The first rap album that became essential listening for me was Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP. Before that I enjoyed and appreciated certain rap songs but had never heard a complete rap album that held my interest.
But the Marshall Mathers LP, which exploded into the cultural consciousness amid cries of outrage and arguments over censorship and freedom of expression, was a fully formed masterpiece of anger, pain and dark humor.
I wanted to include a woman during this week on rap artists, so I did what every modern-day computer literate person does when seeking knowledge — I Googled it.
A search for “best female rapper” returns a lot of candidates, most of whom I’ve never heard of. Among those I do know, I found repeated references to Missy Elliot, Eve, Lil Kim and Queen Latifah. But the most mentioned and most lavishly praised of them all proved to be Lauryn Hill.
Public Enemy was the first rap group to catch my attention. That was thanks to their prominent role in Spike Lee’s classic 1989 film Do the Right Thing.
If you’ve seen the film, you no doubt remember the vibrant opening credits sequence, in which newcomer Rosie Perez danced solo to Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ against a colorfully lit stage backdrop of a city street. This song burst into my brain the same way the movie did.
Whether you love Kanye West or hate him — and I can see plenty of reasons to do both — it’s hard to deny that the man has immense talent and that he has done more to change the face of modern hip-hop than any of his peers.
Much has been written about the emergence of so-called emo rap, and Kanye has certainly done his part to introduce themes of heartbreak, romance, depression and self-doubt into his music and therefore into the broader conversation about what makes a good rap record. His tear-soaked 808s & Heartbreak is rap Blood On the Tracks and, whether or not it “works” in any traditional sense, it’s very existence is noteworthy.
If there’s one genre I’ve given short shrift over nearly 1,300 Songs of the Day, it’s rap. OK, heavy metal as well, but that’s never gonna happen.
But if I can dedicate a week to opera, surely I can dedicate a week to rap. So to paraphrase my mother, that’s what I’ll do.
Starting things off is a track from the Speakerboxxx half of Outkast’s smash 2003 release Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. That record, which won the Album of the Year Grammy and sold more than 5.5 million copies (of a double album), marked the peak of the band’s career. Their only subsequent release was the mostly ignored soundtrack album to a film they conceived, 2006’s Idlewild.
