Random A-List for Set: Hip Hop

Hip hop.

Here are 12 A-list albums, selected at random from Set: Hip Hop. Use your Reload button to get more.

Afrika Bambaataa/Zulu Nation/Cosmic Force: "Zulu Nation Throw Down" [1981, Paul Winley]
Half jingly song-chant and half rap, this starts out so flat that even the rap sounds off-key. But soon the harmonies begin to seem natural, as in "ethnic" music tuned to its own scale, or maybe Kleenex/Liliput. And Lisa Lee, resident young lay-dee of this "Funkadelic of the microphone," must have been a tobacco auctioneer in some earlier lifetime, and a Shirelle after that. Virtually irresistible. A-

Biz Markie: All Samples Cleared [1993, Cold Chillin'/Warner Bros.]
Singin' in the rain 'cause he got the audacity, Biz returns from legal limbo to mumble, spritz, fart around, cop a hit from McFadden & Whitehead, ride four different versions of "Get Out My Life Woman," and rhyme "audacity" with "Butch Cassidy." From "Family Tree," which builds off 20 first names, to "The Gator," which cuts to the beat in the interests of asthma prevention, he never tries harder than is absolutely necessary, and seldom comes up less than beguiling and hilarious. Masterstrokes: the positive "I'm a Ugly Nigger (So What)," in the great tradition of Huckleberry Finn, and "I'm Singin'," in which he does for Gene Kelly what he tried to do for Gilbert O'Sullivan--and nobody is thin-skinned enough to stop him. A-

The Coup: Party Music [2001, 75 Ark]
Imperfect musically (two slow ones) and politically (too anti-Amerikkkan). And right, this is the album with the withdrawn cover of Boots Riley detonating the WTC--a pun gone terribly wrong, tracks "blowing up," get it? Fortunately, most of the jokes are less doctrinaire--there are dozens better in "5 Million Ways to Kill a C.E.O." alone, like "We could let him change a flat tire/Or we could all at once retire." The title's a pun, too, signifying Black Panther or Communist (or necktie), only not only, because the tracks blow up: The live band, the male and female choruses, and DJ Pam the Funkstress do here commit a positive groove worthy of Frankie Beverly, Digital Underground, Chuck Brown. Similarly, the slogans-to-go that begin with the first verse--"Every death is an abrupt one/Every cop is a corrupt one/Without no cash up in a trust fund/Every cat with a gat wants to bust one/Every guest wants a plus-one"--are underpinned by songs wise beyond anybody's years, such as the woman-friendly tale of the girl who convinced a fumbling 17-year-old Boots that he'd fathered her child. Imperfect, definitely. But only because perfection is on the table. A

Chuck D: Autobiography of Mistachuck [1996, Mercury]
If rap, now hip hop, is the black CNN, the coiner of that historic phrase has gone public access--his disappearing solo debut topped out at 190 pop and broke "r&b" well south of House of Pain. So his claim to righteousness has to stand as music, or if he's lucky the kind of rumor that kept Amerindie going--like Spearhead and Gil Scott-Heron, not Wu-Tang or Buju Banton. And until he gets winded half an hour in, he slam-dunks. Over a muscular bottom of unsampled funk--"NO contracts NO tracks with NO mechanicals"--the proud Chevy owner pounds home the plain, intricately rhymed truth about black folks dreaming of Jenny Jones, about hip hop going to hell in an armored limo. Sure helped me get straight after I spent an hour with the law one afternoon. I can only hope it'll do the same for people who really need it. A-

Gang Starr: Full Clip: A Decade of Gang Starr [1999, Virgin]
A longtime agnostic in re Guru and Premier except as regards the former's ill-advised Roy Ayers-Donald Byrd trip, I'm grateful for this exemplary compilation. For anybody wondering what "flow" can mean, Guru's smooth, unshowy delivery, cool in its confident warmth and swift without ever burying words or betraying rush, is one ideal, and Premier's steady drums 'n' bass, just barely touched by anything that would pass for a hook, undergird his groove with discretion and power. My problem has always been the music's formalism--the way it encouraged adepts to bask in skillful sounds and rhymes that abjure commerce and tough-guyism. But reducing five albums to two CDs not only ups the pop density, as you'd expect, but achieves variety by jumbling chronology and mixing in B sides and soundtrack one-offs that weren't cut to any album's flow. It's a credit to the duo's constancy that the result plays like a single release. And despite his occasional bad-girl tales and images of sexual submission, Guru's quiet rectitude and disdain for a street rhetoric whose reality he's seen make him a chronicler everybody can learn from. A-

Mase: Harlem World [1997, Bad Boy]
This hugely appealing, moderately disturbing piece of pop has no more credibility with the keepers of hip hop's gated community than Calvin Butts, Al Roker, or the great neglected legacy of the Fat Boys. Mase's phlegmatic, just-woke-up drawl earns the overused term "flow" more than any delivery since Snoop's--unflappably indolent, fonder of vowels than consonants, he has no trouble rhyming "my limo" and "sex symbol" and is at ease with both tropes. His congested timbre warm rather than cool, he sounds goofy and utterly confident at the same time, the cuddliest rapper ever. But for his audience, cuddly and raunchy are anything but mutually exclusive, and like most ass men only more so, Mase isn't always so cute. He has his "four pimp rules," his "please no hickeys 'cause wifey's with me," his detailed list of freak-me requirements that climaxes with the sudden "If she make my nuts itch I kill that slut bitch." Black Barney, if you're talking this shit just to impress your boys, forget it, because it won't. You know the score: "Niggaz say they love me, they dont love me/I know deep down they wanna slug me/I feel the vibe when they hug me." A-

MTV Party to Go, Vol. 4 [1993, Tommy Boy]
At the same moment Vol. 3 convinces me I can live forever without "Baby Got Back," Mary J. Blige, "I'm Too Sexy," the simultaneous Vol. 4 firms up my affection for "They Want Efx," En Vogue, and "Give It Away" (I kind of dig "Baby-Baby-Baby" too) (and hey, "Hip Hop Hooray" and "Back to the Hotel" are cool, and "Jump" and RuPaul you know about). It's enough to renew my faith in confluences of taste--sometimes even dance disposables sort out. So what if the higher-grade collection mines higher-grade albums--these are remixes, right? Kris Kross's has Super Cat on it. Fun. A-

Ol' Dirty Bastard: Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version [1995, Elektra]
Yacub's worst nightmare as comedian, moral threat, and nut case, the former Russell Jones walks that three-dimensional tightrope not with grace, and not with hope, either. With faith, maybe--even charity. Certainly with an irrepressible commitment to his own history and culture, however sublumpen the sociology of class and race judges those to be. His compulsion is to turn an absence into a presence. His clownish explosions distance him from how fucked up the violence and pleasures of his culture are and appear, respectively, and his clansmen show us how complex and full of fun their treasure is. "I'm the baddest hip hop man across the world," he sputters, the prized fool in the court of King RZA. A-

Prince Paul: Prince Paul Presents a Prince Among Thieves [1999, Tommy Boy]
The main thing wrong with this record is that it's too short at 77 minutes: character sketches like Kool Keith's ordnance man, Big Daddy Kane's pimp, and Chubb Rock's crime lord could easily be fleshed out. Deploying hip hop stereotypes of mythic proportions in a coherent fable, it isn't just one of the few hip hop albums ever to make you look forward to the next skit--it's the closest thing to a true rock opera you've ever heard. So root for Chris Rock to turn it into the movie few optioned properties become. And note that while the full meaning of the title track, for instance, depends on the story, the songs hold up when you program around the skits. I'm not claiming Tommy Boy can break the steady-funking Albert King jam "What U Got," where gangsta Sha and good kid Breeze have much love for each other. But I'm not claiming Sleater-Kinney's about to go gold, either. A

Redman: Doc's Da Name 2000 [1998, Def Jam]
Redman's brand of weed-fueled raunch-ruckus has never been as wild or ecstatic as Busta Rhymes's or Ol' Dirty Bastard's, but here he fuses their comic high spirits with his own trademark grit into ground-level, politically incorrect satire full of loud farts, stinkin' asses, and no-account thugs making monkey noises. In a genre where nobody wants to be a role model and everybody is, Redman cuts fresh cheese: "I'm a everyday nigga like a Toyota/The A&R hope we don't drop the same coda." People have jobs on this record--"whether it's fast food, or transportation, sneaker store, doin' hair, or straight-up strippin', we gotta get the cash"--and that includes a "round-the-clock lyricist" who claims to sleep in his workboots. Not everybody can go to work, though. So give the last word to babymama militant Liquidacia, whose demands include 40 cans of Enfamil a month and no reporting babydaddies to welfare: "We must stick together in order to survive in a world of bourgie hos." A-

Kanye West: The College Dropout [2004, Roc-A-Fella]
What is the fuss about his contradictions? The main difference between him and most hip hop journalists is his money. They'd buy the Benz--so would I, Volvos don't last as long--and probably the gold too. They'd say anything to get laid. They accept the economic rationale of dealing and dig music of dubious moral value. Yet at the same time they do their bit for racial righteousness and know full well how much they need the "single black female addicted to retail." On Easter Sunday, some of them even believe in Jesus Christ. But none of them are as clever or as funny as Kanye West, and these days I'm not so sure about Eminem either. West came up as a beatmaster, but his Alicia Keys and Talib Kweli hits are pretty bland, and neither his voice nor his flow could lead anyone into sin. So he'd better conceptualize, and he does. Not only does he create a unique role model, that role model is dangerous--his arguments against education are as market-targeted as other rappers' arguments for thug life. Don't do what he says, kids, and don't do what he does, because you can't. Just stay in school. Really. I mean it. A