#BEST LYRICS OF ALL TIME RAP FULL#

To a fan coming up in the era of Cardi or Tyler or Polo G or Playboi Carti, the golden age is now.'Rappers I monkey flip em with the funky rhythm I be kicking/Musician, inflicting composition/of pain I'm like Scarface sniffing cocaine/Holding a M-16, see with the pen I'm extreme, now/Bullet holes left in my peepholes/I'm suited up in street clothes/Hand me a nine and I'll defeat foes/Y'all know my steelo with or without the airplay/I keep some E&J, sitting bent up in the stairway/Or either on the corner betting Grants with the celo champs/Laughing at baseheads, tryin' to sell some broken amps/G-Packs get off quick, forever n***** talk s***/Reminiscing about the last time the Task Force flipped/N***** be running through the block shootin'/Time to start the revolution, catch a body, head for Houston/Once they caught us off-guard, the Mac-10 was in the grass and/I ran like a cheetah with thoughts of an assassin/Pick the Mac up, told brothers, 'Back up,' the Mac spit/Lead was hitting n*****, one ran, I made him back flip/Heard a few chicks scream, my arm shook, couldn't look/Gave another squeeze, heard it click, 'yo, my s*** is stuck'/Try to cock it, it wouldn't shoot, now I'm in danger/Finally pulled it back and saw 3 bullets caught up in the chamber/So now I'm jetting to the building lobby/And it was full of children probably couldn't see as high as I be/(So what you saying?) It's like the game ain't the same/Got younger n***** pulling the triggers, bringing fame to their name/And claim some corners, crews without guns are goners/In broad daylight, stickup kids: they run up on us/4-5's and gauges, Macs, in fact/Same n***** will catch a back-to-back, snatching your cracks in black/There was a snitch on the block getting n****s knocked/So hold your stash 'til the coke price drop/I know this crackhead who said she's got to smoke nice rock/And if it's good, she'll bring you customers in measuring pots/But yo, you gotta slide on a vacation, inside information/Keeps large n***** erasin' and their wives basin'/It drops deep as it does in my breath/I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death/Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined/I think of crime when I'm in a New York state of mind. One of the incredible things about hip-hop is that it evolves and expands faster than any other genre in music history. to Houston to Chicago, and beyond.Īs we dug and listened, we found ourselves a little less swayed by “golden age” mystique than we might’ve been had we done this list 10 or 15 years ago. and Rakim and others, through the gangsta era, the rise of the South, the ascendance of larger-than-life aughts superstars like Jay-Z and Kanye West and Nicki Minaj, and on and on into more recent moments like blog-rap, emo-rap, and drill, from New York to L.A. The result was a list that touches on every important moment in the genre’s evolution - from compilations that honor the music’s paleo old-school days, to its artistic flourishing in the late Eighties and early Nineties with Public Enemy, De La Soul, Eric B. When confronted with a choice between the third (or fourth or fifth) record by a classic artist (Outkast, for instance, or A Tribe Called Quest) and an album from an artist who would make the list more interesting (The Jacka or Saba or Camp Lo), we tended to go with the latter option. That all changed in 2002, when Lose Yourself exploded, becoming an inescapable phenomena. Relatedly, a list of hip-hop-adjacent albums from the worlds of dancehall or reggaeton or grime would be fun and fascinating, and something for us to revisit down the road. For a long time, Biggie’s Juicy was the first rap song most kids learned word for word. That’s one reason we limited our scope to English language hip-hop.

But the history of rap LPs is so rich and varied, we were forced to make some painful choices - there are so many iconic artists with deep catalogs, so many constantly evolving sounds and regional scenes. Two hundred seems like an almost luxuriantly expansive number when you’re making an albums list, and in any other genre, maybe it would be.

Best lyrics of all time rap