As a diehard hip-hop kid, I’ve spent a good bit of my life defending rap lyrics. I personally find rap songs hilarious, insightful, and more true to life than the lyrics in any other genre of music. But sometimes the racists are right and rap is just impossible to defend. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the songs on this list, but if the KKK was formed based on solely on the lyrical content of these tracks, I’d kinda see their point.
N.W.A. FUCK THE POLICE Yes, police brutality is a huge problem, especially here in Austin, where we have a police murder rate that puts the LAPD to shame. And while this song is a classic, it’s also retarded. Basically, Cube/Ren/Easy claim that they’re being unfairly confronted by police officers while they are out on the streets murdering police officers. Umm…pick one route and go with it, dudes. Either you’re unfairly targeted by the police or you’re out on the grind killing cops randomly. You can’t have it both ways. Because, honestly, if you’re just running around shooting at cops, I’d be much happier if you were in jail. Don’t get me wrong, if cops are racially profiling you and assaulting you on routine traffic stops, then I’m on your side. But if you’re riding around blasting Uzi rounds at police cars just because you don’t like them, then yeah, I’m perfectly okay with the police locking you up. And if the cops have to beat you up to accomplish that, fuck it. I’m entirely okay with that situation.
Master P GHETTO D Know what? There’s no way Master P had the time to sell dope at this stage, what with him running No Limit and putting out eight discs a year like he was in the mid-1990s. But this one makes the list simply because it spells out the recipe for making crack. And you’d better believe that I wrote that shit down when I was 14, because I thought that shit was gangsta as fuck. And when my mom found my crack recipe, guess who she blamed? If your guess was rap music, you’re really good at guessing the reactions of moms.
Bone Thugz N Harmony ft 2Pac THUG LOVE Bone was my favorite group in junior high. I thought that they made perfect tracks and albums that clicked from start to finish. But it’s hard to hear Bizzy and Krazy and the rest rap this maniacally without getting a tad bit concerned about all the terrible shit that they’re saying. The worst comes when Pac spits the lines “I had to catch a plane to Cleveland late last evening/To help my niggas clean up some niggas no longer breathin’.” Yes, that’s a killer line, and most of this song I can still quote right off the dome to this day. But Jesus, those sort of lines do a lot more to justify Christian’s concerns that hip-hop is about nothing more than murder than they do to confirm the idea that 2Pac was some sort of warrior poet. The constant shotgun blasts that serve as the backing track are no help.
Clipse VIRGINIA My god, has there ever been another song that sounds like pushing cocaine than this one? Also, the rhymes themselves are pretty fucking sinister. “In Virginia we smirked at the Simpson trial.../Most of my partners be feeling like O.J./Beat murder like that shit is okay.” Fuck, that’s some cold-blooded shit. Coupled with the fact that Clipse fills other songs with lyrics like “I ain’t spent one rap dollar in a year” that imply that the Thornton brothers actually sell coke on the real real, I totally believe that these guys have spent a good deal of time with the scales and baggies and maybe with the pistols too. I certainly believe that they miss Shampoo’s grams. That much is for sure. Still, the song is an utter classic.
Ghostface Killah KILO Okay, even more than the above, this song is way more drug dealer friendly, even though it’s incredibly unlikely that Ghost was touching packages of the raw at this stage in his rap career. But the fact that he calls out the names of coke vials and opens the song with an intro about being so high that he wants to fuck Catwoman lend this track to some implied criminal behavior. At least enough to make my grandma shit her pants in fear of young black people, which is really what this list is all about. Despite the fact that this is the best cocaine song in the history of ever, it also does nothing to smooth over race relations.
ScarfaceMURDER BY REASON OF INSANITY Really, everything off Mr. Scarface Is Back could qualify for inclusion here, as it’s one of the most terrifying records ever made (btw – it’s also one of the best rap albums of all time). But this song earns its status for the lyrics “My dad said always look a man in the eye before you kill him.” That’s some of the sickest shit in gangsta rap history. And yeah, I get that it’s only Scarface being Scarface, that he’s laying out these ill rhymes about shit that’s going on in the ghetto in concise storytelling to horrify an audience that is entrenched in the sad saga of such a world while throwing bones towards a secondary audience that loves to be teased in a horror movie sort of way (which was always Scarface’s greatest strength), but this track makes even me shudder. If anyone listened to this song and didn’t roll their windows up afterwards when they rolled through a shitty neighborhood, they’d be fucking crazy. This is the sort of song that makes black people scared of black people.
Ludacris MOVE BITCH For one, the fact that Luda can’t even spell his name correctly only helps reinforce racist ideas that all black people are illiterate. The song itself also confirms the scary black man concept that states that niggas are only out to fuck bitches and then toss them to the curb. Acey and the rest of the sensitive backpack rappers can do their best to add romanticism to hip-hop, but when dudes like Luda, Mystikal, and Juvenile made millions screaming at bitches to back that ass up, shake that ass, and then move out the way, all that white mom’s hear is the worst racial stereotypes confirmed. Yeah, all those songs are fucking jamz, but they hurt more than they help.
Notorious BIG GIMME THE LOOT Sick song with a sick beat and sick rhymes. But all the mainstream heard here was straight sickness. “I wouldn’t give a fuck if you’re pregnant/Gimme the baby ring/And the #1 mom pendant.” There’s a lot of robbery lyrics in rap that I’ll let slide, but sticking up pregnant women is more than a little heartless. Eddie Izzard has a joke about how the world was fine with Hitler murdering his own countrymen, but once he stepped out of that everyone had to put a stop to him. Yo, Biggie, people feel the same way about robbing pregnant women. That’s just too fucked up to stand.
Plastic Little ft Spank Rock NOW I HOLLER A huge part of why people love rap is because it’s smutty and sexual in a way that most other genres of music shy away from. For the most part, listeners love when rappers talk about the erogenous aspects of life, like girls in tight clothing dancing seductively or dudes getting so hard that they’re about to bust a nut in the club. We can all relate to that. But no one other than complete pieces of shit can relate to “I cum inside you/And if you get pregnant, fuck you/The baby’s you’re fucking problem.” It’s lines like that lead to Republicans saying shit like that Welfare is a scam. Just to note – rap works when it entices girls to dance and fuck; it doesn’t work when it actively insults them for dancing and fucking. Hey, rappers, keep that formula in mind.
DMX RUFF RYDERS ANTHEM Is there a better debut in rap history than DMX’s here? Probably not, and that’s even considering Snoop’s work on The Chronic. As good as the Dogg killed it there, DMX is utterly perfect on his introductory single. But my god is this song gruesomely vile. It opens with a declaration to murder bitches (“snitches” in the edited version below, but is that really any better?), then he advises all listeners to cap any witnesses as well. The fact that he also refers to himself and his homies as “apes” doesn’t cool racial tensions in any way/shape/form. By my count, DMX kills about ten people in this song, and then he ends the track by proclaiming that we all “Try to keep your minds/On getting pussy and crime.” The fact that this is followed by several seconds of machine gun blast isn’t particularly savory either.
