What’s the Best Hip-Hop Collab Song of All-Time? Posted by Nathan S. on 10/23/13 | Filed under Top Stories, Debates, RH Nation Answers

I may only post a new "Question of the Week" on Wendesday, but I'm thinking about new questions all week. In this case, as soon as I posted the Black Star album and saw how many people loved "Respiration", I started wondering where it would rank on a Best Hip-Hop Collab of All-Time list and boom, I knew what I had to do.

Now, if we're including rap-R&B collaborations, then the answer is clearly Method Man and Mary J. Blige's "All I Need", with the Roots and Erykah Badu's "You Got Me" and Jay Z and Alicia Keys "Empire State of Mind" also in the running. But now that I'm thinking about it, it feels like that deserves its own separate post.

Instead, let's just focus on rap-on-rap collaborations. As always, when we're talking about "best", we're talking about a combination of inherent dopeness and impact. MC Dude Who Lives Next Door to You and MC Guy You Want to High School With might have musically done a fucking mindblowing track together, but they're still two rappers no one knows. "Renegade" matters more. It just does. On the flipside though, just because you stick a bunch of famous dudes on the same track, it doesn't mean that it's dope (aka 90% of the songs The Fat Guy Who Yells has ever made).

Also, when I say collaboration, I really mean collaboration in the sense that every artist worked together to make the song better. The aformentioned "Renegade" might be famous because people like to debate whether Eminem killed Jay or not, but that doesn't neccesarily mean it was a great collaboration.

For something to be a great collab track it has to be impossible to think of the song without every emcee involved; it should feel so natural you barely even think of it as a "collab", more like a really dope group that just happened to make one song.

Let's get into the specifics. If I'm going old school I have to mention "Scenario", although with all due respect to the rest of Leaders of the New School , I think that song could have been Tribe and Busta and would have been just as dope. Of course "The Symphony" has to be mentioned. Moving on, "Respiration" is just fucking amazing, Jay Z and UGK on "Big Pimpin" is a perfect fit and now that I think about it, while it feels like they were a group (although they technically weren't), Dr. Dre, Snoop and Nate Dogg's "The Next Episode" is textbook teamwork.

More recently, while it might not have the impact to compete with some of the heavyweight names I've already mentioned, my dark horse pick would be The Hurricane Chris "A Bay Bay (Remix)" Nas and Scarface on "Hip Hop". It's consistently, and understandably, overlooked because it was part of a Fat Guy Who Yells project, but I don't give a fuck, I can appreciate greatness however it comes, and this is still one of the best songs of the last few years. Nas and Scar just brought each other to another level:

Alright RefinedHype Nation, hopefully I laid down a solid foundation for y'all to build on. I'm looking forward to spending the rest of my day getting sucked into a rap collab vortex. Have at it...