This Is My Rifle: The Greatest Rappers Alive (Pt. 1 - The Heavy Hitters)

You can't stop the inevitable. At some point in time every rapper will proclaim themselves to be the undisputed "best rapper alive". Whether they say it before their first album even drops or after a solid and successful career, rappers, or should I say rapper's egos, are doomed to eventually inflate to dangerously high levels. I myself have even laid claim to the title after writing a verse or song that I feel is completely unfuckwithable (I generally do it when I'm by myself and nobody is around to pull me out of my delusional state). But aside from my own illusions of grandeur, all artists and fans alike have sat on a stoop or in a park and engaged in the "best rapper alive" argument at least a handful of times, and it's an argument that we're bound to repeat over and over again because without it Hip Hop just isn't that much fun.

So what are the criteria for determining the best rapper alive? Is it album sales? Lyrics? Relevance? Consistency? Is it all of them put together? Personally, when I think about who could possibly reign supreme as the greatest currently doing it, it all boils down to one thing: albums.

Most people outside of the artistic field aren't aware of this but it's extremely hard to make a cohesive and consistently solid album. As the songs are created an incredible amount of energy goes into making sure everything sits just right. One offbeat snare or misplaced syllable and a song is fucked. We've all had that moment when we're enjoying a song and then something comes out of nowhere and ruins the entire experience for us. That moment is an artist's worst nightmare and we toil endlessly to try and prevent that happening. One awkward ad-lib and the album goes from classic to solid effort in the blink of an eye. So we gut check every song to make sure it feels right. More often than not, it doesn't and so we end up back at square one.

Eventually we find 10-15 songs that don't make us cringe and they form a complete body of work. Next comes the tracklisting, which is almost as unnerving as recording the songs because a tracklisting can make or break an album. It's when putting together a tracklisting that the artist has to make sure all of the songs compliment each other and pull their vision together seamlessly. Of course, it never happens on the first try and so another 3-5 songs hit the trash can or get re-arranged (with Marvelous World Of Color I got so frustrated with this part of the process that I just said "fuck it" and kept 3 songs that shouldn't have made the album. I won't say which ones they are but if you listen to it closely you can tell which 3 I'm talking about).

So with that said, it almost seems unfair to argue who is or who isn't the best rapper alive due to the effort put into creating every album. But it's Hip Hop so who the fuck cares. We deserve a good ego bruising every now and then. Now watch me kick the shit out of a bunch of rappers that are better than me.

(*Sidenote: I'm not going to discuss any rappers that were considered as the best to have ever done it prior to 1993 simply because it was before my time and no matter how hard I try it's impossible for me to truly understand how revolutionary Rakim, Kool G Rap, Slick Rick, Run DMC, The Beastie Boys and a long list of others really were. I'll leave that discussion to the older heads.)

So let's start with the obvious top pick: Jay-Z. I know it seems like I pick on him a lot in this column (as if I was even slightly capable of hurting his feelings. Fact: my auto-correct on my iPhone actually figured out that I was typing Jay-Z and finished it for me when I typed "Jay". When I type my name it corrects it to "Jason's jars") but Jay is one of my favorite rappers that ever touched a mic. Both "Reasonable Doubt" and "The Blueprint" were the catalysts to 2 major events in my life; the first being my permanent switch from graffiti to MCing as my choice of artistic expression and the second being when I realized that I had to try a lot harder if I wanted to have a fighting chance at ever being taken seriously. It's those 2 albums that have carried Jay through his lowest moments and saved him from any missteps in his career.

Lyrically there are very few that could match him and even if they do, Jay destroys them with his flow and delivery. Aside from "Renegade" (which I will go into later in this article) nobody has upstaged Jay on any song ever. But as a fan I've always felt like Jay needs to have a not so great album in order to make a solid one. From "Volume 1" to "Volumes 2 & 3", "The Dynasty" to "The Blueprint", "Blueprint 2" to "The Black Album", "Kingdom Come" to "American Gangster" and most recently "Blueprint 3", which means that he should've knocked it out of the park on the upswing but unfortunately "Watch The Throne" just didn't do it (I didn't mention the albums with R.Kelly cuz in my world they didn't happen). I don't know how he did it, but he appeared to be incredibly consistent when he was only connecting universally half of the time. But then again maybe that's why he should be considered the best rapper alive; he can put out an album that fails to live up to the hype and then follow it up with something so dope that we look past the whole R.Kelly thing. But there is the small matter of a little song called "Ether" and like Jonah Hill said to the kid in Superbad that peed his pants in the 4th grade, "people don't forget".

"Motherfuckin Nasty Nas, bitch!” I remember screaming that and jumping up and down in pure rap fan glory after the first time I heard what later became arguably the greatest diss track of all time, "Ether". Prior to hearing that song I, like the rest of the Hip Hop community, had counted him out. After "Nastradamus" I was absolutely sure that he had just stopped caring, but then Jay kicked sand in his face and Nas woke the fuck up. "Ether" wasn't just a Mike Tyson sized, jaw shattering knockout punch; it was also his return to form.



Even more so than his former adversary, Nas has suffered from a serious case of inconsistency. It's almost like he went on a downward slide from "It Was Written" to “I Am” to "Nastradamus". There were some jewels on all 3 albums but nothing that compared to "Illmatic". But here's the thing about "Illmatic"; that album is so fucking flawless that the master tapes should be put in the Smithsonian and displayed as the original copy of Hip Hop's bible. When Nas says, "Name a rapper I ain't influenced" he's not boasting, he's stating fact, and when he came back to life with "Stillmatic" he proved to the world why he's still the best one putting words together. Nas' only real downfall as an MC is that he reads too much, and unfortunately the vast majority of his listeners don't read enough which causes him to go over most people's heads a lot of the time. It takes a very well educated ear to catch his references and if you haven’t read the same books as he has, you might as well be listening to an album from a distant planet. But for people like myself, who just so happen to understand what he’s talking about, “Street’s Disciple”, “Hip Hop Is Dead” and “Untitled” are just a few songs away (or in the case of “Street’s Disciple”, a few songs too many) from classic. Oh, and “Nasty” was the song of summer 2011 but you probably missed it. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it sucks that he’s too good to dumb it down.

There is one variable that keeps throwing a monkey wrench in the battle between Nas and Jay-Z for rap supremacy: Eminem. There is no other MC that has had as large or as significant of an impact on Hip Hop as he has. When Em first emerged onto the radar you could hear the collective yawn from coast to coast as hardcore Hip Hop fans discounted him as another embarrassing attempt to push a White rapper into the mainstream, but when we heard that he was backed by Dr. Dre we all sat up in our chairs and paid attention. Then he dropped 2 consecutive classics, “The Slim Shady LP” and “The Marshall Mathers LP” and Hip Hop changed forever. During this period he solidified himself as both the underground and mainstream’s new favorite rapper and to this day, neither Nas nor Jay-Z can say that they’ve had as much influence on modern day Hop Hop as Eminem.

Overnight we all went from simple rhyme schemes to complicated multi-syllabic patterns and Em was the undeniable cause of it. But, like the aforementioned 2 artists, Em’s Achilles Heel has been his consistency. After “The Marshall Mathers LP” he suffered from the same dramatic decline that Nas did. Both “The Eminem Show” and “Encore” failed to live up to the standards set by his previous 2 albums and a lot of us were left with the “what the fuck happened?” look on our faces. He continued to murder every guest feature; most notably making Jay-Z look like a newcomer on “Renegade”, but for some reason his own albums seemed to lack some effort. We now know that a lot of it had to do with a slowly worsening drug addiction, but at the time it felt like when he wasn’t in direct competition with somebody, he didn’t go as hard. And so both albums came and went and Eminem disappeared from the public eye. He kicked some ass on “The Re-Up” and various albums from G-Unit and produced some big songs on even bigger albums but Eminem the producer just didn’t pack the same punch as Eminem the rapper.

A few years passed and Em re-emerged, sober and sharper than ever with "Relapse". While most of his fanbase disapproved of his change in direction (homosexual rape, pill popping and a weird unrecognizable accent) I thought that "Relapse" was his strongest display of skill since "The Marshall Mathers LP". It was the follow-up album, "Recovery", that I felt was the true disappointment. It wasn't that I didn't appreciate his attempt at tackling real life issues; it just wasn't at the same lyrical caliber of his previous efforts. As an MC, I listen to Eminem for one reason; to have somebody out there who is similar stylistically but is light-years ahead of me. There are few artists that I kill myself trying to beat and he's one of them. Fortunately for me, him and Royce came together and finally did the long-awaited "Bad Meets Evil" project so now, once again, I have a reason to hate him. Thanks, Marshall.

So there you have it folks. My argument as to why (or why not) Jay-Z, Nas and Eminem could all possibly be the best rappers alive. They were the top 3 obvious choices, so next week I'm gonna break out the underdogs and discuss a few MC's that are not often mentioned in the conversation but are fully deserving of the title.

And no, I promise I won't put myself in there. Or maybe I will just to make the comments section go crazier than when I suggested that Osama bin Laden's death was a government hoax (good times, good times).




(Jason James is an artist, freelance columnist and writer for RefinedHype.com. You can listen/download his most recent album, "Marvelous World Of Color", here and you can contact him here and here.)