2000)
96. Dungeon Family - Follow The Light (2001)
97. Bubba Sparxxx - Take A Load Off (2003)
98. Killer Mike - Belly Of The Beast (2008)
99. Rock D Tha Legend ft. Big Boi - DDT (That Hoe) (2007)
100. Lil' Kim - Suck My D*ck (2000)
101. G-Side ft. Yelawolf - Who's Hood

R.I.P to Lil' Phat, btw. Kinda feel like I was the David Thomson to his Orson Welles, and Life Of A Yungsta is probably my favourite non-Boosie Trill Fam mixtape of the past 5 years. Dear lord, why they hold they nuts on the greats until they gone????

Is Reagan by Killer Mike & El-P the most overrated song of 2012?

Given that it's being treated with the reverence of a new Fight The Power or A Bird In The Hand, it certainly appears that way, yes. There are a helluva lotta disingenuous motherfuckers out there at the moment because Reagan doesn't really do anything Wise Intelligent's entirely less-celebrated A Genocide didn't already do more creatively five years ago, except use the backing track of a critic-baiting peckerwood producer and cheat by clumsily hammering its point home with snippets of Ronald Reagan's dialogue. The dialogue trick might have worked for Killer Mike before with those Charlie Manson samples on Belly Of The Beast, but on Reagan the complete lack of subtlety is startling and it affords the song the replay value of an Immortal Technique interlude about how American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 were actually secrete missles fired at the twin towers by Halliburton H.Q. Such an overwhelmingly positive critical response to a song so flawed and ultimately average only confirms my suspicion that some of you heathens will sweat any ol' merely half-decent Rap shit if it happens to mention Oliver North.

Other than being a footnote in Will High's life story and releasing an inexplicitly great song where two of indie-Rap's foremost killjoys break kayfabe to poke fun at their own po-faced personas, what's a useless lump like El-P ever done for American culture to earn the right to besmirch the legacy of the iconic actor who starred in Juke Girl, King's Row and The Killers anyway? Ronnie Reagan getting decked by John Cassavetes after slapping Angie Dickinson around the chops in The Killers is a far greater achievement than releasing ludicrously overrated albums by the poor man's Cage & Yak Ballz and Rapping like the teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off over clangorous beats which sound akin to robot qweefs amidst draws of cutlery crashing down a lighthouse's stairs.


For the love of Rap, someone please put a couple of bullets in El-P's hands before he manages to get his claws into Danny Brown's next album and consequently ruins it.

Fat Lace back!

It's Def Jam week over on Fat Lace, featuring blurbs-a-plenty by ya man Richard Tre Mane AKA Trap Goin' Burham Wazir. Drew Huge and I actually wrote the text for this entire week back in the Reagan/Thatcher era when Davy DMX was signed to the label (well, sometime last year), but it's taken Dan Large this long to rip and up all the audio for it since he's now clocking that Tinie Tempah paper from Sway becoming a proper pop star and partying it up in Dubai with Calvin Harris and Alexa Chung. When we was on the computer writin' about B.G Knocc Out, he was in Palm Deira sippin' Cris' on a speedboat.

Hey black ppl of America

If you're gonna take up Rapping as a career in 2012 then you might as well employ Goodie Mob's debut album and Suga Free's I Wanna Go Home (The County Jail Song) as your two primary artistic inspirations and parlay them into a pretty interesting Youtube gimmick :

"hell no, I don't want my head bust, no I don't wanna die
I 'ono what's up there in that great big ol' sky"

Alpoko Don - All I Know
(From Youtube; 2012)



"This my year this year, money gon' keep pilin'
I'm playin' with more faces than a thousand photo albums

Alpoko Don - Get My Paypa, Dog
(From Youtube; 2012)


Has this guy really just been locked up for eight years or is that narrative merely part of the gimmick?

Reasons why I love Youtube # 25

There's only two types of people in this world, my friend: those simps who think Jarvis Cocker bumrushing Michael Jackson's 1996 performance of Earth Song was the most notable Brit Awards moment of the decade, and the more discerning viewers amongst us who KNOW that the time Mark Morrison cranked out Return Of The Mack at the 1997 Brit Awards when he was on trial for smuggling a burner onto an airliner was the single greatest live performance in the history of television:


Mark's ankle length white mink and black Only God Can Judge Me print turtleneck ensemble was mad baroque, but peep closer and you'll notice it's his mic-throwing skills in this clip that are truly next-level: clock 3:30 - to 3:34 where he stagedives backwards into an adoring throng and then casually tosses his mic from his left hand to his right hand for a glimpse of live TV swag that's second only to the time a clearly shitfaced Scott Hall got hit in the head by a drink on Nitro and used it to grease his immaculate mullet back further without messing a single follicle of hair up. Still, if only Mark had known in 1997 that those blessed with pure uncut swag are supposed to go and cop private jets when they get kicked off planes then his life might not turned into a sisyphean loop of failed-comebacks and prison sentences.

Martorial elegance # 63

A-Mafia adds his own tuppence to the never-ending brand harmony debate, yo :

Since the "real Harlem n*gga - no tight shirts or tight jeans" seems to be delving into his back catalogue for joints to give the ole video treatment at the moment (a Ted Dibiase clip drops this week, apparently!), he might as well shoot a promo for this ridiculously hardbody 2004 joint from when he first popped on the scene as the fourth member of Purple City alongside Agallah, Shiest Bubz and Un Kasa before incarceration saw him vanish and then reappear as a Cam weedcarrier on Public Enemy # 1 in 2007 :

"Sleep with my eyeses open
'cause them guys is scopin'
front on me, my forty-five is smokin'"

A-Mafia - I Ain't Playin'
(From The Color Purple mixtape; 2004)


If only it'd been Mafia instead of that Boo-from-Boo & Gotti sounding jabronie Penz on Glitter, eh?

Just sayin', bruv # 3

Five days to work, an extended Jubilee bank holiday weekend to play, c'mon everybody drop those unpopular opinions today :

There isn't a more abominable Rap album than The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, and the only Fugees song future generations will remember with any fondness is It Doesn't Matter by Wyclef Jean & The Rock, mainly for The Rock's contributions.

Dilla really did change our lives when he managed to ruin three of the great eccentric groups of the early nineties in the space of a year with his pedestrian clip-cloppy production for De La, Tribe and The Pharcyde.

Nothing good has ever emerged from El-P worming his way into black ppl Rappers' affections or studios, and, yes, that includes R.A.P Music.

A-Mafia's belly laugh after he proudly proclaims "I ain't never had a job in my life, man" on the intro of Crime Pays is precisely 10000 times more entertaining than anything Cam'Ron dropped in his unreleased-song-a-day campaign last month.

If the internet has revealed anything about our Rap-writer forefathers, it's that a toadying blowhard like Elliot Wilson simply can't have been responsible for any of the good bits in Ego Trip.

Since Nas is now the Rapping version of the weed-addled twit he's always appeared to be in his interviews, the only chance his new Life Is Good album has of being worth a listen is if we're treated to the return of Nas the gloriously offkey R&B singer who blazed shit like a young Luther on the hooks of Gimme Yours and Street Dreams.

Kirko Bangz's Autotuned ode to sexual harassment What Yo Name Iz makes Future's critically acclaimed Pluto album sound like the creepy ramblings of a PUA-inspired Canadian friend of Mindbender Futurama.

Busy Bee may have lost the famed battle against Kool Moe Dee, but he eventually won the war by managing to make a good song on Sugar Hill Records with Making Cash Money when the Treacherous Three proved themselves to be utterly useless as recording artists after they left Enjoy Records, and then went on to rub salt in the wounds by dropping a golden-era classic in Suicide as Moe Dee was getting his ass handed to him by LL Cool J and responding by recording dis tracks over the mediocre Teddy Riley beats Spoonie Gee rejected.

Hairy Asshole by UGK with Webbie & Boosie is the only true feminist anthem of the last five years since it rejects the pornized ideal that women have to wax every follicle of hair from their bodies to appear attractive to the opposite sex.

It seems unfair to level accusations that American Rap criticism is an all boys club when Rapper groupies are employed by major media outlets, and The Fader's female editor insists two of the more charismatic bloggers pen bland missives which read like they've been writen by a Rap Radar intern.

Close but no cigar, GLC

GLC ft. Raheem DeVaughn - Cathedral
(From Cathedral mixtape; 2012)


I've got a bit of a soft spot for GLC, even when he's cranking out bizarre Nu-Metal jams, so it's a bit of a shame he never had the opportunity to rhyme over any of the A-grade College Dropout and Late Registration cast-offs that KanYe happily gave to Consequence and Rhymefest back in 2005 and 2006. Recently he's come within a pigeon's penis of making the sort of song I wish he'd made back then on two separate occasions : with Cathedral off his new mixtape being slightly spoiled by the Raheem DeVaughn crooning reminding me of these two chicks I know who do this dance to Syleena Johnson's better-than-that-cunt-from-The-Fugees ersatz Lauryn Hill hook on All Falls Down where they close their eyes, wave their fingers about and then open their eyes and point at each other; and with I Ball from that Legendary Traxster EP last year suffering from 2 other dudes with daft names taking up valuable airspace by also Rapping on it, even if they do both deliver pretty good verses :

The Legendary Traxter ft. Skooda Chose, Dawreck & GLC
(From Flood The Streets EP; 2011)