Turn It Up - Special Hip-Hop 50 edition!

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

We’re back again to start the week with some things we’ve been listening to. This week, we’re celebrating Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary by offering some of our favorite rap tracks, deep(er) cuts that we think should be part of the party this year and every year. David goes first, then Charles, and we’ve also included some reading recommendations at the bottom.

“What a Brother Know” and “The Assassinator” – Style (from In Tone We Trust, 1990)

This entire album is worth seeking out, and I remain dumbfounded that it wasn’t a hit in its moment and that it hasn’t become some kind of cult classic in the time since. MC Tony Tone drops self-esteem science on the first single, “What a Brother Know” (it had a video on Yo! MTV Raps), while DJ Mick Nice drops this funky-as-hell and impossibly deep bass rhythm. On the second, battle-rapping “The Assassinator,” Tone asks every foolish MC, “How can you say you’re parallel to my level?” He’s “slicin’ ‘em, tearin’ ‘em, dissin’ ‘em, darin’ ‘em, torchin’ ‘em, teasin’ ‘em, slammin’ ‘em,” all while Mick’s guitar and drum samples keep pouncing at you from unexpected directions. — DC

“Speak Upon It” – Ed O. G. & Da Bulldogs (from Life of a Kid in the Ghetto, 1991)

This album’s bildungsroman title-track made quite a few of my mixtapes in the day. But the fiercely reasoned “Speak Upon It,” about the racial double standards of America’s legal system, is the cut that’s stuck with me most through the decades. Partly that’s because of its brooding piano-and-drum groove but mostly it endures for me because it has continued to speak to every American moment since. Ed’s opening verse rages about the then-recent Charles Stuart case: “For insurance, he killed his wife and his child, and blamed it on a brother,” a story that caused Boston’s white community to go “buckwild” with calls for a return of the state’s death penalty—but only until they found out the white guy did it himself. The second verse, about the murder of New Jersey teen, Phillip Pannell, by a cop who was suspended with pay, then acquitted, is possibly even more brutal. As the opening Malcolm X sample observes, when it comes to protecting black lives seeking justice, “all of a sudden, Uncle Sam becomes very conscious of legality.” – DC

“Cha Cha Cha” – MC Lyte (from Eyes on This, 1989)

MC Lyte’s signature is hardly unknown. But as “Cha Cha Cha” is my longtime choice for greatest-ever dis’ rap, and as it was also one of my picks when Rolling Stone queried critics for their favorite 50 songs a few years back—and since as far as I can tell it isn’t mentioned in such high regard often enough, or at all—please allow me to note its all-time greatness for the record. That delightfully slithery Four Tops bass sample is very nearly the entire rhythm track—which puts it all on Lyte to perform the generous hell out of her stacked internal rhymes and make the record. “The dopest female that you’ve thus far,” she’s offering seemingly friendly advice to ambitious fellow MCs, and I take her pro-tips to heart even as I’m cracking up at her jokes. You’ll find her competition in the hospital where she put them, Lyte observes: “Visting time, I think it’s on a Sunday…” She’s uncertain about the day, understand, because she never visits them and, fair warning, won’t be visiting you. – DC

“Raw (Remix)” – Big Daddy Kane (from Long Live the Kane, 1988)

So glad to see Antonio Hardy, AKA Big Daddy Kane, included on hip hop’s half-century Masters of the Mic tour. During rap music’s heady late-80s, it was always Big Daddy who was my favorite but who, for reasons I well understood even then, always seemed to a take a backseat to Chuck D, KRS-1, LL, Rakim, and the rest of that moment’s murderer’s row. He, his DJ Mister Cee, and his (also underappreciated) producer Marley Marl had a knack for recontextualizing the hooks my favorite childhood soul 45s (“I’ll Take You There” and “Lean on Me,” just for starters) into great modern records, and he was both funny (“Calling Mr. Welfare”) and a smooth-operating lover boy (“The Day You’re Mine” and so many more). “Raw,” off his debut, remains undefeated for me, though, with its jaw-dropping flow, clever boasts (his use of “God bless the child who can hold his own” is like ultimate humble brag), and delightful disses: “So if we battle on the microphone / Bring your own casket and tombstone / And I’ma preach your funeral…,” Kane raps at the close, another battle won.  — DC

“Looking for the Perfect Beat” – Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force (12” single, 1983)

My first hip-hop record. I didn’t buy it because of its “rhymes,” which mostly just keep repeating that Bambaataa and crew are “Looking, searching, seeking, finding” a perfect beat. And I didn’t really know anything about the record either. I didn’t know it was a follow-up to their “Planet Rock,” which I hadn’t yet heard, or that it was born of DJ-driven block party scene in the Bronx, or that the Force had created it with DJ/producers Arthur Baker and John Robie, or that the members of the Soulsonic Force performed in outrageous stage costumes that made Parliament-Funkadelic look like a bunch of CPAs. No, the reason I bought it was because I’d heard it once on the radio and thought its electro sound, its beat, was thrilling and, yes, perfect. “Looking for the Perfect Beat” was a mission accomplished, in other words, and though MCs were even then displacing DJs in the spotlight, it continues to provide a mission statement for the genre. – DC

The Sequence – “Funk You Up” (single, 1979)

Released in 1979, the intoxicating “Funk You Up” is credited as the first commercial rap release by women and by southerners. That world-changing significance alone merits its inclusion in any hall of fame or esteem, but the track itself – eleven minutes in heaven with The Sequence, a South Carolina-based trio – is an absolute slammer. Over bubbling funk, the group – Blondy, Cheryl The Pearl, and Angie B. (later to become R&B star Angie Stone) – trades rhymes with the facility, familiarity, and felicity that mark so many early rap classics. Their central, foundational call – “Don’t you give up: keep going, keep going, keep going” – drives the sound and sensibility of this Big Banger as the Sequence sets the sequence for the first half-century of rap’s history. And, hopefully, its next one. Keep going. - CH

Brother D and the Collective Effort – “How We Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise?” (single, 1980)

Every time I hear boring-ass political hip-hop, of which there is too much, or I hear another iteration of the suggestion that “real” or meaningful rap is somehow separate from the sounds of other pop music, which is pure nonsense, this is one of the many counter-examples I think of. Released in 1980, Brother D. and the Collective Effort’s call to action lays its message across the endless pleasure of Cheryl Lynn’s “Got To Be Real,” a juxtaposition that urges listeners to think about a world beyond the dancefloor while not rejecting the blissful space created there. Are the lyrics a tad scolding to those getting down? Maybe so – but the interplay of voices (including Cheryl Lynn’s sampled chorus) and rhythms show that the transformational “collective effort” than being enacted by hip-hop’s development should always keep those experiences at the center. - CH

B-Rich – “Whoa Now” (from 80 Dimes, 2002)

Alongside its legacy of virtuosic lyrics and world-expanding sounds, one of hip-hop’s great traditions is the glorious party rocker, often a one-shot wonder from an artist who fades quickly but has a shining moment in the spotlight. B-Rich’s 2002 “Whoa Now” is part of that storied legacy. Barely scraping the Hot 100 and just missing the R&B Top 50, this Jeffersons­-sampling track can just barely be called a “hit,” and the Baltimore MC would never reach even those modest commercial heights again. (Although his piano-driven “Showtime” should’ve been a contender.) But its infectious silliness, all handclaps and post-Nelly cadences, remains a delight, a throwaway I won’t ever throw away. - CH

Big Gipp (feat. Andre 3000) – “Boogie Man” (from Mutant Mindframe, 2003)

There was a period when it seemed like everything coming out of Atlanta’s Dungeon Family collective was pure gold. This is a minor entry in that astonishing catalog, a deep cut from a Goodie Mob solo album, but its bubbling propulsion and the playful interplay between Big Gipp and OutKast’s Andre 3000 is an excellent reminder of what made the records by those groups and their affiliates so fresh, so clean, and so compelling. “Boogie Man” is a space-age blues boast over a “spooky-dooky” arrangement that supports both Gipp’s gruffness and Andre’s flights of fancy. Like so much music from this crew, it’s out of time, out of sight, and outer space.

Miss Flame – “Girl at War” (from Voices from the Frontline, 2006)

Welcome to the “War on Terror”-dome. The Iraq War not only produced responses from hip-hop artists on the home front, but also – thanks to the digital technologies and distribution that propelled new-millennium music more broadly – music made by the soldiers themselves. From a powerful 2006 collection of soldier-made tracks called Voices from the Frontline, “Girl At War” is one of the best of these responses. California-based artist Miss Flame recounts both the day-to-day dangers of life on the frontline and the particular problems facing women soldiers who need to prove their worth and strength to too many of their male colleagues. The track is suitably abrasive, with distorted keys punctuating a muted drum track, and Flame’s lyric rides this rough road with a mix of poised defiance and soldier-girl-tell-‘em honesty. As she told CBS News when the album came out, “you’re stressed and you can't be violent or do anything bad. Freestyling is a big relief, and everybody will come around and listen.” We sure will.

Reading recommendations:

-Adam Bradley on the new generation of Black folk artists, for New York Times

-Will Groff on the history of LGBTQ country, for LGBTQ Nation

-Philip Sherburne on Smithsonian Folkways’ best science and nature recordings, for Pitchfork

-Carl Wilson on Jack Antonoff, for Slate

-Stephen Thomas Erlewine on The Beatles’ “Red” and “Blue” albums, at Tidal

-Lucy Sante on Bob Dylan, literature and pop music, at Literary Hub

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