ARE you 14 and desperately want to be ‘urban’ and ‘street’ despite living in the sticks? Here are some excellent tracks to listen to with your crew on the bus to Knutsford.
Heat – 50 Cent
No trip to the local park to share a two-litre bottle of Strongbow is complete without some Fiddy. A lot of his songs are fairly interchangeable, and this one ticks most of the boxes: ‘I’ll ride by and blow ya brains out’, ‘I done made myself a millionaire’, and so on. You too intend to get rich or die tryin’ but your mum keeps making you do your GCSE coursework instead of busting sick rhymes.
Bring Ya Whole Crew – DMX
Like DMX, you have a crew, so he’s required listening for tips on dealing with beefs in the hood. ‘I got blood on my hands and there’s no remorse/ And got blood on my dick cause I f**ked a corpse’, raps DMX surprisingly cheerfully. You’re not sure he really did f**k a corpse, but even DMX must have had the odd dry spell, and you can certainly relate to not getting your leg over.
Chi Chi Man – TOK
A lot of Jamaican dancehall is basically gangsta reggae, which is great, but it’s quite homophobic and the girls in your class don’t like that. If you want to stand any chance of fingering Lianne Rogers don’t play her this track about burning gay men, and particularly not Dr Evil’s hilariously fearful hit Batty Boy Stay Far From We. (Sample lyric: ‘Adam was made for Eve/ He was not made for Steve/ No ifs, no buts, no maybes/ Dicks and butts will make no babies.’)
Kim – Eminem
Marshall Mathers is an inspiration to every aspiring rapper like yourself. However you’re currently having difficulty writing your own lyrics about violently murdering your girlfriend, possibly due to never having had a girlfriend. You could easily fill several double albums with songs about wanking, though.
Straight outta Compton – NWA
An oldie but the lyrics are excellent. As well carrying out what sounds like dozens of murders, which somehow he was never charged with, Ice Cube warns potential enemies he will ‘cook ‘em in a pot like gumbo’, and there’s nothing more terrifying than being turned into seafood stew. Sadly you live in a leafy commuter town in Cheshire, not a crime-ridden Californian slum with a sky-high murder rate, but you can dream.
Paper Planes – MIA
You love this track, which is totally gangsta, with female rapper MIA in a hoodie singing ‘All I wanna do is take your money’ to the sound of gunshots. Annoyingly, it’s actually about singer Maya Arulpragasam’s difficulty overcoming immigrant stereotypes when applying for a US work visa, but it’s still great to listen to while smoking a pathetically tiny blim of dope behind Asda while nervously watching out for ‘the Feds’.
Thug Life – Tupac
Admittedly you’re not as immersed in street crime as Tupac (RIP) with his entanglements in various shootings and his untimely death, but you do play your music without headphones on the bus which is probably illegal, so you feel a bond. You definitely want a ‘thug life’ tattoo, but your mum would go f**king ballistic. Still, Tupac probably had the same problem.
