Pre-Introduction Introduction:
This is the introduction to the top 100 Hip Hop Jamz list me and the dude Raven Mack along with our crack team of Rapologists have been working on for like six months. If everything goes smoothly and we keep our writing game up, there should be at least a couple updates every week. Number 100 should be posted within the next 24 hours. This will also see some sort of print form at one time or another, and I'll drop info on how you can get that once it happens. Comments and disagreements are welcome and appreicated.
Introduction
Raven Mack: I am Raven Mack, but you know that. This here idiotic project was born from the completely marketable and perfectly awesome phrase EXPERT WHITEBOY ANALYSIS, which me and Mike Dikk created all by ourselves with no help from any black dudes, because me and Mike, both being white guys who get into hip hop a whole lot, recognize the inherent hilarity of white dudes try to out unwhite each other when it comes to be tru to the hip hop.
This comedy is now expressed on the telebisions too, as there's some ultra-real reality show about white rappers on some white-ass cable channel, where white rappers are forced to eat hot wings in the Bronx and write their names on subways discreetly and show and prove just how tru they really are. I think this is an MC Serch project, and he is the go-between, the ultra-down non-whitest of white rappers who is taking these rounded-up aspiring white rappers to hold their hand on a little walk through the ghetto birthplace of tha rill shit. I do not care much for that MC Serch, mostly because I remember some interview a long time back, probably in The Source, where he said he'd never sign a white rapper unless the rapper was better than him. That's some funny shit, because to me, Serch was the comical goofy-assed half of 3rd Bass, with his stupid Kid-n-Play hair and algebra teacher glasses. Pete Nice was a guy who was not afraid to be his white self and still pimp a nice suit and throw down a nice rhyme, without reverse step-n-fetchin' for the hip hop audience, which ironically enough is mostly white.
Well, anyways, apparently this Sage Francis rapper made a long-winded and ultimately right-on response about how full of shit MC Serch was for thinking one was not allowed to be a white rapper without having licked black assholes in dingy alleys or rocking shit that black people who will never go to college will respect. (That is a tricky thing for the white person who is ultimately down with hip hop, because approval from college-educated black people is not true approval of black people, because higher education is a white-owned industry, and thus not tha rill shit.) Sage made some good points, except I also hate him too because he is one of those academic termpaper rappers who will rhythmically explain the Illuminati diametrics of psycho-social oppression IN EVERY FUCKIN' SONG HE WRITES! This goes over big on college campuses, but with white kids who like green bumper stickers during election years as opposed to the standard blue or red ones, and not with black kids in college, who again, are not real black people, at least not according to the white dude who's into hip hop mindframe.
I know this can be confusing, so let me just slow it down and explain my background with hip hop and how I'm more tru than everybody else who is white and down with it. I have always loved hip hop, from whenever I finally got around to getting into it, which was probably around the Rock Box era. My school was shut down in massive resistance back in the '60s, where black folks couldn't go to school, so my school was mad racial conscious, but all quiet-like about it. There was a private school that only allowed white people until I was in 10th grade, but I was always a public school fool, mostly because I came from a broke-ass family (SEE! That makes me more down, too, because tha rill shit is always made by broke asses.), but I played little league baseball at that private school because that was the only little league. My best friend was a black kid named Sterling (SEE!) back then, so much so teachers would call us by each other's name all the time by accident (AGAIN!), and he couldn't even play little league ball until we were both 10 when a second league started up, that actually allowed black kids to join, ironically enough called the Dixie Youth League. You being a modern person of naive thoughts might think this was like 1969 or some shit during civil rights stuff, but no... it was 1983. My schoolbus was nothing but black kids, with only five white kids on it, two of them being my younger sisters, and the other two being two fat chicks who lived down by the creek. So you see, I am more down than you could ever imagine, because I was around black people, and according to the hardcore MC Serch ultra-down philosophy, that makes me hip and acceptable.
Wait, there's a second aspect to being acceptable... I also have to be ashamed. There's this movie called Whiteboyz by chump-ass Danny Hoch where Danny Hoch the Brooklyn Jewish actor-comedian decides a great thing for him to do would be make a movie about how dumb he thinks white people from Iowa would be, using played-out midwest stereotypes to show how terrible wannabe gangsta rappers from Iowa are about using played-out stereotypes. At the end of the movie, the stupid wannabe gangsta rapper goes to Chicago and makes a fool of himself acting in a way he thinks makes him black, so he goes back home to community college and stops rhyming and starts writing poetry about how fucked-up white people are for oppressing other cultures. He has now transmogrified into an acceptable white dude, because he hates white dudes. And this is why I hate MC Serch and Sage Francis, as well as most of what other white people like in hip hop, which I usually determine using played-out stereotypes of white people.
This is called EXPERT WHITEBOY ANALYSIS, where me and Mike got four others dudes to sort of group compile the penultimate list of the greatest ever 100 Rap Jamz ever, except we could probably do this right now again and it would be completely different. We could do it a hundred times and probably have about forty songs that were on every list and that would probably be a better penultimate list, but that would take too long and really me and Mike are just using this as an excuse to write long-winded rants about stupid shit and talk about how awesome we think some things are, to try and trick you into thinking it's awesome as well. But each word of the EXPERT WHITEBOY ANALYSIS label has important meaning. So allow me to break it down, word by word...
EXPERT - used, because like I showed up above, every white dude who is into hip hop thinks he is the ultimate street professor of what the realest hip hop possibly could be. We are no exceptions, nor are the other people who made up our panel of six, although two of the panel were black dudes, though I think they're both college-educated black people, which means they're not real black people.
WHITEBOY - used because, in my experience, when black dudes want to refer to you in a friendly but distant way when they know you, they can't say "nigga" because, well, you're not black. It seems that "whiteboy" is a good replacement term. I have heard this often, where black sheetrock dudes who have their cousin come ask me and my boss for a job painting are overheard on the other side of the house saying, "Them whiteboys ain't gonna hire him," and this older black dude I used to work with and hang out with sometimes because he had marijuana and marijuana will make good friends of disparate individuals, he would introduce me to his "homies" (a term black people use for their friends) as a "whiteboy" he worked with. This would trigger understanding in them, I was white, which was obvious, but I was also okay, to an extent, because I wasn't a white man, which is mentally connected to The Man usually, but a whiteboy, which I guess means I'm cool but I could also grow into being a white man easily enough eventually, if I wanted to.
ANALYSIS - used because this list was worked on inside the internets, and the internets are well-known for their over-analysis of stupid shit, which is what makes people think it's some sort of information super-highway when actually it's just a bunch of ignorant shit presented in a nice, easy to read way that makes it seems like someone must be making perfect sense.
So there's your introduction to this list of the 100 grandest rapping compositions, and I hope you will find some new music that is old that moves you from reading this. And I also hope you will realize how much I know about rap music and how because of that, I am a more perfect form of modern white man... err... I mean whiteboy.
Mike Dikk: Although Raven and I joined forces for the same common goal, my motivation was slightly different. The term “Expert Whiteboy Analysis” to me is as much of a dig on ourselves as it is to all the other nerds out there that would never dare to be self-deprecating enough to say such a thing.
To put it bluntly, the internet has ruined everything. Don’t get me wrong, it’s done a lot of good. Possibly more good than bad, but the bad it has done is irreversible and kinda stings. The internet has managed to globalize everything you’ve ever loved while making it easily accessible to anyone who wants to put an ounce of effort into finding it. I’m glad people from all over can share the same fond memories of things I feel the same way about, but at the same time, the internet has globalized popular opinion to the point where people accept it as bible truth.
Up until last year, Hip-Hop was the biggest form of music out there, so a lot of Self Appointed Rap Scholars were borne out of it. Now I’m sure a lot of them are genuine, but a lot more are just some kids who read Ego Trip’s Book Of Rap Lists (Which I finally read for the first time a couple months ago, and I’m glad I finally did) and surfed the web for around a month then decided The Clipse were the best shit ever and that’s that. That’s the kind of Expert Whiteboy Analysis I fucking hate. I don’t need some smarmy assholes telling me what’s the haps on some kind of music I’ve been listening to since I was six.
That’s what’s wrong with white people, well one of the things at least. They discover something then feel the need to puff up their chests about it and prove to other white people that they know the most about that given thing. It’s annoying beyond belief and the internet has magnified it a million fold. It’s a well known fact that white people don’t have soul, and if you connect a white person to the soulless internet it’s like you have this crazy Voltron sized soul sucking cyborg monster that’s waving his giant robot dick around and pissing on everything you hold dear until you’re forced to turn your back on it because you don’t want to be wading around in robot piss trying to piece things back together.
I may not be right all of the time, but I hate being told I’m wrong by some anonymous machine. I don’t mean on actual science facts, I mean my own opinions. Where I grew up, people weren’t feeling Public Enemy after “Fear of a Black Planet”, but the Expert Whiteboy Internet Propaganda Machine will tell you different. They will tell you “Critical Beatdown” was the best LP from that era, but none of my real life flesh and blood friends from back then owned that record. It’s not like their opinions are any less valid than mine, but it’s like they’re trying to beat them into everyone on the internet so younger kids will grow up to think all of the same shit and never bother to discover things on their own because they don’t need to. It’s all fucked up, and this may not be the best top 100 list made for the Hip Hop Records, but I think it’s one of the most genuine, because it was made by people who actually love music, and for the most part, are as old as hip hop itself.
This is a list, so no doubt people will read it and think we are assholes, because that’s why lists are made. The list makers brag and the readers call bullshit. I’m not going to throw a titty attack if you don’t agree with it, because there’s a lot of parts I don’t agree with, but I feel good knowing the people who helped create it stand by their choices and aren’t a bunch of little ankle biters who just got into rap music once Aesop Rock hit their dorms. No offense to Aesop Rock, I just really don’t know who the current rapper that is getting college bros into hip hop is these days. Maybe it’s Atmosphere? Who the Hell cares.
Since Raven shared his real life Hard Knock Life back story with you, I figure I should do the same so I’m not fakin’ the funk. Usually this isn’t something I would do because people like to call bullshit on stuff like this, and I normally don’t feel the need to explain my real life or music background to nameless faces, but I’m trying to do this thing on the up and up so I can become famous like every other douche on the internet.
I grew up in a very unsavory part of Connecticut called Bridgeport. I know it’s hard to believe there are unsavory parts of Connecticut, but there is. There was a black kid (Tha rill shit) that lived across the street from me named Kenny. He was a bit older but he quickly became my best friend.
At that time, Rap was slowly infiltrating MTV and the radio. You would see all those old videos like ‘Rapper’s Delight’, ‘The Message’ & ‘Walk This Way’, but there wasn’t ‘YO! MTV Raps’ or anything yet. I thought that stuff was cool, but it’s not like I became obsessed overnight.
Kenny had a lot of older brothers and sisters, and one of them was some sort of a DJ, so he had a lot of records that I would have never gotten a chance to hear on MTV or the radio. Kenny would always play them for me, and the first one I got really into was Funkmaster Wizard Wiz’s “Bellvue Patient”. It’s not a classic by any means, but it’s straight up potty humor and 6 or 7 year old me thought it was the most brilliant music ever made. Who knew you could talk about shitty diapers and getting your dick stuck in an elevator on a record?!?! Now think about that. He could have easily played me some Dr. Dimento type shit and I would have grown up to be some kind of fat creep living in my mom’s basement listening to John Valby bootlegs, but luckily that “Bellvue Patient” stuck with me.
Shortly after, I heard the ‘The Show/La Di Da Di’ 12” and that was that. Once we got old enough to go to the store and buy stuff, Kenny and I would buy any tape that sounded good and we’d do all the dumb shit kids do together, like play the records and record ourselves talking over them like radio DJs, and making pause tapes or writing our own horrible raps to rap over instrumentals.
The whole me being a whiteboy thing kind of went over my head. Like, I knew we obviously looked different, but I was so young it never dawned on me that I was supposed to be listening to heavy metal or whatever, since I grew up in an area where everyone listened to rap music. So until I was about ten, I thought it was normal whiteboy behavior. Then I kind of discovered I was a bit weird for liking what I liked, but I didn’t really care.
Honestly, I’ve always been kind of bummed out that it took me until around the age of 15 or 16 to really get into other music besides rap. I don’t really regret it, but I love music. Not just rap, so I feel I missed out on a lot. This isn’t the Wonder Years though, so I think this is enough information for the anonymous reader to digest so they can feel comfortable with me telling them what’s what with the hip hop music.
Before you go onto the actual weird-ass list, and this is completely sincere and 100% no bullshit, I’d like to thank the following people, things and their music for helping me love Hip Hop like it was a woman with soft enormous breasts: Funk Master Wizard Wiz, Kenny Perry and his family wherever they may be these days, Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh, My Mom for never telling me I was a weirdo for wanting to listen to rap, The Skinny Boys, The Source Magazine before it went to shit. Rap Pages in all it’s typo’d glory, EPMD & Stezo, Wu-Tang Clan, Ultramagnetic and Kool Keith, and most definitely Prince Paul.
Download: Funkmaster Wizard Wiz - Bellvue Patient
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