The Top Five Hip-Hop Tracks of All Time

Whenever it comes to musical “best of all time” lists, the prejudices of those assembling the tracks, artists and albums chosen are evident. Really, Rolling Stone? No room for Mozart in the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list? I realize he wasn’t around to play the three day orgy of mud and gonorrhea you call Woodstock, but come on, Salieri; hook the brother up. So let me preface this list by saying I was born in 1981, I’m white (well, off-white…whatever Greek counts as) and grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. That said, I’m also omniscient and my taste is impeccable, so this list really does contain the top five hip-hop tracks of all time (in chronological order of my first hearing them).

1. Naughty by Nature-“Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” (released 1992, heard 1992)

This song was the first rap track I was spoon-fed by “Dial MTV” that was edgy, angry and all those other adjectives that my teachers would use to describe me in the written section of my report card. (See? Born gangsta.) Up until this point, my experience with rap had been limited to MC Hammer, Kid ‘n Play’s horrible Saturday morning cartoon and my dad telling me as he watched the video to Salt-n-Pepa’s “Do You Want Me” that he would definitely like to nail them because “It’s all black in the dark, anyhow” (Lord, I miss him).

Either way, I remember when Naughty by Nature’s previous single, the smash-hit “O.P.P.” dropped, every kid in my fifth grade class loved it. We spent countless hours on the playground trying to decipher just what O.P.P. meant because, whatever it was, we sure as hell wanted to be down with it. By the time their next single, “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,” rolled around, most of the class had moved on to the Use Your Illusion albums. But I couldn’t get enough of the track, and would wait every day after school to see the video played for its duration on the charts. It was the first rap track that I (as well as my little brother) memorized the lyrics to, and to this day, if you ask either of us what to do if “you ain’t never been to the ghetto,” we’ll yell back “then stay the fuck outta the ghetto!” without missing a beat.

2. Run-D.M.C. vs. Jason Nevins-“It’s Like That” (remix) (released 1997, heard 1997)

While I fully acknowledge the original version of this track is superior, back in 1997, I was listening to zero hip-hop and needed to be eased into it with this techno-remix. My musical life consisted of metal acts such as White Zombie and Pantera with some industrial in the form of Ministry and Front Line Assembly thrown in for good measure. The only thing that exposed me to music outside of that milieu at that time in my life was MTV’s “Amp,” a show featuring electronic music that my friends and I would dutifully tune into every Friday night after ingesting large amounts of Coricidin Cough and Cold medication. We were so messed up that the entire group would have to talk to each other the next day to try and recall the videos that played the night before, which was no small feet given the distorted lyrics and repetitive beats of the music coupled with the fact we were getting up to vomit every five minutes.

The only song that I remembered flawlessly after its first spin on “Amp” was Jason Nevin’s remix of Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Like That.” Since I was probably hallucinating that the walls were melting or that I had turned into a robot as I watched the video, I knew it had to be special. I rushed to look up the lyrics to the tune and was blown away by gems like “Money is the key to end all your woes/You ups, your downs, your highs and your lows/Won’t you tell me last time that love bought your clothes?/It’s like that, and that’s the way it is.” Though I still pop on some metal here and there, this is the song that turned me onto genres of music based upon lyrics dealing with everyday problems, like the distinct lack of duckets and bitches in my life.

3. Ol’ Dirty Bastard-“Dog Shit” (released 1997, heard 2000)


Ol’ Dirty Bastard is something of a patron saint to me. I mean, he rapped about subjects like knocking up multiple women while living at home with his mom and once drove in a limousine filled with his children (by various baby mamas, natch) to the state aid office to collect food stamps as a television crew taped it. Sure, on one hand, it’s reprehensible…but, on the other hand, I couldn’t stop laughing as I typed each word of the previous sentence.

I first heard “Dog Shit” during the heyday of Napster, my freshman year of college at Virginia Tech. For those of you that didn’t have a T3 connection and Napster during that year or so before Metallica spoke out against the service, let me just say it was a fantastic time to be a music fan. You could download literally any song that caught your interest in a matter of seconds and, more importantly, for free. Catchy tune you heard used in a commercial? Go for it! Your friend mentioned a band that you weren’t aware of so he could out-pretentious-music-snob you? Hell with him, download their entire catalog and memorize it by the time you saw him in class the next day. Because of Napster, I was able to first start exploring rap in depth and found that I had a lot of catching up to do.

My friend Gavin is responsible for introducing me to “Dog Shit.” Back in my frosh days, I was thoroughly, almost astoundingly, socially retarded. It hadn’t dawned on me that the girls around me were so happy to be out from under daddy’s roof that they would pretty much bang anyone who dressed decently and didn’t utter the worlds “I’m a serial killer.” I was of course terrified by them and spent my every free hour locked in my room either listening to music or downloading porn to the first computer whose hard drive my mom couldn’t scour. I suppose it was my own, pathetic version of collegiate sexual experimentation. The only reason I would leave my dorm outside of attending class was to visit Gavin’s apartment, where we would take bong rips, shoot each other with BB guns in the ass and drink countless cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon as we bitched about women not understanding us and being hopelessly impossible to approach (after reading what I just wrote, I’m kind of shocked at how much it sounds like the beginning of a gay porn flick. Well, not that shocked).

During one of these visits, Gavin would not shut the hell up about the song and how amazing it was, which of course drove me to download it the instant I stumbled back home the next morning (again, Napster allowed for great musical knowledge pissing contests between friends). As soon as I finished hearing it the first time, I listened a second time. And a third, and a fourth and a fifth. Its lyrics became my AIM away message for weeks and I came home as soon as possible with a copy of the mp3 for my brother. ODB’s ability to ignore conventional rhyme schemes and bend them to his own needs and sound great doing it astounded me. I spent two years in high school studying Latin poetry (I told you I was awesome with the ladies!), and it shocked me to see the same poetic techniques employed by Virgil in The Aeneid used by a guy rapping “Tossed salad? Oh, you in some shit now!” For my money, ODB was the light of the Wu-Tang Clan, and, while most people saw him as a clown, there was an obvious genius there that I feel still goes largely ignored today.





4. Nas-“It Ain’t Hard to Tell” (released 1994, heard 2001)


Once I started listening to it, it took me all of a few months to become a snob about hip-hop. The Busta Rhymes albums I had purchased the year before were discarded in favor of Black Star and Public Enemy. Walking around the cutthroat streets of the University of Virginia campus (Charlottesville, son. Charlottesville), I needed a soundtrack as edgy as they were. Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were too commercial, too sugary for the job. I needed a gritty lyrical genius. I needed Nas.

To this day, I still maintain that the best album in hip-hop, pound for pound, is Nas’ Illmatic. Maybe it hit me so hard because Nas recorded it at age 19, the same age I was as I played it day in, day out. It is said that Caesar, once, while visiting Spain, encountered a statue of Alexander the Great. Caesar knelt and wept before the statue, bemoaning the fact that, at his age, Alexander had already conquered vast swaths of the entire world and how little he had achieved by comparison. Illmatic was my statue of Alexander. Every day I would fire up my discman as I walked to class, pissed that someone my own age had already made it huge in the world of entertainment as I suffered through classes about neural ganglions and spanked off straight into a trash can because I was too broke for tissues, my dreams of stand-up comedy withering on the vine. Though it’s tough to pick one track from the album that stands above the others, “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” gets the nod. Thanks for continuing to be the salt in my wounds of failure, Nas. Bastard.





5. Tupac Shakur-“Str8 Ballin” (released 1994, heard 2006)


As I mentioned above, I considered myself above what I perceived as the pop-rap of Tupac Shakur for quite some time. That all changed in 2006, when I got an 8-5 desk job and music was my only release. Honestly, I hated that gig so much that listening to audio of prisoner interrogations at the Hanoi Hilton would have probably cheered me up, but I decided to go a little less morbid and went with finally exploring the Tupac Shakur discography, instead. And, with Pac’s help, work became a little less of a hell.

My cubicle neighbor for a long time at this job was a gigantic brother by the name of J.D. Smith. I’m not sure if we were friends before I spent my every day at my desk blasting Tupac to the chagrin of my cracka-ass cracka boss, but we sure were as soon as I started. J.D. was a great guy and loved the fact that I was listening to Tupac, which is cool of him because I’m pretty sure that, if the roles were reversed, I’d have viewed me as Michael Bolton from Office Space. Either way, we spent the next six months taking turns blasting Pac from our computers and getting fat eating $4 Chinese food lunch specials until my boss couldn’t take it anymore, put her cloven hoof down and moved us to different wings of the building.

Years later, now far removed from my juvenile East Coast hip-hop snobbery, I can say that Tupac Shakur is the embodiment of everything I love about hip-hop. He raps about being crushed repeatedly by life and seeking fame, success, money and women as restitution, even though he knows none of those things will make him happy in the end. Kinda like me except he had abs, only one testicle and banged Quincy Jones’ daughter. “Str8 Ballin” is the quintessential Pac tune. “I think I’ll die if I don’t get no ends/In a bucket, but I’m riding it like it’s a Benz” is the most hip-hop lyric you’ll ever hear. (In George Zimmer voice) I guarantee it.


Any tracks you feel should be on this list instead? Well, shove it up your ass! Or, leave a comment. Probably the latter.

Tagged as: dial mtv, everything's gonna be alright, hip hop, illmatic, it ain't hard to tell, it's like that, jason nevins, mtv, nas, naughty by nature, odb, ol dirty bastard, run-d.m.c., str8 ballin, tupac shakur, University of Virginia, Virginia Tech.