50 hip-hop artists share 50 songs they love

“When we heard ‘The Message,’ you smelled the Bronx, New York, you tasted what was going on. It was that vivid to you. ‘6 ’N the Mornin’’ was like, ‘Oh, that’s what’s going on the West Coast?’” Ed Lover recalls. “Nobody knew it. Then N.W.A. came; Ice-T opened the door for them to do what they do. That’s what I was talking about. I can smell it. I can feel it. I can taste it. It was real. And a lot of people around the country were going through the same thing, so they could smell it and feel it and taste it too. It was no bragging rap. It was reality rap.”

Wonder Mike, Master Gee and Big Bank Hank — the latter with rhymes penned by the Cold Crush Brothers’ Grandmaster Caz — shook up the world with hip-hop’s first radio-friendly smash hit. The very first words — “I said a-hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip-hip-hop” — caught on, and the song, set to the bass line of Chic’s “Good Times,” was exactly what the title promised: a delight.

“That was a monumental song, for everyone,” Kurtis Blow said. “I remember that summer of ’79, every car driving up the block, every bus, every train, every boombox, every radio station was playing that song.”

It inspired Blow to shop “Christmas Rappin’,” which he considers the fourth hip-hop record ever made. For countless other artists, “Rapper’s Delight” was the moment they realized hip-hop had no limits.

“It got us to a point where we got serious about making records,” Scorpio of the Furious Five said. “We were used to doing parties for four hours and didn’t want to condense that to four minutes.”

When Fat Joe was a teen, he first heard the song in which Biz Markie describes changes in attitude toward him and his friends after success. “It’s never changed. My favorite hip-hop song has never changed for the last 40 years,” he says. “Me growing up in the Bronx, growing up with nothing, not having much to eat, not having anything in reference to fly clothes, or anything like that, it was the soundtrack to my life. I worked hard to get money, and come up, and everybody who made fun of me, I would play this song, ‘Vapors,’ for them.”

“I’m going with De La Soul’s ‘Me, Myself and I,’” Mike D says, noting the song is tied with Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” as his all-time favorite. When the Beastie Boys were working on “Paul’s Boutique,” they listened to an advance copy of the De La Soul record, Mike D recalled. “There was this exhilarating feeling. Our minds were blown. And at the same time, we were enraged with jealousy,” he says, laughing. “Because we felt like we had been working on ‘Paul’s Boutique’ at that point for months and months, or even years at that point, and especially with De La Soul, we’re like, ‘These guys get it. This is what we wanted to do!’”

“[‘Me, Myself and I’ producer] Prince Paul and De La showed the world what is possible when you can combine samples of musical genres from all over and make something that’s totally uniquely yours — and something that’s never been done before. It’s totally mind-blowing.”

Mike D also picked Run-DMC’s “Sucker M.C.’s.”

“I just love the vibration of that song,” Common says. “It just feels so hip-hop, so pure and raw. It has a certain high-quality level of artistry that I just feel hip-hop possesses. Anytime I heard it and hear it, it just makes me feel like I can do anything. And that’s what hip-hop really gave me. And that song embodies it.”

LL Cool J, like many artists we talked to for this project, says he loves the whole genre of hip-hop and found it hard to pin down one standout song. “My mood changes depending on what’s going on at that particular time. Sometimes I might be in a ‘Shook Ones’ mode, sometimes I might be in another mood.”

Bone Thugs-N-Harmony introduced a melodic style of tongue-twisting rapping when they broke through on “Thuggish Ruggish Bone,” but “Tha Crossroads” is held in high esteem for the way it tugs on the heartstrings. It’s “a song that’s about something that goes on every day and goes on for eternity, which is death and losing people,” Layzie Bone says of his group’s hit. “That song became brand-new for me when I lost my mom, so I connected with it again because of that process of life.” The song also reminds Jim Jones of a parent — his mother, Nancy, who is best known as Mama Jones on TV’s “Love & Hip-Hop.” “That’s me and my mother’s favorite song. We love to listen to it,” he says.

“I like Treach, how he came into the industry and created his own lane, his own rap style, making hip-hop anthems. But it’s not even like the biggest songs, the ‘Hip Hop Hoorays’ and all that. I’m talking about ‘Guard Your Grill’ and all of his deep songs,” Scorpio notes. “As a hip-hop head, sometimes you just get in that zone where you want to wild out, you want to be not politically correct. Treach is the one that does it for me.”

Apollo Brown recalls how, when he was in college at Michigan State with friend and fellow producer Bronze Nazareth, music store Sam Goody would open from midnight to 1 a.m. to sell the new releases that came out on Tuesdays. “We used to go every Monday to go get whatever we were going to get and get it before everybody else. So we went. We both grabbed ‘Supreme Clientele.’ And this was after hearing ‘Apollo Kids’ and ‘One.’ We’re like, ‘We’ve got to get this album. This album is going to be crazy.’ Got the album. As soon as ‘Nutmeg’ came on, we were like, ‘Yo, I can’t even finish walking back to my dorm room. I’ve got to lay right here on the grass.’ Literally laid right there in the grass, at 1 o’clock in the morning, and listened to this album. And I’ve never had that feeling about an album since, not even my own albums. It’s just that album right there for some reason, gave me this specific feeling that went through my bones and my body and my muscles and my hands and my veins and whatever that I’ve never been able to duplicate ever again. … I don’t even get that same feeling from [Black Moon’s] ‘Enta da Stage,’ even though that’s my favorite album of all time. There’s just a certain feeling that I got from ‘Supreme Clientele’ that I’ve never been able to duplicate. It’s crazy, man. But that’s what I’m always looking for. You know, people always talk about [how] they’re always chasing their first high.”

Brown also picked “Let Me Ride” by Dr. Dre.

Homeboy Sandman says he was 9 in 1989 and preparing to perform “I’m That Type of Guy,” the lead single from LL Cool J’s third album, at a summer-camp talent show. But after buying the maxi-single at Queens Center Mall, he ended up listening to “It Gets No Rougher” by accident. He was instantly hooked.

“Immediately I was like, ‘I’m not doing the other jam at all at the talent show,’” he says.

LL had the ability to make songs with wide appeal, such as “I Need Love,” Homeboy Sandman recalls. “But ‘It Gets No Rougher’ is a hard rap jam,” he said. “Just crazy, like ‘if anybody wants to try to out-rap me, let’s do it.’ ... And [LL] can do that with anybody. And when I heard “It Gets No Rougher,” I got so much juice that I scrapped doing “I’m That Type of Guy.” Immediately, he memorized the lyrics to “It Gets No Rougher.”

“And I killed the talent show,” he said.

Homeboy Sandman also picked “Fear Not of Man” by Mos Def.

Juvenile says the song marks the point when all his friends fell in love with hip-hop: “It was a song everyone could recite together. And it’s still like that. When it comes on, me and my wife, we put our BDP hats on and cut up.”

For Common, “it was influential in a way that introduced me to what being a vegetarian was. It made me see things in a different way or think about the fact that KRS was saying, ‘I don’t eat chicken or turkey or hamburger. ’Cause to me, that’s suicide, self-murder.’ That was a whole new concept to me. I grew up in Chicago, [where we eat] everything. To hear somebody say they’re not eating certain things and I’m like, ‘I wonder why.’ … He was going against all the stereotypes and just trying to raise the consciousness.”

Fat Joe recalls the initial punch of hearing this searing N.W.A. rebuke: “The first time I ever heard that song, it was just right in our faces, like ‘boom, this is what it is.’”

Greg Mack said he supports law enforcement but that he recognized the power that N.W.A. wielded by shining a light on what it felt was police injustice. “The thing about the way Ice Cube wrote that song and explained what was going on in the community and what we as Black men were dealing with, it was so on point,” he says. Mack said he would frequently get pulled over in his Cadillac with his wife or business acquaintances and get accused of being a pimp.

“When the movie ‘Straight Outta Compton’ came out, I had some sheriffs approach me. They weren’t very happy that I was portrayed in it because they don’t like N.W.A. But it’s because they didn’t really understand what was being said.”

Statik Selektah first heard the song, an extended metaphor about the state of hip-hop at the time, as it battled commercialism and other outside pressure, when he was young. “It just kind of tells my story a little bit, as far as when I fell in love with hip-hop around 10 years old,” he says. “Just all the emotions in it — the song is talking about a girl, but he’s talking about hip-hop.”

Statik also picked “Code of the Streets” by Gang Starr.

“That’s an inspiring song. It’s actually one of my alarm songs. I have a bunch of alarms that play when I get up, and the last song when it’s time to leave the house is that one. So I hear that song every day. … The hook helps me get up and get focused for the day. [Kweli] says, “This morning, I woke up. Feeling brand new, I jumped up. Feeling my highs, and my lows.”

Big Tigger also picked “Headbanger” by EPMD featuring Redman and K-Solo, and “Time 4 Sum Aksion” by Redman.

The beauty of the song — in which Ice Cube depicts a rare day in the ’hood in which everything breaks his way — is in its clarity, Dom Kennedy says. “Great storytelling. Easy for me to remember, and captivating,” he said. “It’s not stuff that has to grow on you: The first time you heard it, it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s it right there.’ … These are the types of songs that are unforgettable in the rap genre.”

Kennedy also picked “Around the Way Girl” by LL Cool J.

“It’s so representative of the Bay,” P-Lo says. “You can go anywhere, and you can drop ‘Blow the Whistle,’ and it’s just going to be a great time.” P-Lo also feels strongly about “Burn Rubber,” another song by Too $hort: “I always say, like, when it’s my time to go, I would want my casket to be dropped to ‘Burn Rubber.’”

Ludacris credits the song — featuring LL’s bold and forcefully delivered braggadocio — with inspiring him. “I was in fourth grade and I knew every word of that record,” he says. “So that’s what defines hip-hop for me. It made me want to do what I’m doing, and if it weren’t for that record, I can’t say I’ll be where I’m at.”

“Remember when Michael Jackson came out with ‘Bad’ and it was a big thing for pop artists?” Layzie Bone asks. “LL Cool J had the wherewithal to do it as a rapper. He helped put rap on the map.”

CL Smooth’s ode to family and his recently deceased friend Trouble T Roy works perfectly over Pete Rock’s evocative use of jazz samples and hip-hop drums. Dante Ross, the legendary A&R man and producer, reflects on both that song and a 1991 track by Gang Starr.

“Certainly ‘Just to Get a Rep’ by Gang Starr, something about the Jean-Jacques Perrey sample was so soulful and emotional, and rap to me didn’t necessarily have that feel to it at that point,” Ross says. “It was few and far between. It had a soul to it. It was almost like a blues record to me. I felt an emotion from it. The way Guru was rapping, it was an emotional record. Cerebral and emotional. Another version of that same kind of canon was ‘They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)’ by Pete Rock and CL Smooth, which completely blew me away when I heard it. It was so emotive and beautiful. … They are beautiful pieces of art, to me.”

Dante Ross also picked Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man.”

Daddy-O insists he prefers collective works to single songs, and the Port Arthur, Tex., duo’s third album “Ridin’ Dirty” does it for him. “That’s my favorite album ever, and Pimp C is my favorite MC,” Daddy-O said. “It’s ‘The Message’ on crack.” Whereas Melle Mel’s rhymes on the 1982 song are considered the prime example of hip-hop’s potential to be more than just party music, UGK’s work is an even deeper expedition into a gritty world. Pimp C’s production and Texas drawl and Bun B’s flow on “Murder” — which Daddy-O calls “unparalleled” — helped open ears across the hip-hop spectrum to a sound they’d grow to love.

Boogie Down Productions, Stetsasonic, Kool Moe Dee, MC Lyte, Doug E. Fresh, Just-Ice, Heavy D and Public Enemy teamed up as the Stop The Violence Movement for a “We Are the World”-style anthem disassociating hip-hop and violence.

“That record right there? Changed it for me,” DJ Slugo said. “I was like, ‘Oooh, that’s deep.’ At that particular time, people were blaming hip-hop for a lot of the violence. And for me, they were telling the story of the poverty in the neighborhood and the structural things they felt like the government was doing to the neighborhoods — bringing crack in — and I just liked the storytelling of the record. It ain’t just hip-hop; America itself is doing the self-destruction. It makes you think, what was the issue before hip-hop? That violence existed before hip-hop.”

DJ Slugo also picked “Stop the Violence” by Boogie Down Productions.

The album “didn’t have any big hits on it, but it’s the song I have to hear at least once a month. When I first heard it, it’s the song that made me think: ‘I can grow old to this. I can grow old with hip-hop,’” Chang says. “It really moved me. It’s about generations, it’s about community, it’s about family. It’s them telling their stories.

“It’s set to this music that, every time I hear it, I get really choked up, because I think about my family, my kids, and I think about people that have passed. The generations that are still coming, I want them to hear this song.”

Chang also picked “I Know You Got Soul” by Eric B. and Rakim.

“Because it’s the breakdown of the science of hip-hop,” Doug E. Fresh says when explaining this choice. “The skill level is unbelievable. The flows are unbelievable. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five are the foundation of it, and I think it’s the most incredible pass-of-the-mic style, which was the original style in hip-hop. And it’s the best that I’ve ever heard. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five is one of the best to ever do this.”

Mannie Fresh says that the triplets and drumrolls from the Kurtis Mantronik production hooked him, but it was the New Yorkers’ new use of the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer drum machine that blew him away. “He turned it into an instrument. … Now, [there are] so many people that’s doing that, turning the 808s up, the bass lines and all of that. He did that way, way back before it was even thought about.”

Large Professor produced A Tribe Called Quest’s “Keep it Rollin’,” and the Alchemist considers the track a “blueprint” for his own style. “The way the beat was made, and just the style and selection of samples that Large Professor used, where it sat on the album, him as a producer also rapping on a song and killing it on the third verse,” the Alchemist says. “It had a lot of effect on how I approached producing and also rap, and being able to do both.”

“‘I Ain’t Mad at Cha’ is a quintessential Black American story of change. And just life,” Mensa says. “He illustrates through these different perspectives of the story the relationship between Black men and incarceration, and relationships between Black men and Black women. And approaches the gigantic topic of change, you know, with just such confidence, nuance and relaxation.”

Mensa also picked 2Pac’s “Me Against the World.”

The song, through Big L’s trademark cleverness, explains a variety of hip-hop slang from the late ’90s. Flip loves hearing all the terms in “Ebonics,” which makes sense for a rapper who took the melting pot that is Houston and expressed that in his career by working with people from all rap fiefdoms. The group the Girll Codee remade “Ebonics” in 2021 with updated slang and explanations.

Lil’ Flip also picked “Anotha Day in tha Hood” by 8Ball & MJG.

“It was that Brooklyn anthem. You would see cats in the Latin Quarter lose their minds. You would see the ‘grimies’ … it would trigger something in them where they had to snatch chains. It just brought out that adrenaline, right from the opening drumroll.”

Run-DMC and Jam Master Jay “kicked the door open for everybody,” former “Yo! MTV Raps” host Ed Lover said, noting their ascent from “King of Rock” to “Raising Hell” to “Tougher Than Leather.” But it’s a song from the group’s 1983 debut album, with its boom-bap drums, guitar riff and crisp rhymes, that stood out as Parrish Smith ran through a list of memorable hip-hop classics. “I don’t think people talk about Run enough. … When you talk about what an MC is, the master of ceremonies, the person who controls the crowd, you have to mention Run,” says DoItAll of Lords of the Underground.

DoItAll showed love for a handful of classic artists but says the party-rocking drums, “Go Brooklyn” chant and sharp lyrics from Audio Two’s Milk Dee gave him a feeling he could not deny.

“The Audio Two, whenever I hear that, those drums, I think that’s probably one of the illest breaks in hip-hop,” he says. “‘Milk is chillin’, Giz is chillin’’ … who doesn’t know that?”

Public Enemy weaved its politically charged, pro-Black messages over production featuring a smorgasbord of sounds that matched the urgency of the MCs. “I’m a huge Public Enemy fan,” DJ Kool said. “I feel some type of way [about] Chuck and Flavor. … Anybody that knows anything about hip-hop knows [this song] takes you up here and back. It takes you through the roof with the Bomb Squad production. Lights out.”

“That’s the first song I learned,” Tobe Nwigwe said during the Essence Festival in New Orleans in July.

“That’s mine,” his wife, Martica, who was sitting next to him on the white couch in the press room, said immediately after.

“Oh, for real, that’s your favorite song too?” he said to her. “That’s the first song everybody learned. It was that good.”

This song transports Posdnuos back in time. “In that period of my life, I was still going to the Latin Quarter to see [KRS-One] perform,” he says. “This is before we were on, before we were even signed. It means so much to me because I can see him doing it live, and it was one of those songs when it came out, you could play it over and over again. He had so much confidence. It was him going up against the Juice Crew, and it showed so much of his style.”

Spicer raps for more than 15 minutes with no chorus or hook, breaking into a Dracula voice midway through, and recounting a story as Aladdin talking to his genie. “When I heard that,” Shante says, “I wanted to rhyme as long as he could, without having it written. And I knew I could.”

Phonte, a Greensboro, N.C., native, points to Willie D’s bars at the end of the song — which starts off with a reaction to Geffen Records refusing to work with Geto Boys but pushing Guns N’ Roses — as an example of how territorial rap can be:

We’re from the ... South / Now what was this ... about/ That we had to be from Cali or New York/ Anybody can make it that got heart.

“It was a call to action,” Phonte says. “… So hearing Willie D, hearing Geto Boys’ ‘We Can’t Be Stopped,’ him saying that line … really spoke to me, and it was like, ‘Yeah, it don’t matter where you from, you know, saying if you got the heart to do this, you can band against [people] from anywhere.’ And that was something that always resonated with me.”

Phonte also picked “Lost at Birth” by Public Enemy.

Tribe went on to put out more well-known hits such as “Electric Relaxation,” “Check the Rhime” and “Award Tour,” but Scarface went out on a limb with this song from the group’s debut album. Asked why he loved the song, Scarface simply responded: “That motherf---er’s jamming. … That’s how they do.”

“I’m talking the streets, you feel me? Hip-hop is urban. So if you’re from an urban community, it’s easy for you to relate to it, you know what I mean?” E-40 asks. “And that’s me, raised in an urban community. ‘Dope Fiend Beat,’ I was raised around dope fiends. I’m raised around D-boys [dealers]. That’s my memories.”

While many of the artists on this list are MCs, there would be no hip-hop without DJs to create, play and blend the music. And DJ Paul points to Jazzy Jeff as one of the best ever to mix tracks. “It was such a dope blend,” he says of “A Touch of Jazz.”

Big Boi and André 3000 achieved legendary status with their first four albums. OutKast’s fifth release, the double album “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,” spawned huge hits in “Hey Ya!” and “The Way You Move.” But Dear Silas picked a song from André 3000’s “The Love Below” that he says has a classic appeal. “It could be made today and nobody would blink,” Dear Silas says of “Spread.”

Dear Silas also picked “Roses” by Kanye West, now known as Ye.

Several artists The Post spoke to brought up Rakim’s influence on hip-hop, as he helped carve space for lyrics delivered in a smooth and forceful monotone instead of upbeat party rhymes. But when this song popped into the Lady of Rage’s mind, it was the beat that she couldn’t help but hum.

The Lady of Rage also picked “The Theme (It’s Party Time)” by Tracey Lee.

“This really was one that pierced my ears for a long time. And I couldn’t get away from it, it was like almost infectious,” Jermaine Dupri remembers. … And the way that EPMD rapped back and forth with each other, I basically mimicked with me and Brat. I wanted to do it differently, so it sounds like a girl and a guy, but I got that style from EPMD.”

Dante Ross also mentioned this song, “because it was like, ‘Oh, there’s two Rakims in this group.’ That was my initial thought because they both had the monotone thing going on, like Rakim did. And it was just so, so cool.”

“I think when I hear Jay-Z’s New York record, I think that gives a sense of pride; it’s almost like you’re hearing ‘New York, New York’ by Frank Sinatra again,” Kid Capri says. “‘Empire State’ is one of those records that when you hear it … you ain’t even got to live in New York. I play that record in places like Kentucky, places like Omaha, Nebraska, and watch these people act like they’re in New York by the way they receive it. It’s a prideful record.”

Kid Capri also picked “The Bridge Is Over” by Boogie Down Productions.