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Raekwon Breaks Down His 10 Favorite Albums of All Time
Oct 29, 2020
Amy Harris/Invision/AP
Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon was among the hundreds of artists, writers, and industry insiders who took part in the vote that determined Rolling Stone’s all-new 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Here, the rapper discusses the top 10 albums on his ballot, and how they informed his life and music
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
1. Ghostface Killah, Supreme Clientele (2000)
Me and Ghost, we’ve been each other’s favorite rapper since the Nineties. Ghost is a character within himself. He has a crazy charisma about him, and he took this album to the next level, lyrically. It’s Ghostface expressing himself to the masses, the way he wanted to.
I watched him go to work on this album. He did a lot of it in Miami. Ghost takes his verses like going to class; like college. He really takes his time. He doesn’t rush. He tells me all [the] time, because he knows me as being a fast writer, and he’s a slower writer. Me, I catch a vibe real quick, and it’s almost like the rhyme is there before I even write it down. But Ghost, he’s more articulate. He carries books. He writes six lines, then he leaves it alone and goes to make a sandwich. He’ll come back, and if his vibe ain’t right, he’ll wait another day. It becomes a craft. Everybody respects it. That’s how much he pays attention to his bars and what he’s spitting out.
Related
“We in the fields with heat/You fake n—-s eat kid meals to me . . .” “Pretty little Sally sat up by the tree trunk . . .” He was just going off. “One,” “Stay True,” “Wu Banga 101,” “Saturday Nite,” “Ghost Deini”… Too many fiery records. It’s so many, man. The beats he picks sometimes, you might not think that a rapper could freak that beat. He was challenging himself with all different kinds of tracks. Soul music mixed with heavy chaos. There’s one beat on there, “Stroke of Death,” where the beat goes backwards, and he handles it! “Milk on my mustache, drop to my chinny-chin…”I don’t know if people caught that. He just knows how to flow when it comes to anything.
I tell Ghost all the time, “Yo, bro, I think we’re going a little extra hard on ourselves.” But he’s like, “But that’s what makes classics. That’s what we about.” That’s how Ghost is. On Supreme Clientele, he was killing it, and when he finished it and I looked at the album cover, I was like, “That’s Ghostface Killah in his prime — a super-sharp guy, coming off his mojo.” I love that album. Everybody does.
2. Eric B. and Rakim, Paid in Full (1987)
This is a special, special album to me. When Rakim first came out, I was about 15 years old. I saw him on the cover. He had outfits on there; they had money in their hand, jewelry. At that time, that was the way. Big gold chains and rings. Rakim was the trailblazer of that, besides guys like Just-Ice, Slick Rick, Run-DMC, Big Daddy Kane, LL. It was almost like a uniform for your favorite rappers.
The shyt he was saying was just amazing. “Thinking of a master plan, ‘cause ain’t nothing but sweat inside my hand.” Everything he was saying, I felt like I was living it, I was going through it. Records like “Eric B. for President,” oh my god. When I first heard that fukking track — “I came through the door…” This is when Red Alert, Mr. Magic, and Marley Marl started to play hip-hop. You had to have the tape deck. It was clubs that was jumping. New York City was a different time, where emcees were really showing off, and Rakim came through the door killing it. He had knowledge of self, he was intelligent, and his wordplay was like, “God damn.”
Looking at the video for “I Ain’t No Joke” — the sweatsuits, the sneakers, the haircut with the part — it was almost like he was giving me a blueprint of my life and how it needed to go. I loved the fact that he was so intelligent, but still deadly on the mic. Songs like “My Melody” — tracks that you never would think a rapper could rap to — he was doing everything to it, and doing it in a way where [you thought], “Yo, this guy ain’t even cursing!”
He made you run out and go buy a radio. Back then, the biggest radio for us was the Conion Box, with two big dookie speakers on it. We used to walk up and down the street every day with it, carrying this fukking 12, 13-pound radio — and not mad carrying it up the block, either, as long as you could get those sounds out. His album was the pinnacle of that time.
3. Boogie Down Productions, Criminal Minded (1987)
KRS-One was a lyrical professor and a street talker. Songs like “South Bronx” really meant a lot to us coming up in the game — and I’m talking about the street game, the hustle factor. It made me want to get up and enjoy hip-hop even more. This is when I started to hang out with my dudes, and we would go to other people’s cities and shyt. “Yo, let’s go uptown. Yo, let’s go to the Bronx. Yo, let’s go to Queens.” I remember going to 42nd Street; we would have the radio with us, and KRS’ shyt would be blasting through the joint: “South Bronx, South, South Bronx. South Bronx.” For us, being from Staten Island, it made us feel like we were from South Bronx, too.
KRS has always been a super-emcee in my book, a guy that has a lot of intelligence and knows how to paint pictures. Even taking it to the battle level, battling MC Shan and the Juice Crew from Queens and all of that. KRS might have been one of the first guys to start representing where he was from at a higher capacity than any other artist in the game at that time. To me, he represented hip-hop and he represented being a real emcee. We were young and we had a lot of energy. We would love to go to a party and they’d play that shyt, and the whole fukking crowd would go crazy. You didn’t even have to be from South Bronx to be singing it.
4. Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993)
I knew we had made a classic before the world knew it. It was a mission accomplished with that one. RZA brought a new sound to the table; he showed the world that every track doesn’t have to be regular. The stuff that he was making, combining it with karate shyt and mixing it with his own twist of samples, taking pieces of beats and putting it together — nobody never did it that way. RZA came with this whole different sound that fukked the world up. He was really getting busy and bringing you mad different sounds.
Songs like “Bring Da Ruckus,” it wasn’t hard for us to write those rhymes. “Bring da ruckus, bring da motherfukkin’ ruckus…” We were in a challenging moment when it came to being emcees, because back then you had to have a sharp sword to come out in the big park and call yourself a rapper. RZA made those beats that put us in a cage, like “Yo, if you come in this cage, you liable to die, fukking with us lyrically.”
“Protect Ya Neck” was a five-minute song where it seemed like we didn’t never have to stop rhyming on it. That was our first thing that we frisbeed out to everybody, and everybody loved it. So we knew the importance of making this album: “Yo, this shyt got to be what it’s supposed to be, and not what people might expect.”
I was one of the members to have the most songs on that album, that’s how much I was in the zone. I was right there when RZA was starting to feel his oats as a producer. I was his number one cheerleader and one of his number one coaches, too, when it came to criticizing and really wanting to win. Sometimes you need your guys next to you to put you in that frame of mind. That was the energy that we needed. I fukked around and went off on that album and did as much shyt as I could, and it made the cut.
5. The Notorious B.I.G., Ready to Die (1994)
Ready to Die was the shyt. Big was coming up around the same time we were. The whole New York scene was on fire back then. You had a lot of cats in different boroughs that were like, “Yo, it’s a guy named Biggie Smalls out there that’s killing it.” Me, I fell in love with the name, Biggie Smalls — it sounds like a gangster that really knows what he’s doing on that mic.
When he made Ready to Die, you knew this is going to be a guy that’s going to stick around for a long time. He had that rapper’s voice. He did a record with one of my brothers, Method Man [“The What”]: “fukk the world, don’t ask me for shyt/Everything you got, you got to work hard for it.” They was just bouncing. Songs like “Warning,” he was just letting it fly, and making a good representation of what New York emcees is about. We knew Biggie was a star back then, off his first album. I’m a very good ear when it comes to who I feel got it. And he definitely had it on that album.
One of my favorites is “Party and Bullshyt” [Biggie’s non-album single from 1993] — that takes me back to rec-room parties and having fun and wearing Polo gooses, and just doing stupid shyt. Jumping on trains with 40 ounces, drinking, hanging, riding bikes on the back of the bus. All type of shyt we used to do, and he painted that whole shyt in one fukking verse on that song. That’s what we used to do: We used to party and bullshyt. Bullshyt was just fukking around in the neighborhood. We might go down to the liquor store and go fukking swindle three bottles of fukking Carlo Rossi or whatever we wanted at that time. Ballantine Ale, we used to steal beer and all that shyt, go get drunk, go hang out in the staircase and drink. Songs like that, I can relate to.
Raekwon Breaks Down His 10 Favorite Albums of All Time
Oct 29, 2020
Amy Harris/Invision/AP
Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon was among the hundreds of artists, writers, and industry insiders who took part in the vote that determined Rolling Stone’s all-new 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Here, the rapper discusses the top 10 albums on his ballot, and how they informed his life and music
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
1. Ghostface Killah, Supreme Clientele (2000)
Me and Ghost, we’ve been each other’s favorite rapper since the Nineties. Ghost is a character within himself. He has a crazy charisma about him, and he took this album to the next level, lyrically. It’s Ghostface expressing himself to the masses, the way he wanted to.
I watched him go to work on this album. He did a lot of it in Miami. Ghost takes his verses like going to class; like college. He really takes his time. He doesn’t rush. He tells me all [the] time, because he knows me as being a fast writer, and he’s a slower writer. Me, I catch a vibe real quick, and it’s almost like the rhyme is there before I even write it down. But Ghost, he’s more articulate. He carries books. He writes six lines, then he leaves it alone and goes to make a sandwich. He’ll come back, and if his vibe ain’t right, he’ll wait another day. It becomes a craft. Everybody respects it. That’s how much he pays attention to his bars and what he’s spitting out.
Related
“We in the fields with heat/You fake n—-s eat kid meals to me . . .” “Pretty little Sally sat up by the tree trunk . . .” He was just going off. “One,” “Stay True,” “Wu Banga 101,” “Saturday Nite,” “Ghost Deini”… Too many fiery records. It’s so many, man. The beats he picks sometimes, you might not think that a rapper could freak that beat. He was challenging himself with all different kinds of tracks. Soul music mixed with heavy chaos. There’s one beat on there, “Stroke of Death,” where the beat goes backwards, and he handles it! “Milk on my mustache, drop to my chinny-chin…”I don’t know if people caught that. He just knows how to flow when it comes to anything.
I tell Ghost all the time, “Yo, bro, I think we’re going a little extra hard on ourselves.” But he’s like, “But that’s what makes classics. That’s what we about.” That’s how Ghost is. On Supreme Clientele, he was killing it, and when he finished it and I looked at the album cover, I was like, “That’s Ghostface Killah in his prime — a super-sharp guy, coming off his mojo.” I love that album. Everybody does.
2. Eric B. and Rakim, Paid in Full (1987)
This is a special, special album to me. When Rakim first came out, I was about 15 years old. I saw him on the cover. He had outfits on there; they had money in their hand, jewelry. At that time, that was the way. Big gold chains and rings. Rakim was the trailblazer of that, besides guys like Just-Ice, Slick Rick, Run-DMC, Big Daddy Kane, LL. It was almost like a uniform for your favorite rappers.
The shyt he was saying was just amazing. “Thinking of a master plan, ‘cause ain’t nothing but sweat inside my hand.” Everything he was saying, I felt like I was living it, I was going through it. Records like “Eric B. for President,” oh my god. When I first heard that fukking track — “I came through the door…” This is when Red Alert, Mr. Magic, and Marley Marl started to play hip-hop. You had to have the tape deck. It was clubs that was jumping. New York City was a different time, where emcees were really showing off, and Rakim came through the door killing it. He had knowledge of self, he was intelligent, and his wordplay was like, “God damn.”
Looking at the video for “I Ain’t No Joke” — the sweatsuits, the sneakers, the haircut with the part — it was almost like he was giving me a blueprint of my life and how it needed to go. I loved the fact that he was so intelligent, but still deadly on the mic. Songs like “My Melody” — tracks that you never would think a rapper could rap to — he was doing everything to it, and doing it in a way where [you thought], “Yo, this guy ain’t even cursing!”
He made you run out and go buy a radio. Back then, the biggest radio for us was the Conion Box, with two big dookie speakers on it. We used to walk up and down the street every day with it, carrying this fukking 12, 13-pound radio — and not mad carrying it up the block, either, as long as you could get those sounds out. His album was the pinnacle of that time.
3. Boogie Down Productions, Criminal Minded (1987)
KRS-One was a lyrical professor and a street talker. Songs like “South Bronx” really meant a lot to us coming up in the game — and I’m talking about the street game, the hustle factor. It made me want to get up and enjoy hip-hop even more. This is when I started to hang out with my dudes, and we would go to other people’s cities and shyt. “Yo, let’s go uptown. Yo, let’s go to the Bronx. Yo, let’s go to Queens.” I remember going to 42nd Street; we would have the radio with us, and KRS’ shyt would be blasting through the joint: “South Bronx, South, South Bronx. South Bronx.” For us, being from Staten Island, it made us feel like we were from South Bronx, too.
KRS has always been a super-emcee in my book, a guy that has a lot of intelligence and knows how to paint pictures. Even taking it to the battle level, battling MC Shan and the Juice Crew from Queens and all of that. KRS might have been one of the first guys to start representing where he was from at a higher capacity than any other artist in the game at that time. To me, he represented hip-hop and he represented being a real emcee. We were young and we had a lot of energy. We would love to go to a party and they’d play that shyt, and the whole fukking crowd would go crazy. You didn’t even have to be from South Bronx to be singing it.
4. Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993)
I knew we had made a classic before the world knew it. It was a mission accomplished with that one. RZA brought a new sound to the table; he showed the world that every track doesn’t have to be regular. The stuff that he was making, combining it with karate shyt and mixing it with his own twist of samples, taking pieces of beats and putting it together — nobody never did it that way. RZA came with this whole different sound that fukked the world up. He was really getting busy and bringing you mad different sounds.
Songs like “Bring Da Ruckus,” it wasn’t hard for us to write those rhymes. “Bring da ruckus, bring da motherfukkin’ ruckus…” We were in a challenging moment when it came to being emcees, because back then you had to have a sharp sword to come out in the big park and call yourself a rapper. RZA made those beats that put us in a cage, like “Yo, if you come in this cage, you liable to die, fukking with us lyrically.”
“Protect Ya Neck” was a five-minute song where it seemed like we didn’t never have to stop rhyming on it. That was our first thing that we frisbeed out to everybody, and everybody loved it. So we knew the importance of making this album: “Yo, this shyt got to be what it’s supposed to be, and not what people might expect.”
I was one of the members to have the most songs on that album, that’s how much I was in the zone. I was right there when RZA was starting to feel his oats as a producer. I was his number one cheerleader and one of his number one coaches, too, when it came to criticizing and really wanting to win. Sometimes you need your guys next to you to put you in that frame of mind. That was the energy that we needed. I fukked around and went off on that album and did as much shyt as I could, and it made the cut.
5. The Notorious B.I.G., Ready to Die (1994)
Ready to Die was the shyt. Big was coming up around the same time we were. The whole New York scene was on fire back then. You had a lot of cats in different boroughs that were like, “Yo, it’s a guy named Biggie Smalls out there that’s killing it.” Me, I fell in love with the name, Biggie Smalls — it sounds like a gangster that really knows what he’s doing on that mic.
When he made Ready to Die, you knew this is going to be a guy that’s going to stick around for a long time. He had that rapper’s voice. He did a record with one of my brothers, Method Man [“The What”]: “fukk the world, don’t ask me for shyt/Everything you got, you got to work hard for it.” They was just bouncing. Songs like “Warning,” he was just letting it fly, and making a good representation of what New York emcees is about. We knew Biggie was a star back then, off his first album. I’m a very good ear when it comes to who I feel got it. And he definitely had it on that album.
One of my favorites is “Party and Bullshyt” [Biggie’s non-album single from 1993] — that takes me back to rec-room parties and having fun and wearing Polo gooses, and just doing stupid shyt. Jumping on trains with 40 ounces, drinking, hanging, riding bikes on the back of the bus. All type of shyt we used to do, and he painted that whole shyt in one fukking verse on that song. That’s what we used to do: We used to party and bullshyt. Bullshyt was just fukking around in the neighborhood. We might go down to the liquor store and go fukking swindle three bottles of fukking Carlo Rossi or whatever we wanted at that time. Ballantine Ale, we used to steal beer and all that shyt, go get drunk, go hang out in the staircase and drink. Songs like that, I can relate to.
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