I had to Google it to make sure it wasn’t. On the first verse, a gang-affiliated female rapper, Bloody Mary (who’s no longer with us), claims various ’hoods with a deep voice that I assumed was a man’s for the last 23 years. It came loaded with 18 tracks about “pimpin,” including “Hittin’ Corners,” his misogynistic magnum opus about eating chips, disarming car alarms, seducing women with cayenne pepper and turning his giant penis into a tool for philanthropy: “I bone it cuz they want it/I don’t sleep that often.” K-Dee is a favorite with female music critics. Self-proclaimed “gigolo” K-Dee released just one album, Ass, Gas or Cash, a CD I still own. K-Dee's Ass, Gas or Cash (No One Rides for Free) Credit: Lench Mob Records Except for Geto Boy and Delinquent Habits, which I never got on CD or tape. I’ve included records that I once owned on CD. So this is my ode to the canon of gangsta rap songs that deserve to be exhumed and appreciated as either comedy or street poetry, or both.ĭisclaimer: This list is by no means comprehensive. I grew up listening to these songs, taking them very seriously (like Rock IV’ s anti-communist propaganda), only to realize eventually that a song titled “Ass, Gas or Cash” is unhealthy when taken seriously in any context. And like the cartoonish, scenery-chewing villain of a Steven Seagal movie, none of these songs were meant to be jokes, or treated as such when they were first released. But for those who write about hip-hop, these songs have been shamed into irrelevance because they’re a reminder of how gangsta rap is hip-hop’s most theatrical genre. None of the following songs were written as satire. This is written for the historians who choose to forget Ice Cube’s attempt at being taken seriously as an artist (not a gang member) on War & Peace - when the album art alone made everyone wonder if he was trying to be taken unseriously. This is, above all, a statement to West Coast hip-hop critics who’ve decided Westside Connection wasn’t as good as N.W.A, or that N.W.A was somehow better than Snoop Dogg’s grotesquely greedy No Limit era. For them, the defining genre of West Coast hip-hop represents true stories from the ’hood as told by those who lived it, coupled with beats sampled from ’70s funk and soul music, and the occasional sound of gunshots or a sawed-off shotgun being pumped.įor me, the more twisted fanboy, gangsta rap is unintentional comedy - like Snoop Dogg’s poetry in “Lodi Dodi”: “Clean, dry, was my body and hair/I threw on my brand new Doggy underwear.” The following list, however, isn’t meant for amusement alone. For fans and critics who intellectualize it, gangsta rap, or “reality rap,” is serious business.
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