Issue #390: The Real Hip-Hop Is Over Here

Jul 29, 2025

There’s a scene in season five of Bosch (2014) where Barrel (Troy Evans), a character largely used for comic relief, sits down to watch Man Without a Star (1955). When a movie shows up in Bosch, I pay attention. It’s pretty unusual. But when it happens, the show records the screen like a pirated youtube video trying to avoid a copyright strike. There’s visuals and dialogue, we always get a genuine movie clip. In this case, Kirk Douglas is twirling his gun.

Barrel remarks, “they broke the mold,” presumably referring to Douglas, conflating the actor with his character. But what stands out more to me in this particular scene is the enthusiasm with which Barrel sits down to watch this movie he has seen before.

This isn’t the only time this comes up, either. In season three, Jerry Edgar (Jamie Hector) watches They Made Me a Criminal (1939), agreeing with Bosch (Titus Welliver) that it’s a “great flick.” Rewatching movies seems today less common than ever. It’s anecdotal, but I have people tell me all the time they never watch a movie twice. I suspect they may be space aliens.

I appreciate a show, then, that lingers on the simple pleasures of watching a movie for the second, third, or fifth time. And for a great film, or even a terrible one, it’s never the same experience the next time you watch it.

“The movie never changes, it can’t change, but every time you see it, it seems different because you’re different.” Give rewatching movies a chance.

The Best Narrative Rap Songs Ever

The rap song with a full narrative arc is underrepresented in modern hip-hop. It makes sense. These can’t be an easy category of song to write. You have to be one part short story author, one part rapper. Sometimes songs that don’t tell a story in their lyrics get the narrative sutured through a video, like in the case of Future’s “Dirty Sprite.” But, for me, songs like this are among my favorite of all time in any genre. So I wanted to take some time to list what I think are the greatest artistic achievements in this subgenre. These songs are not in order of quality, but in order of their meticulous arrangement on the playlist.

1. Murs — “Walk Like a Man” (2003)

This was from the first album in a series of collaborations between LA rapper Murs and North Carolina based producer 9th Wonder. Somehow, some of the best rap beats of all time are on these songs that are among the longest and most lyrically dense in all of hip-hop. “Walk Like a Man” might have been the first time I heard such a distinctive beat switch, where a song suddenly transforms into what sounds like a completely different one. That happens at about fifty seconds in here, but both the short intro and the song’s plot are about a pretty common theme in these narrative rap songs: gun violence.

Murs has a lot of classic lines here, like “Human life is so precious it could never be measured.” It’s a stage-setting for a song that will follow someone across their transformation from innocence to experience, seeking revenge for a friend who dies in a gang squabble, “What I remember most was when I got to my knees and I held my [friend] close / Asked him not to leave us in the name of Christ Jesus / but he’s gone and all I got left is his blood on my sneakers.” Another fascinating aspect of the song is the edits in the explicit version, all identifying details about the gang affiliation of the shooter are edited out, but it’s not hard to make out what’s cut.

The next section picks up a year later, again focused on the grid lines defined by gang affiliation in Los Angeles. Murs, rapping in the voice of the speaker who is somewhere he is not supposed to be, viscerally recounts the experience of seeing his friend’s killer. The speaker confronts the killer, “I couldn’t dream of a better day for me to catch his ass / Slippin’ while he dip into the ride by himself / I slid up behind him in the shadows hella stealth / He started to break hisself / I said I didn’t want a dime / Do you remember what you was doin’ last year about this time?” At this point in the song I always have chills, no matter how many times I’ve heard it. But the outro is perfect:

It was a year to this day that my best friend died
For weeks I sat alone in my room and cried
And I tried to pretend everything was fine
But my soul couldn't rest until vengeance was mine
It was a year to this day that my best friend died
And for weeks I sat alone in my room and cried
And I thought that's what I wanted til the problem was confronted
Now I'm haunted by remorse that I wished I hadn't done it

That last line, “I wished I hadn’t done it,” is in the last second of the song as the beat cuts off, like an afterthought squeezed into those last moments, something difficult to admit but the cause of the enlightened view on gun violence and human life in the song’s first fifty seconds. They don’t make them like this, they never did.

2. Nas — “I Gave You Power” (1996)

Consistent with the production trend I mentioned about the Murs song, “I Gave You Power” is the only DJ Premiere produced song on It Was Written. The song has a great title. On the Bridge 9 message board back in the early 2000s, there was a prolific poster with the username igaveyoupower and I think the It Was Written cover art was in his signature. Never did know who that guy was, but that’s what put the song on my radar most acutely. The lyrics are from a perspective of a gun, as opposed to the one who wields it in the case of Murs. Distinct from, but certainly an influence on, the chapter of Tommy Orange’s There There (2018) from the perspective of bullets that will make their way into a 3D printed gun for a mass shooting at a powwow.

The song’s title and the lyrics from the chorus, “I gave you power, I made you buck-wild,” emphasizes the transient quality of the subject position the gun imparts on the one who holds it. Nas is very clever in his embodiment of the gun’s POV, with a long stanza about the phallic quality of the gun. The story follows this gun’s use and the execution of a plan, “the next time the beef is on / I make myself jam right in my owner’s hand.” There’s a transformation of the gun from wanting to fill its purpose, “I was made to kill, that’s why they keep me concealed,” to being sick of killing, “Now I’m happy, until I felt somebody else grab me. Damn!” The tactile descriptions of rust and the idea of a gun experiencing discomfort from being in disrepair reminds me of the outlook on material things from Gachiakuta (2022). Compared to Murs, there’s more of a wide-angled sociopolitical commentary with lyrics like “making every ghetto foul,” and the specific racist function of guns as a tool for maintaining white supremacy. Nas is never subtle. At the song’s outset he raps, “I’m a f-, I’m a gun, shit.”

3. Ice Cube — “It Was A Good Day” (1992)

Like I said, these songs are not really in order of quality or personal preference or cultural significance. But it feels like “It Was A Good Day” has to be at the top of the list because of its quality and cultural significance. I think it is the most quoted rap song ever, maybe the most assimilated into American popular culture. That’s certainly true among the songs on this list, but I think it would still be true measured against the entire genre.

F. Gary Gray directed the video in 1993 before his first feature film, Friday (1995).

4. A Tribe Called Quest — “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” (1990)

Most of the songs in this style are tragic or contemplative. But like Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day,” this Tribe song is fun and slightly surreal. And like the Ice Cube song, it’s popular, so the less said about it the better.

5. The Streets — “Could Well Be In” (2004)

This is the only non-U.S. song on the list, which might indicate a significant blind spot. The entirety of The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come For Free is a story about the speaker’s relationship with a woman named Simone. As a result, people call it a concept album and a rap opera. “Could Well Be In” is my favorite song off the record. It’s laid back and slow. I saw The Streets in 2006 at a music festival playing in the early afternoon right before Atmosphere. The speaker in this song is trying to figure out if Simone is into him after seeing her at a pub a few times, using clues from ITV programming.

6. Kanye West — “Roses” (2005)

I don’t think this song comes up often enough when talking about narrative rap songs, even ones specifically by Kanye. I hear people talk about “Big Brother,” “Drive Slow,” “Touch The Sky,” “All Falls Down,” and even “Last Call.” But none of those songs tell as cohesive a story as “Roses,” about Kanye and his family visiting his grandmother in the hospital. It captures all the foreboding qualities of being in a hospital: insensitive medical staff, machine sounds, bargaining to figure out if there’s a way to make things right someone hasn’t thought of yet. But “Roses” has a happy ending, with Kanye’s grandmother making it through and the elation of the family at the end of the final verse.

7. Common — “Testify” (2005)

From the same milieu as Kanye, “Testify” is the first legal drama on the playlist. Director Anthony Mandler adapted the ending of The Usual Suspects (1995) for the music video. Can a song be “spoiled”? “Testify” has a plot twist, with the ostensibly dutiful wife testifying on her husband’s behalf trying to undo the damage of her statements to police, “Using her lies for protecting him / They arrested him for murder and gun possession / As they read back her confession, she screamed” leading into lyrics sampled from Honey Core’s “Innocent ‘Til Proven Guilty,” “Before you lock my love away / Please let me testify.”

8. Geto Boys — “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” (1991)

Hallucinations, doppelgangers, and Shakespearean elderly trios plague the speakers brought to life by Scarface, Willie D, and Bushwick Bill in this gruesome hip-hop classic. They expose a sordid underside of criminal life, the paranoia that results from living in a state of conflict. The song is focused on violence more generally and its psychological consequences, but its influence on “Walk Like a Man” is obvious.

9. Eyedea — “Bottle Dreams” (2002)

Topically unique, this song follows a character who is clearly different from Eyedea himself: a young violin prodigy who is sexually abused by her father. Of all the songs on the list, it is particularly harrowing in its treatment of CSA.

Though the young girl’s ability seems to be an inherent gift, Eyedea connects her artistic capacity to her abuse, “She made that violin sing with so much pain / You could almost hear her scream through the string’s vibrations.” His rhyme scheme in this verse is something like A B C B, but the lines are wordy, making the listener wait for the payoff of the rhyme as the song’s protagonist waits for some reply to her bottles.

Those titular bottle dreams are messages, notes she would write indicating her abuse that she would throw into what Eyedea calls a river in the chorus, “And everyday she’d go to the river with a message in a bottle sayin’ / Please, God help me I don’t wanna live to see tomorrow.” By the end of the song’s chorus, there’s the fatalistic conclusion, “I don’t know why but the bottle always sinks / She never sees it happen, but the bottle always sinks / Now only the bottom of the river knows what she really thinks.”

It’s no accident that the content of the letter, as Eyedea describes it in the chorus, doesn’t actually implicate the young girl’s father or describe the concrete circumstances of her existence but instead confesses a powerful suicidal urge.

Eyedea does a lot with the plot of this song. The listener, in part, is implicated through their listening. If there is any biographical similarity between Eyedea and this young woman he has invented, it is the anguish that they share that fuels their artistic output. There are perennial, but perhaps under-thought, questions of fandom exposed here. Is it moral to enjoy the fruits of psychological trauma? If you know the artist in question, at what point does their music or art become a cry for help to which you have some accountability to respond?

In many cases, though, as a fan there is no capacity or access to respond in the way the music might require. For the young woman in the song, her onslaught of pain is finally revealed only after her death:

It was weeks before they found her dead body
Some fisherman reeled it from the water
Like something from a detective novel
Diagnosis: suicide, stemmed from desperation
Cause near where she drowned they found about 500 messages in sunken bottles.

10. Speaker Knockerz — “Rico Story” (2013)

“Rico Story” is the only song on the list with multiple installments, but the part two and part three addendums happen from time to time in narrative rap and R&B. This is a salacious story, about a man named Rico who is having a child with a woman named Tesha. Tesha, as it turns out, is a police officer who ultimately arrests him. The plot benefits from suspending one’s disbelief. Speaker Knockerz lyrics are simple and descriptive, moving from scene to scene with a journalists’ workmanship:

Prayed to God and then he opened up the door
Point his gun and said, “Don’t nobody move
Just give me all the money and we all cool”
He told the teller, “Please don’t try no funny shit
‘Cause if you try some shit, I’ll shoot up this bitch”
She said okay and gave him ‘bout a hundred K
He started walkin’ backwards, then he ran away

There are a lot of unusual lines like the last one in the quote above that seem overly descriptive of a series of events, like a few lines earlier where he raps “He told her, ‘Baby, let’s go rob a fuckin’ bank’ / She said okay, and then they filled the gas tank.” The filling of the gas tank, however, serves as the point of no return where Rico takes the final step that will lead to his downfall. There are also some creative rhyming choices, like when he rhymes “sir” with “Tesha,” which relies on an intrusive R at the end of “Tesha.”

As straightforward as the story may seem, Speaker Knockerz works through a couple of recurring themes in this song. Rico is exculpated from some of the responsibility of what he does because of his economic situation, “Rico got no money, he done lost his job / He ain’t got no choice but to jugg and rob.” Speaker Knockerz also has many (misogynistic, one must admit) songs about betrayal by women, of which this is one. Following the song’s logic, Rico is condemned to imprisonment because of his trusting Tesha. Tesha’s betrayal motivates the most extreme instance of violence, where Rico pulls a gun on the mother of his own child — the note on which the song ends. One might enjoy that ambiguous note as an ending, but “Rico Story 2” resolves the ambiguity immediately. He shoots her.

11. The Coup — “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ‘79 Granada Last Night” (1998)

Before Boots Riley was known for directing, he was the primary songwriter for rap group The Coup. “Me and Jesus the Pimp…” is a notable outlier in their discography, a seven minute story drawing attention to its narrative structure by way of its length and falling early in the runtime of Steal This Album, where it first appeared; although I guess it’s fair to say The Coup generally has a much higher average song runtime than other rap artists. Riley raps about an unnamed boy who is transformed, much like the speaker of “Walk Like a Man,” but in this case Riley’s protagonist is also coming of age. This is a story of both transformation and maturation.

This is an unmistakably West Coast rap song, consistent with The Coup’s style. And Riley puts words in the mouth of his speaker that reveal a greater level of insight, either retrospectively earned by the speaker looking back on his life or a reversal of the free indirect style where the narrator’s point of view is spoken through the first-person perspective of the protagonist, “Well, since my adolescence, ‘cause of his pimp lessons / Smack my woman in the dental just for askin’ silly questions … Ain’t got no close partners, socially I can’t function.”

The “Me” of the song’s title, the speaker, learns not just the explicit life lessons from Jesus, his father, but the implicit lessons from the sex work his mother is forced to engage in and the abuse she sustains from Jesus. There’s an ironic quality to the title, too, as the song follows the speaker over a large span of time rather than just “Last Night,” though the night in question is particularly significant and comes at the end of the song.

It ends with the usurpation of the paternal authority Jesus imposes, following the logic of that authority:

I said, “This trip is over,
We ain’t finna ride on
This is for my mental and my mama that I cried on
Microsoft motherfuckers
Let bygones be bygones
But since I’m Macintosh,
I’mma double click your icon”

The violence that Jesus passed on to his son returns to him, though this is far from the end of the cycle Riley hopes for when he raps, “I don’t think that it’s gonna end till we make revolution.”

This may also be the only song on the list that has been adapted into a novel. Monique W. Morris’s Too Beautiful For Words (2001) is an adaptation of the song.

12. Nav — “Brown Boy” (2020)

The most recent song on this list and the only one I have definitely written about before, Nav writes this song from the perspective of a ‘hater’ in the most extreme colloquial sense. He posits the cause of their resentment as envy:

What kind of car was he driving? That shit was clean
Tried to catch him outside, but he peeling off the scene
I wonder what it feel like to live his life just for a day
How he keep making his dreams come true and I can’t?

There’s some pretty extreme self-hatred Nav attributes to these haters:

Fuck am I doing in school? I’m wasting time
Swear if he get another plaque, I’ll lose my mind
I envy his life so much, I wish it was mine
Still live with my mom and dad, I hate them both
If I listen to the brown boy, I might get some hope
He always gon’ be there when there’s nowhere for me to go
Can’t deny his music, feel like drugs, I need a dose

The line about the parents always strikes me more than I think Nav intended. And the hostility toward Nav seems to come from an unhealthy sort of emotional investment in the music, some kind of analysis of stan culture. The speaker here can only live vicariously through the exploits Nav describes and can’t make anything happen for himself. I can’t help but imagine Nav’s own frustrations before his fame giving some of the visceral texture to “Brown Boy.”

13. Atmosphere — “Like Today” (2001)

Ant flips a sample from The Counts’ “Since We Said Goodbye” to set the stage for Slug’s treatise on monotonous living. I like following him to the record store and the book store, the pattern that seems to gall him so much doesn’t seem so bad. Though it’s not for nothing that we never hear about the speaker doing any listening or reading other than for a particular purpose, “Put my headphones on for this world I ignore.”

The speaker people watches, with a little bit of social commentary coming in the song’s back half:

So I dipped back out into a cloud of tattoos
Pierced body part and coloful hairdos
And I questioned, did Babylon resemble this?
Are we getting any closer to the end of the list? …
We teach them how to make a fist, but not to resist

And the disruption to the speaker’s routine leaves him stranded at the start of the day: it was all a dream. One can see the influence from “Juicy” as well as Slick Rick’s verse in “La Di Da Di.”

14. Big L — “Casualties of a Dice Game” (2000)

This is my favorite song title on this list, even edging out “I Gave You Power.” There’s something about the cadence and structure of the title that evokes the core, kind of reminding me of Anti Cimex’s “Victims of a Bomb Raid.” Big L is a genre until himself. This is another particularly explicit song. Big L raps about betrayal and a world where the unwritten law is ignored in favor of total, violent anarchy.

15. Aesop Rock — “No rEgrets” (2001)

Lucy is the Bartleby of hip-hop, the subject of the Aesop Rock song with the refrain “I’m busy, thank you much.” But the thrust of the song is the opposite of Bartleby’s preference to not, as Lucy has a preference to do. For Aesop Rock and his character, to act is to avoid languishing at the mercy of one’s unattained dreams:

And she said, “Look, I’ve never had a dream in my life
Because a dream is what you wanna do, but still haven’t pursued
I knew what I wanted and did it till it was done
So I’ve been the dream that I wanted to be since day one!”

16. Ugly Duckling — “La Revolucion” (2003)

Twenty-three years after the release of Taste the Secret, Ugly Duckling is just another retro rap group. But in 2003, when I was young, they were the new hotness (to some people) carrying on the style of Native Tongues rap, 80s and 90s revivalists. “La Revolucion” satirizes the antagonism between ancient and modern hip-hop as an actual armed conflict:

You see, it was ten or so years ago
When they rolled up in the town and stole the show
They used sex, intimidation and violence to plunder
And take the people under like pirates
They started spreading their seeds about
And we tried to resist, but they squeezed us out
So we went underground, off the map
Now we’re on our way back, now we’re on our way back!

Things don’t work out for our heroes in the song. Prescient, as it turns out. But our new rap overlords haven’t been all bad, as long as UY Scuti sees the light of day.

17. Del The Funky Homosapien — “Corner Story” (1997)

If I were rating these songs by quality, this would have to be way closer to the top. But I need some heat for the end of the playlist. This is another of these songs with an absolutely jaw-dropping beat. Every song and album A-Plus has produced is basically perfect. He collaborated with Del frequently, as part of the group Hieroglyphics and producing No Need for Alarm (1993), Future Development, and Both Sides of the Brain (2000).

The laid back style and slice of live chorus belies some of the song’s foreboding quality. Gun violence has been a frequent theme in these songs, and “Corner Story” is no exception:

This shit is like a war zone
Streets is hot like the Bahamas
But we will stay away from the drama
I’m wearin’ my snipe, my arctic jacket with the wool like a llama
But then we had to pause like a comma
Cause someone got stuck and bucked and family was outside with trauma
We heard the shots from inside and whenever gats go off
I hit the deck and hide
And if po-po said they got there on time they lied

Del brings to the fore a contrast between leisurely, repetitive life and the violent interruptions. Even Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” alludes to the possibility of things going wrong in its oft quoted line, “I didn’t even have to use my AK.” This kind of violence, in certain contexts, can only be temporarily avoided.

18. Kool G Rap & DJ Polo — “On the Run” (1992)

Live and Let Die was the third and final in a series of Kool G Rap & DJ Polo collaboration albums, but the first of the three to not receive major label distribution. Warner Bros., Cold Chillin’s distribution partner, declined to distribute it because of the lyrical content. “On the Run” is the album opener, describing a speaker’s transition from small time drug moving to robbing his crime family employers.

The song is complete with supporting voice performers, including the speaker’s wife. Kool G Rap uses a sample from The Untouchables (1987) which he presents as a conversation between Don Luciano and one of his associates. Unlike a lot of examples, this song ends with the speaker succeeding in his caper and triumph over Don Luciano. One reading available is that the song critiques the exploitation of Black Americans as subordinate to other ethnically-aligned criminal enterprises.

19. Slick Rick — Children’s Story (1989)

“Children’s Story” is Slick Rick’s most famous song. Handling both rapping and production duties, Slick Rick’s beat has been sampled repeatedly over the subsequent decades, most notably in “This Is How We Do It” (1995) and “Cops Shot the Kid” (2018).

Like “Casualties of a Dice Game,” Slick Rick laments in some way the loss of order that comes with the so-called death of God in a Nietzschean sense, “When laws were stern and justice stood / And people were behavin’ like they ought to good.” At the same time, there’s a touch of irony here, as Slick Rick sets the stage for his story. This sanguine retrospection ignores the social conditions that lead to the outrageous scenes Slick Rick goes on to describe. This is on purpose, of course. Theft occurs in modern society as a result of economic imbalances that many of these songs outline.

20. Boogie Down Productions — “Love’s Gonna Get’cha (Material Love)” (1990)

Boogie Down Productions and KRS-One are often understood as following a trajectory that leads from hip-hop conventionality to political consciousness and explicitly politicized rap music. Edutainment is a product of this latter period, which begins somewhere between 1988 and 1990 and remains the defining characteristic of KRS-One’s music today.

“Love’s Gonna Get’cha” is a parable that cautions against an over-investment in “material things.” KRS-One is explicit about this in the song’s spoken outro:

You know, a lot of people believe that that word "Love" is real soft, But when you use it in your vocabulary like you're addicted to it, it sneaks right up and takes you right out.
So, for future reference, remember, it's alright to like or want a material item, But when you fall in love with it, and you start schemin' and carrying on for it, just remember:
It's gonna get you!

In a broader sense, what KRS-One advocates here is a tempering of one’s desire. The endless metonym of wanting the next, newest thing is the origin point, KRS-One argues, of community violence. He elaborates on many of the principles and themes from narrative rap songs leading up to 1990, but he adds this didactic quality to the violence he depicts.