This was the closest we could get our staff to at least sort of agreeing.
Now that we’ve reached the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, we wanted to celebrate the greatest rappers of all time.
Ranking musicians is an impossible task, of course, because everyone brings their own criteria and preferences. For example, we recently tried to rank the greatest American rock bands, and we realized there was no perfect science.
Music isn’t like sports. There aren’t definitive stats we can mention in order to demonstrate why someone is better than someone else. Rap is so much more about the way something makes you feel, which makes it very hard to judge and quantify.
But we still did our best to try and answer some important questions.
How exactly does one define greatness? Is it your personal favorite rapper, or is it more based on accomplishments and influence? How much do we factor technical ability relative to storytelling? What weight is given to flow compared to popularity? We all had our own definitions so we had to really just trust our gut here.
What about collectives? Rap groups (e.g. Wu-Tang Clan, A Tribe Called Quest, The Beastie Boys, N.W.A., Public Enemy, Run D.M.C., Salt-N-Pepa, etc.) were excluded from this list. We will revisit this at a later date.
Here was our methodology: Our staff was allowed to cast ten votes for any rapper, dead or alive. We were asked to rank each rapper from No. 1 overall to No. 10 overall. Rappers that got first-place votes from a staffer received ten points, rappers that got second-place votes received nine points (and so on … until rappers that got tenth-place votes earned one).
We calculated the results and brought them to you, the reader. This article is, by nature, imperfect. This list missed a lot of the best rappers to ever touch a microphone.
Art is subjective, as we know. But this was the closest we could get our staff to at least sort of agreeing.
We’ve compiled the 10 best songs from athletes that you need to hear today. I’ll be completely transparent at the top — “best” is mostly subjective. While most of these songs are great, a few are admittedly bad. But it’s the shock value of them that reels you in.
And these aren’t songs from established rappers turned athletes like Master P and J Cole. Including them would be cheating.
These are the folks who you wouldn’t think would have songs. But here we are listening to them in our headphones. There’s plenty to choose from here.
So, without further ado, let’s dig in.
WARNING: There is NSFW language included in the videos below
Cheers to Hip-Hop’s 50th anniversary and its incredible relationship with the sports world.
This is the online version of our daily newsletter, The Morning Win. Subscribe to get irreverent and incisive sports stories, delivered to your mailbox every morning. Here’s Mike Sykes.
It all started on Aug. 11, 1973. A group of kids were having a back-to-school bash in the basement of their apartment complex in the Bronx. The tunes were set in motion by the legend we know today as DJ Kool Herc.
He had the brilliant idea of playing the percussive breaks from people’s favorite songs back-to-back-to-back to keep the vibes flowing. He’d scratch the records on the turntables of his enormous sound system and use the mixer to switch between his songs.
That, folks, is widely regarded as the night hip-hop was born. It started in that Bronx basement 50 years ago, but now it’s spread out across the globe and taken multiple cultures and industries by storm.
Yes, the sports world is included in that.
From the music you hear at your local park on someone’s speaker during a pick-up game to the music blasted from the jumbotron speakers in your favorite team’s home arena, hip-hop is everywhere in the sports world.
That’s been the case for decades. Essentially, for as long as the genre has existed, the music has had a presence in sports. It blew up in the 90s as hip-hop entered the mainstream zeitgeist and has only grown more since. The marriage between the two has been a beautiful one.
But it’s not just the songs that this beautiful marriage between these two worlds has produced for us. They also share their talent. As the legend Lil Wayne once said, “Athletes wanna be rappers, rappers wanna be athletes.” Sometimes, that mix actually works out.
He’s certainly the most prominent example, but there are plenty of other athletes who gave music a shot. Damian Lillard is the example now. But, before him, you had the likes of Deion Sanders, Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, Kevin Durant, LeBron James and so many more who laid a verse down on wax.
Was it always good? Absolutely not. But it was always fun to at least hear your favorite athletes trying.
All of these super-talented folks having all of these amazing opportunities is a direct result of the beautiful union we have between hip-hop and sports. The effortless fusion of these two cultures is something we rarely see, but it makes complete sense.
Athletes are people, too. And hip-hop is all about the people. It imprinted on so many of us. The music raised us up. It taught us how to be cool, how to make friends and how to talk to people. It taught us rejection and failure, but it also taught us how to love and be loved. Most importantly, it never left us. It always connected with us.
It doesn’t matter who you are. Hip-hop will always accept you. You’re always welcome to the party, no matter where you come from. That’s the beauty of it all.
Happy birthday, hip-hop. Thank you for everything.
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The 2023 Grammys have come and gone, leaving everyone with plenty of Beyoncé takes, new Ben Affleck memes and stellar performances to rewatch over and over again.
The night’s biggest moments featured Beyoncé both becoming the most-decorated artist in Grammy history and controversially losing the Best Album honor for a fourth time. Queen Bey was also late to the show because she was stuck in Los Angeles traffic.
But this? Slicked back mullet? This is definitely a new one.
That’s right. The Boy popped out here looking like Billy Dee Williams’ Lando Calrissian — Star Wars fans, you’ll get that reference. It’s very fitting that he took this picture at a casino. He definitely belongs there with this hair.
Everyone liked Beyoncé’s oontz a bit better than Drake’s, but it’s all fun
Man. 2022 has been the year of unexpected stuff coming back into pop culture. Baggy clothes, Air Jordan 2s, the Tootsie Roll. We’re living in wild times, y’all.
Now, the “oontz, oontz” music is back in full effect, too.
Y’all know what I’m talking about. House music. Club music. The music that sounds like somebody just added a bunch of synths and some piano keys to your heartbeat after you just had a mean cardio session at the gym for the first time in 3 months.
That’s what our music this summer is going to sound like thanks to Beyoncé and Drake. The two pop stars dropped music over the last few days featuring that signature sound and it was pretty shocking.
Drake dropped an entire album called Honestly, Nevermind featuring 13 tracks of all the oontz.
Then, heading into Tuesday night, Beyoncé dropped a new single called “Break My Soul” from her new album coming in late July. The vibes were immaculate. It featured that oontz with some signature New Orleans bounce and even had a Big Freedia feature.
Pushin’ 🅿 is all the rage these days on the internet. Or, at least, it’s trying to be, anyway.
Most people have no idea what it means or where it even comes from. They’ve only seen blue parking sign emojis on the internet everywhere and are trying to figure out what is going on.
If that’s you —and it definitely is because that’s why you clicked this — don’t be embarrassed. You’re not alone. There are a lot of people who have no idea what P is nor do they know how to keep it P.
But don’t worry. That’s why you’ve got me. I’m here to fill you in. You’re welcome.
Naturally, with the two of them releasing albums within the same week of one another, there were almost certainly more shots between the two of them coming.
Drake threw plenty of them at West on Certified Lover Boywith tracks like “7 AM on Bridle Path” and “No Friends in the Industry.”
But it seems Kanye actually left his biggest shot at Drake off of his album, Donda.
On a track called “Life of the Party” featuring Andre 3000, West absolutely takes it to Drake and a few other folks he, apparently, has a little problem with.
The best part? We only know this track exists because, well, Drake leaked it himself.
On OvO Sound 42 (Drake radio show) .. he leaked a new song of his called “Mention Me”, a Playboi Carti song which he’s featured on and also Kanye West ft Andre 3000 – Life Of The Party (a song where Kanye West is claiming GD and dissing him on)
That’s right, folks. Drake’s new album is officially here. It dropped in the wee hours of the morning on Friday and some people are already stamping it as album of the year.
While it’s a little too early for that, the project does seem to be solid. There’s a lot of R&B Drake on it, which is what everyone expects of an album named Certified Lover Boy.
But don’t get it twisted — there are definitely some bars in it for those of us who lean toward the hardcore hip-hop Drake. And, as we usually get with Drake, many of them are sports adjacent.
We’re just a few hours away from the actual release of the album now and people everywhere are excited. It feels like this could be a really good one. Not only because, well, it’s Drake. But also because the feature list seems pretty awesome.
There have been billboards popping up in various cities across the country revealing some of the artists who we’ll see on the album. And there are some exciting names included.
