I was a big hip hop fan especially DMX ( love the lyrics in party up, "ya wack ya twisted ya girls a hoe"), Nas, redman, naughty by nature, ghostface killer the list goes on an on
Hearing Public Enemy for the first time twenty four years ago was like a bomb going off in my mind. I already loved stuff like The Message and White Lines but this was incendiary. The next two:
were even better and bestride the whole genre even to this day, for me.
Since then I've been into Nas, Wu-Tang, Cypress Hill, NWA, The Roots, Outkast, and so on but I've drifted away from the genre somewhat lately. Much of it seems tired and uninspired, rehashing and reworking (which, though it is an integral part of the genre, needs to be done creatively) and the strident materialism and posturing (again, integral, I suppose) irritates me too often these days. Basically, I'm just getting too old, I think! I tend to look to the seventies and sixties for my black music now.
I been down since day one! Used to listen to Bushwick Bill etc even before I knew what half the stuff meant lol! Bit of a controversial one but quite enjoying this:
I love NWA, even if a great deal of it was unpc. They pretty much originated gangsta rap (unless some aficionado knows otherwise) so it wasn't like they lacked originality. Nor was it there fault when everyone copied them for the next two decades.
But as a counter to all that gangsta macho **** - I present the Pharcyde. When everyone was boating about ****ing hundreds of bitches and selling drugs and doing drive bys, they were dropping lyrics like this.