Category: #RushHourRap

#RushHourRap – Souls Of Mischief – 93 ‘Til Infinity

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Not to sound like an old head, but this song is a classic from back when rap was rap. Even if you don’t know this song, you for sure recognize the beat as it’s been sampled by everyone from J. Cole on The Warmup to Rick Ross on Thug Cry to Big K.R.I.T. on Somedayz to even Tyga on ’09 Until. EVERYONE got on this beat. It was even ranked No. 93 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Hip Hop Songs of All Time.

As I was saying the other day, one of my favorite elements of rap is how artists find old, obscure songs and chop them up into something else entirely. This beat was originally sampled from a 1970’s jazz track 

“A-Plus’s flip is one of the most infamous ever, looping two different parts of the Cobham song to layer over each other. With the perfect truncation of sound and a little pitch increase, it’s up there with Havoc’s ‘Shook Ones Pt. II’ and RZA’s ‘Verbal Intercourse’ samples as one of the craziest flips of all time.” – TheBoomBox.com

Absolutely bananas.

If you really want to go down the YouTube rabbit hole of music inspiring music, check out this old video of Kanye, Just Blaze, and John Mayer all chopping it up over the 93 ‘Til Infinity beat.

Who do you think we need to feature on Rush Hour Rap? Tweet us @The300sBoston and use the hashtag #RushHourRap to send us what you want to hear in the AM.

#RushHourRap – Clear Soul Forces – Get No Better

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A song that dropped back in 2012 and is one I only stumbled onto after it was used on Toucher and Rich as a bed coming back from commercial. Love the old school Mos Def/Talib Kweli sound and style. But this is what I love about hip hop man, this beat just sounded familiar to me so I was trying to track down the sample and it led me to this artist/producer Alien Folk Urban Aire / Kankick, which led me to the original sampling of this Latin jazz artist, Airto. Unreal. Thats exactly why Kanye will forever be one of the best producers to ever lay down a beat. The samples the man was able to repurpose are just absurd.

It would seem like these guys never really popped mainstream, but as we all know you can make a hell of a living as an indie rapper these days. So I may be nearly a decade late on these guys, but better late than never.

#RushHourRap – Kid Cudi ft. Eminem – The Adventures of Moon Man and Slim Shady

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So theres really not much of a rush hour these days as time is a flat circle during the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t blast some new #RushHourRap from your couch at 8 am. Well after a rough couple of years dealing with personal issues, Kid Cudi is back and he’s brought the one and only Eminem with him. This is a catchy track and a lyrically impressive song from Marshall. Em does more than just play with pronunciations as he plays with his tempo, which will have you rewinding the song a few times just to make sure you caught every line.

#RushHourRap – NF – The Search

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NF is someone that I stumbled onto last year and is kind of a throwback to the underground rap days. Listening to this guy rap is like reading someone’s diary without any filter, which is refreshing in this era of mumble rappers. Back in college I used to scour HotNewHipHop for the up and comers, but given that I’m a 30-year-old guy with a 9-5 these days I was a little late to the party on NF. With four albums released since 2015 he’s been on a tear dropping music and even hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, but the first time I saw him really hit mainstream was on an ESPN college football commercial last summer.

#RushHourRap – 16 Years Ago Today Kanye West Released The College Dropout

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Say what you will about Kanye West and all the drama around him over the years, but you cannot deny the man put out some of the best rap music ever made early in his career. Kanye’s debut album The College Dropout alone featured mega hits like Through the Wire, Slow Jamz, Jesus Walks, and All Falls Down. Those are just the radio hits though.

If you haven’t listened to this album in a while, do yourself a favor and go back and listen to Spaceship, Never Let Me Down (ft. Jay Z), Get Em High (ft. Talib Kwelli and Common), Breathe In Breathe Out (ft. Ludacris) just to name a few. Thats basically the entire album, and I didn’t even mention New Workout Plan.

Kanye is without a doubt the most successful producer turned rapper after spending years mixing beats for guys like Jay-Z. Watching a young Ye at work in the studio really is incredible to see. Just look at Jay’s face when he first hears some of these beats that would later go on The Black Album. That’s inspiring man.

One of my all-time favorite Kanye West stories comes from the Tim Ferris Show when Jamie Foxx told the story of how Slow Jamz came together:

Also, in things I learned today is that the bear mascot that Kanye had become synonomous with over the years for incorporating into several album covers, was a completely unplanned thing.

#RushHourRap – On This Day 17 Years Ago 50 Cent Released Get Rich Or Die Tryin’

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For a white kid from the burbs, this album was like being transported to another world. I love Jay-Z, but was probably just a little too young to really understand what The Blueprint was about when it was released. When Curtis Jackson came out of nowhere in 2003, co-signed by Eminem, he took off like a rocket because he was authentic with a wild origin story to back him. In what is nearly an urban myth at this point, 50 cent was shot 9 times and lived to tell the tale.

There were FIVE singles from his debut album, three of which I’ve heard on the radio within the last week – 17 years after their release. Get Rich or Die Tryin’ had one of the greatest B-sides of an album I can remember too.  What Up Gangsta, Patiently Waiting, High All the Time, Heat, Like My Style, Don’t Push Me, Life’s On the Line are all still bangers to this day. I feel like I forgot about a lot of these early 2000s albums once they stopped putting CD players in cars. I have like 50 CDs in my trunk with no way to play them. Damn technology.

Hey Google, play 50 Cent radio!

#RushHourRap – Eminem – Darkness

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Em dropped his new album “Music to Be Murdered By” in the middle of the night a couple weeks back and it definitely shows that Shady’ still got the juice as it hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. There aren’t any instant classic singles here nor are there many radio friendly tracks, but there is a ton of elite rapping. Eminem shows off his unmatched lyrical dexterity while recruiting some big names to fill out the album’s 20 songs. Ed Sheeran returns for his second Eminem collab on “Those Kinda Nights,” he brings out old friend Royce Da 5’9″ for a few songs, as well as the likes of Skylar Gray, Anderson .Paak, Q-Tip, Joell Ortiz and more. The song everyone is going to remember from this album though is the incredibly morbid track “Darkness” where Em raps from the perspective of the Las Vegas mass shooter. The song is more “Encore” than “The Eminem Show” and whether it’s profound or tasteless is up for debate, but it’s definitely an engrossing track that samples Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence.”

#RushHourRap – Logic – Homicide ft. Eminem (video)

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I don’t know what kind of obscure demographic/psychographic research you have to cross into as a fan of watching YouTube music videos, Rap, Logic, and The Sandlot…but shit thats me. Either way, the song is fire flames, but this music video shouldn’t work. It looks like a drunk MadLib on paper. So we’re going to have a music video that features zero artists performing with Squints from the Sandlot rapping and Eminem being played by Chris D’Elia while he raps in a murder cabin. 

That sounds like someone watched Em’s 3 AM video while high and then tried to recreate it for a student film with C list actors, but IT WORKS. Doesn’t hurt that the song bangs and oh ya Squints is a dead fucking ringer for Logic. Like Bobby might want to keep Squints on retainer for mall autograph sessions or to be his fall guy.

#RushHourRap – Lupe Fiasco – Switch

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I was in my daily cocoon of sadness sitting in soul crushing traffic this morning when I opened up YouTube and went down the Lupe Fiasco rabbit hole. It wasn’t long before I came back to the 2006 mixtape heater “Switch.” In addition to the 10,000 pound bass booming throughout, this song is incredibly clever and shows just how slick Lupe was back in the day. Lupe himself even describes the song as “a little science experiment” as he literally switches back and forth from subject matter without missing a beat.

In the song Switch, Lupe runs an “Experiment” during which he lays out for the listeners several different facets or niches that all rappers tend to fall into. Every time the background says “Switch”, Lupe will change the flow, meter, cadence, vocab, and topic to correspond to another niche of rap. – Genius

So turn up your factory ass system or pop in your headphones and let this Lupe classic bang.

#RushHourRap – Logic ft. Eminem – Homicide

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Logic + Eminem. Two of my favorite artists of all time jump on the same track to put together an absolutely hectic flurry of rhymes. And the beat bangs too. Sometimes with tracks like this you get one or the other. Incredible flow and wordplay, but a lackluster beat. Well Bobby Tarantino came hard here and Marshall Mathers came in to close it out. What I’d give to see these two tour together. Hey, Logic did open for Em at a recent show in Hawaii so it could happen.