The 100 Best LA Rap Songs

Album: Famous Cryp
Label:Fifth Amendment/eOne
Producer: Scum Beatz

Before he became an odd mix of an exaggerated meme—a reality TV figure moonlighting as an amateur boxer—Blueface was a capable rapper with an off-kilter flow and at least one cult classic mixtape, Famous Cryp. "Respect My Cryppin" put him on the map, but it was the sleazy "Thotiana" that gave him a hit, a song so brazen and ridiculous that you have to take it seriously. —Dimas Sanfiorenzo

Album: The Kickback
Label: Capitol
Producer: RunWay Star

Cali Swag District's time was short but it gave us one of the most inescapable songs of the 2010s.

There is a real recess-time energy to “Teach Me How to Dougie,” which is an ode to a dance that started in Dallas, paying homage to pioneering Harlem figure Doug E. Fresh. Culture just has a tendency to move. And despite the lighthearted nature of their music, there would be a bunch of tragedy around the group. M-Bone was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2011, while JayAre, who had sickle cell, died of cardiac arrest in 2014. —Dimas Sanfiorenzo

Album: Loc-ed After Dark
Label: Delicious Vinyl
Producer: Matt Dike, Michael Ross

“I had a killer telephone voice,” Tone Loc once said, in explanation of his success. And he had a killer track, produced by LA DJ Matt Dike, who had broader taste than any producer in hip-hop at the time.

You need a pretty refined sense of fun and games to create a danceable rap song based on Van Halen's “Jamie's Cryin'.” The verses were written by Delicious Vinyl's in-house hit maker Young MC, and the hook was based on something Fab 5 Freddy said in a Spike Lee movie, but “Wild Thing” belongs wholly to the smog-clogged speech of one former Crip turned lovable lothario.

Album: "Surgery" - Single
Label: Kru-Cut Records
Producer: Lozno Williams

To understand “Surgery” you really need to look at the purple-tinted illustration that adorned the original 1984 Kru-Cut 12-inch, which sold 50,000 copies independently. Dr. Dre—outfitted in O.R. scrubs, a look that unfortunately didn’t catch on in Compton—performs a surgical procedure on a set of turntables, as a pair of assistants hand him necessary implements.

One guy offers a mixer, while a female nurse monitors an IV drip directly into the electronics of the turntable (you can hear the sound of that drip in the music). A man in a NASA suit observes them from behind glass, smoking a pipe. Not telling what’s in the pipe, but this was 1984, so use your imagination. The Wreckin’ Cru obviously did.

Even now, “Surgery” is still an admirably surreal piece of work. Surgery turned out to be the perfect metaphor for LA electro, because Dre’s cuts and production touches were the product of steady, precise handiwork, and yet you still felt like you were looking down at a pile of throbbing innards. No pop-locking in the ER.

Album: Curb Servin'
Label: PayDay/FFRR/PolyGram Records
Producer: Crazy Toones

“And all the time I'm bumpin WC/Cause it seem like he the only nigga making sense to me.”

Such were the words of the great Pimp C in 1994. WC displayed the kind of hard-won wisdom that a Texan could appreciate. Dub-C could have become the West Coast equivalent to Scarface, but where Face turned inward to brooding contemplations of mortality, Dub Crip-walked into a successful career as the third banana in Westside Connection. “West Up” catches him just before then, at the apex of his solo career.

No rapper has ever been more deserving of George Duke's chunky “Reach For It.” The high-cholesterol bass is just right for WC, who quite obviously came from a place where “even the strongest niggas is drug through the mud.” This anthem came with a great video, in which the crew turns a gridlock headache into a full-scale BBQ party in the middle of the freeway. It's the L.A. antidote to that preposterous REM clip for “Everybody Hurts,” only instead of Michael Stipe's Christ pose you get extra servings of ribs, spokes, hoochies, etc.

Album: "Dial A Freak" - Single
Label: Freak Beat Records
Producer: Egyptian Lover/Mr. Prinze

By the time “Dial-A-Freak” was released in 1984, Uncle Jamm’s Army really was an army. Led by Rodger Clayton, The Harbor City-based crew of DJs and musicians had been promoting and performing at house parties since the early 1970s, and they were almost single-handedly responsible for cultivating the first wave of LA electro and hip-hop innovators, including Egyptian Lover, Arabian Prince, Ice-T, DJ Pooh, DJ Bobcat, and the World Class Wreckin Cru.

Clayton’s roots were in the meaty, friendly party funk of the Ohio Players and Earth, Wind & Fire, but “Dial-A-Freak” is evacuated of anything organic. It’s a cold rush of wind for an extremely hot party. There's a smell hanging in the air that isn’t weed—something unrecognizably metallic.

One minute you're under the stars on Venice Beach with Egyptian Lover, next thing you know you're riding a camel through the sands near the Pyramids! He’s telling the truth when he raps: “Some say I’m conceited/But I can’t be beated.”

Album: No One Can Do it Better
Label: Ruthless Records/Atlantic Recording Corporation
Producer: Dr. Dre, DJ Yella

“The Grand Finale” is the best N.W.A song ever made that isn't an N.W.A song. With a lineup that runs from Cube to Ren to Eazy to The D.O.C.—with hypeman interjections from Dre—"The Grand Finale" offers an alternate picture of the Compton super group. Can you imagine an entire album that had Ren and Cube and D.O.C. sharing equal space on the mic?

And yet it's the soon-to-be ostracized Eazy who steals the show, with a completely preposterous and childlike reference to his dick: “The pleasure and pain my wing-ding inflicted.” If only this lineup had lived into the Death Row era. Instead, we get the best posse cut in the history of South Central rap music. “I got raw when I came to Cali,” the Texas-born D.O.C. admits at the end of the song.

Album: Street Gospel
Label: Polygram
Producer: DJ Quik, Robert "Fonksta" Bacon, G-One

Every family has some peripheral uncle who appears only occasionally. No one knows where he comes from, but he packs more charm and has bigger stories and is a little funnier and a little scarier than anyone else in the family-because he is unhinged. And then you realize that's why he only appears occasionally. That's Suga Free's role in LA rap. The question of why he isn't a bigger star would be relevant if its answer were not so evident: he has too much style and he refuses to make music for the masses.

Also he is from Pomona, and continues to represent the Inland Empire. For that reason, he would probably agree that you haven't really listened to “Dip Da” until you've listened to it at 2:30am while driving through the Donut Hole in La Puente. By “driving through,” you must actually drive inside an enormous fabricated donut to pick up your crullers. Suga Free could rap the menu at the Donut Hole without a beat, and it would still be the most musical LA rap song of the year.

Album: The Predator
Label: Priority
Producer: Torture Chamba

Who said New York rappers were the only ones to collab with reggae artists? The first single from Cube's third solo album features dancehall-flavored vocals from the man called Don Jagwarr. And Torture Chamba's beat is musical murder.

Album: New Funky Nation
Label: 4th & B-way, Island, PolyGram
Producer: Boo-Ya T.R.I.B.E., John King

This is such a good-time jam that it's easy to overlook how feared these six Samoan brothers were in the '80s-'90s LA club scene. Having appeared as poppers in the early documentary Breaking and Entering, the oversize crew had their breakthrough with this party starter from their debut album. And their guns go "boo-yaa!"

Album: Informal Introduction
Label: Sire/London
Producer: Eddie Berkeley, Kay Gee

Nominally a Shade Sheist song, "Where I Wanna Be" is again a showcase for Nate Dogg's mellifluous, multi-tracked, gangsta-gospel vocals. As Nate equates loved ones with "thug ones," this is sun-dappled Sunday slow-roll at its finest.

Album: Ketchup
Producer: DJ Mustard
Label: N/A

The ratchet era needed a Nate Dogg, a crooner capable of delivering the sexually explicit lyrics of his rap counterparts more melodically, transmuting the potentially offensive into hilarious and self-aware absurdity.

Ty Dolla $ign slid into the role as one-third of LA.’s unofficial ratchet triumvirate alongside DJ Mustard and YG. Originally released on Mustard’s 2013 mixtape, Ketchup, “Paranoid” is Ty’s most indelible contribution to the West Coast canon, the closest anyone has come to “Ain’t No Fun (If the Homies Can’t Have None)” in the 2010s. The beat, like most of those in Mustard’s oeuvre, is sparse and rubbery, ping ponging between simple yet effective keys and skittering percussion.

The hook compresses the sole nightmare of the unfaithful into a few lines; Ty’s verses are a page-by-page look at his black book and the game therein. The remix with B.o.B landed on Billboard for weeks, but Joe Moses’ verse on the original will probably haunt T.I. forever.

Album: Street Scholars
Label: Death Row/Interscope
Producer: Sam Sneed, Dr. Dre

The Murder Was The Case soundtrack had a feel all its own. It was more stressful and paranoid than The Chronic (with good reason, remember) but had not yet morphed into the new sonic templates that Dre would devise after leaving Death Row.

The piano chords are suspended in air like clouds of smoke, and the rhythm is chillingly resolute, as though a death sentence had been decided and could be revoked. The beat is the star here, but Sam Sneezy gets the job done, because this was the moment when LA rap was handed off from big stars to soldiers. It didn’t matter who was rapping because by that time, the slinky whine of Dre’s Mini-Moog was single-handedly running the West Coast.

Album: Me and Joe
Label: Egyptian Empire Recordings
Producer: Rodney O

Two turntables, a microphone, and a subwoofer. And two of the most exquisitely processed coiffures in the history of black American music. Those who where on the scene for the release of “Everlasting Bass” on Egyptian Empire in 1986 do not forget it. It ranks among the paramount events in LA rap chronology, a tectonic detonation of unadultered low-frequency measurement that rivaled an earthquake.

To summarize the group's platinum tastes, Rodney O explains that “We ride on 747s not DC10s.” It's a point of comparison that could just as easily apply to their low-end assault. As N.W.A, ascended Rodney O and Joe Cooley were obscured in the public consciousness, a historical oversight attributable to their taste in curl activator and stonewashed denim. However, their hair was timeless and so was their bass. Even when Dre and Cube were dissing them, regional innovators like Uncle Luke and Mannie Fresh were relaying the message.

Album: Make Way For the Motherlode
Label: East West America/Atlantic Records
Producer: Ice Cube

East coast rapstresses like MC Lyte and Queen Latifah get more credit for repping for the ladies, but Yolanda “Yo Yo” Whittaker should never be forgotten.

She came out hard with her debut single, a no-nonsense banger where she acknowledges that, yeah, she's got a soft ass, but “if you touch it, you're living in a coffin.” Cube doesn't rap on this song as much as he cosigns her with authoritative shit talk, crowning her “the brand new intelligent black lady… For all you suckas.”

Album: I Wish
Label: Scotti Bros. Sunshine
Producer: Walter "Kandor" Kahn, Skee-Lo

In the summer of 1995, when gangsta rap ruled the charts, Skee-Lo offered a counterpoint to all the gang signs and grimaces.

“I Wish” slipped in something gentler and more subversive. Over a sunny Bernard Wright sample, the Los Angeles rapper’s horn-driven anthem cataloged ordinary defeats while daydreaming aloud for height, a nice ride, and elusive romance.

A modest hit at the time that peaked just outside the Top Ten, it’s now a commercial regular, recently featured in ESPN and Super Bowl ads. Skee-Lo confesses, "It's a shame, when you livin' in a city that's the size of a box, and nobody knows your name,” an enduring act of honesty that shows rap can speak to the everyman’s quiet yearning. —David Ma

Album: "Won't Catch Me Runnin'/Remain Anonymous" - Single
Label: Patchwerk Recordings
Producer: Vooodu

Ras Kass often tops the thinking fan's shortlist for LA's finest overlooked rapper of all time. But his maximum verbosity offers no easy entry point; only a dedicated B-boy or B-girl could engage the work of a rapper who demands his fans "witness my linguistics like a Muslim takes jihad." No chorus, just a lyrical lynching: "too many MCs get deals from who you're down with or where you represent."

Album: Labcabincalifornia
Label: Delicious Vinyl
Producer: Jay Dee

Their Bizarre Ride was over and the dyspepsia had set in: "Niggas done sold they souls and now they souls is hollow." Imani, Booty Brown, Fatlip and SlimKid3 followed up the classic singles from their debut ("Passin' Me By"; "Ya Mama") with something a little more somber, assisted by a vocal sample ("Drrrrrop!") of Beastie Boy Ad-Rock. Check the Spike Jonze video where, aptly, the Pharcyde travel in reverse through the straight world.

Album: Music & Me
Label: Elektra
Producer: Bink!

Although "Nobody Does It Better" is in fact Nate Dogg's biggest solo hit, and "These Days" is so heartfelt it might make you cry, we've got love for the lead single for his sophomore album, Music & Me.

Backed by an obnoxiously boombastic beat from Bink!, the late great Nate spit his game the way only he knew how. Although he made a career out of singing classic hooks and bridges for every rapper under the sun, here he simply “oooohs” his way through the hook—and that's all we need.

Album: Escape From Havana
Label: Capitol
Producer: Tony G

Original Delicious Vinyl labelmates with Tone Loc and Young MC, Cuban-born, South Gate LA raised Mellow Man Ace never had a hit as big as "Wild Thing" or "Bust A Move." But "Mentitrosa" was close, going to No. 14 on the pop charts and putting Spanglish rap on the map.

Produced by KDAY radio legend Tony G, "Mentitrosa" borrows its theme from the song it samples-"Evil Ways" by Santana-calling a girl out on her shit: "Last night you didn't go/ a la casa de tu tio..." True fact: Mellow Man Ace is Sen-Dog's older brother.

Album: Blank Face LP
Label: TDE, Interscope
Producer: Cardo, Yung Exclusive, Cubeatz, Sounwave

This song is fun and catchy where the rest of Blank Face LP is gnarly and impenetrable. Q’s verse meanders casually around the expression “that part” and Kanye raps about...Chipotle and the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman? And then there’s a breakdown where the beat—from Cardo, Yung Exclusive, Cubeatz, and Sounwave—uncouples from the foundation like a spaceship undocking and Kanye makes all manner of noises. Kanye doesn’t care about words here. He’s almost beyond sound. —Ross Scarano

Album: World Ultimate
Label: Wild West, American Recordings, Warner Bros.
Producer: The Nonce

A b-boy rifles through his cassette collection, which gets him reminiscing about the open mic scene at Leimert Park when, "Money wasn't really part of the rap/Pay was having people starting to clap." The nostalgia is so poignant he wonders if he should just go back to slangin' mixtapes. This is the classic single from the sole album by Nouka Base and Yusef Afloat (RIP).

Album: Cold Devil
Label: Stinc Team / self-released
Producer: Bruce24k

A South Central salvo for a new generation—the card-crackers, seal-breakers and pink-slippers. "Flu Flamming" is still the north star for "nervous music," Drakeo’s sleight of hand that forever reimagined LA rap. Sparseness on the beat, superstardom in the foreground. Our protagonist really showed us mopsticks in mama’s couch while sheriffs hawked his every move. There are no features here, but the guest list is stacked. Bruce Wayne pulls up rocking Maison Margiela. Luke Skywalker leads a game of semi-automatic laser tag. Sideshow Bob and Pippi Longstocking are drafted into life’s long mud-walk. Like the best of the Drakeo discography, "Flu Flamming" is both secret code and city canon. —Steven Louis

Album: Mack 10
Label: Priority
Producer: Ice Cube

How much squelchier could a West Coast bass line be? Is that the best measure of this Inglewood jingle? Or did the East Coast finally cower in the face of pulled straps, khaki suits and Chucks on the barbed wire? Some years before he married T-Boz, Mack 10 pleaded "your honor, I'm a changed man" on this superbad, supergansta general delivery.

Album: Uncle Sam's Curse
Label: Ruthless
Producer: Cold 187um, DJ-Koss, KMG

Concept: Instead of an all-American orphan with superhuman abilities, Superman is a Compton drug slinger. And instead of doing everything in his power to protect Lois Lane, he risks life and limb to support his single mama. In a market clogged with superhero blockbusters, how is this prospective movie not on the shooting schedule?

Until it gets to the big screen, we’ll have to settle for the biggest hit by the highly underrated Above the Law, a team of fiercely imaginative rappers and producers that basically kept Ruthless relevant in the early 1990s. In their view, gang bangers are more like superheros than villains. Hutch has the last word: “Uh, you really wanna know why I sold scum?/Because my mama to me comes number one.”

Album: Act A Fool
Label: Capitol
Producer: DJ Pooh

King Tee came up alongside OG's like Ice-T and Kid Frost, and the title cut from his 1988 debut shows why he's considered a pioneer of West Coast rap. You better get ready when King Tee is about to act a fool. On this West Coast classic he details the events of a wild Friday night with rough rhymes about cruising the streets of LA, getting drunk, and smacking up a gold-digger at a party.

Album: Summertime ’06
Label: Def Jam
Producer: Clams Casino

In another world, this eerie cavern banger from Clams Casino becomes a Lil B song called something like "I am Beautiful."

Fortunately, we live in this world, where the beat is a shankh blow to shake up Long Beach. Vince goes platinum on Poppy Street, riding around from Ramona Park greens to the Louis Burger parking lot. He salutes the herald Nate Dogg and the homie T-Skrap. His sneering sincerity on "Norf Norf" marked him as one of rap’s great antiheroes. And "I ain’t never ran from nothing but the police" is still an all-time hook, put that on the Yankee hat. —Steven Louis

Album: Brown & Proud
Label: Pump Records
Producer: Jammin' James Carter, O.J. Romeo, Tony G., Fase Love

House finches have a pretty song and they appear freely in the parks of LA If you don't have access to a park in LA you can hear them sing backing vocals in “On A Sunday Afternoon.” Like most rappers, the house finch sings to attract a mate or to establish territory. Hence, the incorporation of a birdsong in this track makes sense.

In fact, it might be the prettiest, most haunting touch of production in all of LA rap. Generally speaking, the song is part of a tradition of smooth Sunday BBQ jams that also includes Dove Shack's “Summertime in the LBC.”

The way the song weaves together strands of several oldies is given credence by a cameo from Dick Hugg, a/k/a Huggy Boy, the white DJ who became a hero to LA Chicanos by broadcasting dedication songs on KRLA. “Hi, this is Huggy Boy, and this is going out to all the homies on a Sunday Afternoon…” It's a melody equal only to the mating call of the house finch.

Album: It Takes A Thief
Label: Tommy Boy
Producer: Brian Dobbs

As one of the most felonious members of WC's superlative Maad Circle crew, Coolio was the last figure anyone expected to be the crossover success story of 1994.

But thanks to “Fantastic Voyage,” his gravity-defying cornrows became the most famous haircut in America, second only to that of Kramer from Seinfeld. Based on a sample of the 1980 hit of the same name by the Dayton, Ohio-based funk outfit Lakeside, “Fantastic Voyage” was the first song to make gangsta rap totally amenable to white America.

“Ain't no bloodin', ain't no crippin'/Ain't no punk-ass niggas set trippin'/Everybody's got a stack and it ain't no crack/And it really don't matter if you're white or black.” Coolio may have been selling out the kind of South LA reality rap he had helped to invent with WC, but in a year when gang violence was surging, you can't blame the man born Artis Leon Ivey Jr. for trying something friendly. “Fantastic Voyage” allowed suburban families to enjoy an all-inclusive party jam that had all of the bounce of vintage LA rap with none of the attendant violence.

Album: "Bow Wow Wow" - Single
Label: Immortal Records
Producer: DJ Muggs

Forget that “Bow Wow Wow” is an unabashed hybrid of two of rap's most beloved anthems: Snoop's “What's My Name” and House of Pain's “Jump Around.” Forget that Funkdoobiest had a lineup that sounded like a bad joke (“A Puerto Rican, a Mexican and an Indian walk into a bar…”)

Let's focus instead on lead rapper Son Doobie a/k/a The Porno King. On “Bow Wow Wow” he compares himself to Tina Turner, Barney Rubble, Sigourney Weaver, Colt Seavers, Fire Marshall Bill, Harry Houdini and Tonto. 

If that doesn't sell you then leave it to the production-by DJs Muggs and Lethal. This the type of flow to make you start upending parking meters at the Grove. So what if Funkdoobiest is the Yum Yum to Cypress Hill's Winchell's? In a town where the donuts are that good, there's room for two.

Album: We're in This Together
Label: Priority
Producer: DJ Aladdin, Doug Young

There is a case to be made for Low Profile's 1989 debut We're In This Together as the greatest LA rap album ever made. Even when he was young, WC seemed about ten years older and 30 years wiser than his peers. Every song was delivered as a lesson from a hood elder. At a time when N.W.A was fracturing amidst petty beefs, We're In This Together seemed even more tight-knit and resolute by comparison.

One producer, one rapper. 11 tracks. No interludes. No singing. The front cover showed WC and DJ Aladdin in all-black Champion sweatshirts and snapbacks, glaring at the camera as if to ask the listener: “What do YOU have to say?” “Pay Ya Dues” epitomizes their method. Aladdin beats the sand out of “More To the Ounce” and WC uses three verses to unpack what it means and does not mean to ride a bandwagon. It's also the only rap song that uses the term “peon” as the ultimate diss.

The song's heart is its middle verse, where WC takes a break from breaking balls to draw a picture of his dedication: “Back in the days I drove a raggedy Dodge/Couldn't afford a studio, so we used a garage/Aladdin used to grab a gang of disco breaks/One turntable and a broken 808/My little brother Toones and Frank, they hung around all night/To make sure that the demo was tight/Didn't have an engineer, if you know what I mean/Aladdin did it all at the age of 16.” Before gangsta became glamorized, this pair was the salt of the LA earth.

Album: To Pimp a Butterfly
Label: Top Dawg Entertainment, Aftermath, Interscope
Producer: Pharrell Williams, Sounwave

God or a gun? A binary as timeless as oppression, it is central to Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.”

The fulcrum of the Compton native’s 2015 opus, To Pimp a Butterfly, the song is an impassioned prayer delivered with one foot dangling over a desert of desultory excess and the other planted firmly on blood-streaked concrete.

The questions mount as the divide widens. What do you do when wealth, once a believed theriac, becomes a toxin? How do you excise those who make you feel like a commodity? How do you release the rage you feel when watching the rampant violence perpetrated against black people every day?

Over a lush and percussive sax-laden suite from Sounwave and Pharell, Lamar admits to initially avoiding all the aforementioned inquiries in favor of flesh and finances. But, by the end, he announces his newfound clarity. Rap is his answer—a penance, a chance at redemption and resolution for “i” and we.

Album: Murder Was The Case OST/Natural Born Killers OST
Label: Death Row Records
Producer: Daz Dillinger, Dr. Dre

“What Would U Do?” is G-funk comfort food from the line cooks of the Death Row Family Restaurant, est. 1991. One big difference between camp Ruthless and camp Row was that Ruthless preferred to make their threats over slow-burning, undanceably psychotic beats. One of the reasons Death Row won that war-at least in the minds of the record-buying public-is because of songs like “What Would U Do,” which finds time to shit on BG Knocc Out, Dresta, Eazy and Cold187um, but only in the context of a swift clip, all the better to keep the crowd moving while indoctrinating them with anti-Ruthless sentiment.

Album: Doris
Label: Tan Cressida, Columbia
Producer: Christian Rich

“Chum” begins with a scream. It’s brief and barely audible, half a second at most. It doesn’t belong to Earl Sweatshirt. Instead, he offers two of the best verses in the Odd Future catalog.

The rhymes are lucid and deftly written autobiography, the portrait of a broken and perpetually bristling young writer, detailing everything from the incalculable emotional damage of growing up without his father to the rise of OF and his return from Samoan exile.

Each event is sketched with incisive wordplay and a precociously wise perspective, Earl’s dead-eyed delivery never wavering. Co-produced with duo Christian Rich, the beat is built around a plaintive piano loop, the propulsive drums and dirty bass both as raw as the open wounds Earl attempts to cauterize.

“Chum” was the first of three singles on Doris; all were antithetical to commercial rap radio playlists. Still, the album debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Rap Albums chart. Other rappers might have to scream regularly, but Earl’s never had to.

Album: The Young Son of No One
Label: Atlantic
Producer: L.A. Posse

The rap music equivalent of the D.C. Comics character Harvey Dent—aka Two-Face, because in comics, as in rap, there’s always an aka—“L.A. Posse” is cut down the middle: 50% New York and 50% Los Angeles. Confusingly, “L.A. Posse” is not just the name of the song but the name of the production team that made it, who weren’t from L.A., but rather from Queens.

Originally signed to Def Jam, they were set to produce LL Cool J’s Bigger and Deffer but things fell through and they relocated to L.A., where they hooked up with Breeze, an L.A. native with a style based on LL Cool J.

If that’s not confusing enough, try wrapping your head around the beat, which essentially runs a Zapp song and a James Brown song (well, a Hank Ballard song, produced by James Brown) at the same time, for the deluxe bicoastal mindwarp.

Album: Skanless
Label: Hollywood Records
Producer: Tony-A

The jheri curl was invented in Los Angeles in the late 1970s by a white hairdresser named Jheri Redding. It became the most popular black hairstyle on earth with the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller, which functioned as a worldwide advertisement for Redding's line of hair goops. The curl died in 1991, when Ice Cube shaved his off for Death Certificate and rapped about burning off Eazy's with gasoline in “No Vaseline.”

For true believers like Hi-C the last defense of the hairstyle that had become the ghetto equivalent of a mullet was to celebrate its nastiness. “Leave My Curl Alone” is easily the apex of shower cap rap. (Competition is slim.) In it the leaky perm becomes a way for Hi-C to mark his territory (“Grease on the do' / The bathroom flo'…).

Likewise, Hi-C argues that the curl may serve as a litmus test for potential sex partners. He confesses that he's “got a gang of hoochies but the Fendi girls don't want me.” If you learn anything from Hi-C you will learn that a single hoochie is worth 100 Fendi girls.

Album: Ahmad
Label: Giant/Reprise/Warner Bros.
Producer: Ahmad, Redfoo

Ahmad was a smart rapper. Not just clever—the dude graduated from Stanford with a degree in sociology.

Maybe that’s why he could hone in on all those details that make “Back In the Day” feel like an emblem for everyone’s childhood, even though his details are all about an LA childhood: “Hide and go get it” with the younger hoes by the bungalows; the day when J.J. Fad’s “Supersonic” hit the streets; the stoop-sitting dream of escaping South Central.

We still grimace when I hear the line about eating “pickles and tootsie pops” but in retrospect it’s the perfect way to describe the bitter sweetness of the beat, which is based on Womack & Womack’s 1981 hit “Love TKO.”

Even if you are in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, this song slows down everything around you. Ahmad produced it himself (with an assist from Redfoo of LMFAO), which part of why we forgive his blatant imitation of The Pharcyde.

Album: Black Sunday
Label: Ruffhouse, Columbia
Producer: Cypress Hill

Only in the rear view mirror does the similarity between "Jump Around" and "Insane In The Brain" seem impossibly close; at the time both break-out tracks were just the latest gems from producer DJ Muggs. This was the crossover crucible for Cypress, who emerged with the entire Beavis & Butthead nation behind them. B-Real's Rammellzee-inspired gangster duck bite and Sen-Dog's bark celebrated bongs, going loco, and trumpeter Louis Armstrong.

Album: No Limit Top Dogg
Label: No Limit
Producer: Dr. Dre

When he was Death Row's last man standing, Snoop Dogg found a new home at Master P's No Limit Records. But as a No Limit soldier, Snoop was expected to churn out tunes by the pound, just like the rest of the team.

Although his first No Limit album, Da Game Is to Be Sold, Not to Be Told, felt like a byproduct of Master P's production schedule, his follow-up, No Limit Top Dogg, was much stronger. Mainly because Snoop hooked up with Dr. Dre and Nate Dogg again for the first time since the Death Row days. He even brought rising star Xzibit along for the ride on this West Coast classic. Coupled with Dre's 2001 later that year, the West Coast was definitely back in the house.

Album: The Yellow Album

Label: Other People's Money / self-released

Producer: Dahi

It’s just not that deep sometimes. Dom Kennedy broke out because he had the juice, in a city where the juice is pressed and bottled.

"My Type of Party" shows how much Dom can do with so little. He stays on one rhyme scheme per verse. He daps Matt Kemp in Dodger blues. He likes her face, and he likes her friend’s body. Dahi brings it all together with a neon tarmac to light up Leimert Park. Los Angeles rap lineage is steeped in protests, beefs and freeway chases. But it will always prioritize a good party, which Dom throws without trying. —Steven Louis

Album: Straight Checkn 'Em
Label: Orpheus
Producer: DJ Slip, The Unknown DJ

Anchored by a sample of Joe Simon's “Theme From Cleopatra Jones,” “Growin' Up In the Hood” is the song that transforms Blaxploitation dreams into a gangbanger's deep blues. MC Eiht sets his narrative in the mid-1980s, before Compton culture went mainstream, before the Crips and Bloods had their own rap albums, back when the gangsters C-Walked to James Brown.

There's something in this song that goes beyond the G-Rap trend of the 1990s and connects to an ancient form of ghetto nihilism. “This is a two-by-four, I'll trim it down to fit my hand / When I get through with you this time baby / You know I'll treat your man.” Those were the words of west coast blues man Lowell Fulson in “Double Trouble,” which was recorded on Central Avenue in 1949, but could have just as believably come from MC Eiht on the same block, 40 years later.

Album: Made in America
Label: East West America, Elektra
Producer: DJ Battlecat
The word is a friend to anyone in need of a fast reason why LA sucks: “Traffic.” Kam's brilliance is that he somehow turned traffic into a positive. In his song, traffic isn't something to complain about-it's a metaphor for the pulse of LA culture. Cause I'm known as a peacemaker on the L.A. streets/Wakin' black people up over gangster beats/I'm in traffic.”

Parking lots, swap meets, barbershops-being in traffic is all about living the day. "In Traffic" also functions as a helpful instructional manual for averting the authorities: “Damn, a nigga can't even kick it/Tried to defile it and got a hydraulic ticket/I'm takin' off of this clown and skated/Court sent me a bill and I still ain't paid it.” There isn't a car owner in the county who can't relate.

Album: Stone Cold Rhymin'
Label: Fourth & Broadway/Delicious Vinyl/Island Records/BMG Ariola
Producer: Matt Dike, Michael Ross

“Bust a Move” was the brainchild of several LA wunderkinds. DJ Matt Dike, who elevated the art of deejaying at his club Power Tools (1985–1987); Michael Ross, a UCLA business student from Long Beach who parlayed Dike's talents into Delicious Vinyl, the most successful and longest-running impendent rap label on the West Coast; and Marvin Young, a USC economics student, who wrote raps that a generation of teenagers memorized and would still repeat decades after they grew up, got rich and became the characters you see in Up In the Air. Last but not least, Flea delivers the bassline for a perfect confection of LA musical currents circa 1989.

Album: House of Pain
Label: XL Recordings
Producer: DJ Muggs

By the time his shamrock-flaunting crew became a mainstream phenomenon, Erik "Everlast" Shrody had been around the hip-hop block dating back to his appearance on Rhyme Syndicate's 1988 comp Comin' Through.

Piling atop a "Blow Ya Head" sample (smartly depicted as a bagpipe in the song's video), Everlast's team-up with Danny Boy and DJ Lethal as House of Pain celebrated Irish-American heritage with a ready-to-rumble roughness as good as Guinness. "Word to your moms, I came to drop bombs, got more rhymes than the Bible got psalms." A grandstand-rattling classic to this day.

Album: Balance & Options
Label: Arista
Producer: DJ Quik

“Mama, I know you said that you wanted a record you could listen to/With no cussing and shit/I tried/But I still gotta do this!”

We'll never know what Mama Quik thought when she got to the part about “raggedy-ass bitches,” but it's still a good bet that this is her favorite song. Its genius is that it's about a party where everything goes wrong-“Cigarette burns in my plush/Empty beers bottles in the brush/And my bitch acting like a lush”—and yet everything about it feels right.

Balance & Options might well be Quik's best-engineered album in a career of superbly-engineered albums. If you got Rod Temperton and Quincy Jones to reunite at the console on which they recorded Off the Wall, they still might not be able to make a track with a polyurethane glimmer to match “Pitch In On A Party.”

Album: Doggystyle
Label: Death Row/Interscope/Atlantic
Producer: Dat Nigga Daz, Warren G

This gem from Snoop's debut album provided several classic rap quotables. But more importantly, it supplied hip-hop with one of its cornerstone pillars: trust no ho.

Instead of getting sprung on a chick who gets around, Snoop and the fellas showed that sharing with your boys was caring for your boys. And let's not forget Nate Dogg's melodic rap, in which he tells a chick that because she gave up the P so fast, he lost respect for her even faster.

Album: Supersonic
Label: Ruthless
Producer: Dr. Dre, DJ Yella, Arabian Prince

Salt-N-Pepa was the biggest female rap act in the world. Thus, Eazy-E needed his own version of Salt-N-Pepa.

J.J. Fad was three teenagers from Rialto, California: MC J.B. (Juana Burns), Baby-D (Dania Birks), and Sassy C. (Michelle Franklin). Up to 1987, “Supersonic” was the biggest-selling song on Ruthless Records, with over 400,000 copies sold out of car trunks under the supervision of Jerry Heller and Eazy-E.

When Atlantic picked up J.J. Fad for national distribution, Heller enthused to the New York office: “It’s just jammin’, fresh and def,” which was the acronym Eazy had deduced from the group’s moniker. “Supersonic” went on to become an even bigger national hit, and with good reason. It’s the perfect merger of Arabian Prince’s fast-break electro and Cold Chillin’-style beatboxing.

Album: good kid, m.A.A.d city
Label: Interscope, TDE, Aftermath
Producer: DJ Dahi

When looking at Kendrick Lamar's solo discography, there isn't a bunch of Black Hippy representation. The closest we got was "Money Trees," a haunting collaboration between two of TDE's earliest signees. What makes this song special is the way both rappers attack the beat: Kendrick glides, charming his way in with little catch phrases ("you, bish"), while Jay Rock straight up Deebos the track, attacking it with brute force and ferocious wordplay. Can't go wrong with either approach. —Dimas Sanfiorenzo

Album: My Krazy Life
Label: Def Jam
Producer: DJ Mustard

It takes a conscious effort to replace C’s (and C sounds) with B’s—at least initially. Eventually the oral affront to the opposition becomes an inextricable aspect of your lexicon. YG didn’t invent the switch, but he’s the first to expose the lingo to the masses so brazenly. “Bicken Back Being Bool” is his answer to DJ Quik’s “Loked Out Hood.”

The narrative isn’t as cohesive, or chronological, but the conflict is the same. A day of intended relaxation goes horribly awry in Bompton—shots are fired, homes are robbed, and YG goes to prison.

His plainspoken rhymes convey the chaos with arresting immediacy. DJ Mustard’s beat thumps with sub-rattling menace and shimmers like shattered glass in the sunlight. Though YG recycles lines from his 2011 song “Honestly” when engaging in full Blood speak, it’s forgivable. “Smoking on a bigarette/Eating a bowl of bereal” will always be inexplicably catchy.

Album: Goblin
Label: XL
Producer: Tyler, the Creator

It was before the sold-out world tours, the handful of Grammys, the walkthroughs at Carreau du Temple and the 35mm A24 shoots.

The remarkable career of Tyler Okonma pops off with a Madagascar hissing cockroach. Granted, "Yonkers" is wall-to-wall shock and awe. Tyler’s beat traps a ghost in a machine and drowns the machine in battery acid. His flow scrapes into the underworld.

The second verse tells Jesus to find a shrink, then makes Stevie Wonder run fade routes. He summons school shootings and dinosaur threesomes and a 187 on Bruno Mars. It’s all grayscale nightmare fuel. But nothing landed quite like that cockroach, which shook up the blog era and put the center of the universe on Melrose and Fairfax. —Steven Louis

Album: Perfect Ten
Label: Universal Music Group, 10 Summers Records, Interscope Records
Producer: Mustard, GYLTTRYP, Justus West

"Ballin’"—this site’s song of the year in 2019—builds such unique sorrow and triumph.

While Mustard’s guitar gently weep its thug tears, the grand piano rings out like a funeral procession. That pitched-up sample of 702’s "Get it Together" sounds like some sort of long goodbye. But altogether, the beat glows with sunset hues of pink, blue and golden brown. It’s the music at the mountaintop. Roddy’s verses swerve in the same style—Forgis on the Jeep as he mourns Nipsey, twin baddies as he remembers his uncle fronting Ps. "Ballin’" is complicated, and that’s what makes it simple. —Steven Louis

Album: Careless World: Rise of the Last King
Label: Young Money, Cash Money, Republic
Producer: DJ Mustard, Mike Free

In the early 2010s, Tyga was mostly seen as a joke, the rapper who made that corny lime and coconut song with Travis McCoy, who was best known for eating money on the internet. But then "Rack City" came. Tyga's rapping is decent, but really the song is iconic because this is the birth of DJ Mustard, the producer's first big hit, featuring that bass-y groove that was ripped off countless times.

Album: The Documentary
Label: Aftermath, Interscope, G-Unit
Producer: Dr. Dre, Scott Storch

Crips, Bloods, eses, Asians—everyone could agree that this was a smash. This song kicked off Game's major label debut album and was also the song that really got him buzzing on the mixtape circuit. The track featured a vicious piano line courtesy of the good Doc and 50 Cent on the chorus, but unlike Game's other 50-assisted hits (“How We Do” and “Hate It Or Love It”) "Westside Story" didn't have 50 stealing the show or even spitting any verses.

This was rough, rugged, and raw West coast music for cats who don't do button-up shirts or drive Maybachs.

Album: Quik is the Name
Label: Profile
Producer: DJ Quik

"That's the biggest hit I've had, chart-wise, in my career," Quik once told Complex. "That was my second record that impacted at radio."

But the song had even greater significance for Quik, because it marked his coming-of-age. "I'm hanging out with all these OG-ass gangbangin'-ass drug dealer fly-ass rich motherfuckers," Quik explained. "And I ended up just being like one of them... I made 'Tonite' gloating about that. You know, I ain't got no job, but I'm having money—and I'm honing in my rap style... I'm pretty lucky in a lot of senses. Because I could have gotten killed living the lifestyle I was living. But the shit turned into money... Alcohol, growing up, bitches and shit—it was a great time. Debauchery at its finest.”

Album: "Put The Monkey In It" - Single
Label: Tommy Boy
Producer: Daz Dillinger

When Death Row's freshman class was first in session, around 1991, one of several duos to pair off within the larger collective was Daz Dillinger and Soopafly. The first was one-half of the Long Beach rap duo the Dogg Pound, and the second was a musical mastermind and closet rapper originally recruited to play keyboards on Dre's tracks.

They've been collaborators ever since, although the peak of their musical friendship was probably 1997's “Put The Monkey In It.” This was G-funk in its dapper middle-age. Instead of pulls of malt liquor at the local liquor mart, the beats now felt like sips of cognac at a well-appointed gentleman's club. Daz knew how to rap at conversation volume, and his nimble vocal fits into Sooafly's track like stitching to the leather upholstery of a factory Lexus.

Album: IV Life
Label: MCA Records
Producer: DJ Broadway, King Tee

When asked to identify the center of an infamously centerless city, Joan Didion pointed to the intersection of Sunset and La Brea. The thick of Hollywood. Bullshit. Anyone who lives in the real Los Angeles could tell you that its center is the cloverleaf in which the 105 crosses over the 110.

Everytime an Angeleno returns home to the city, you take the carpool lane east on the Harbor Freeway, and you get lifted up on the greatest freeway interchange in Southern California, a boomerang turn that throws you ten stories above the streets as you curve to the north and are gifted with a view of the smog-shrouded mountains and dystopian downtown spires. The big home. It's impossible for a song to sound bad on that drive, but there is one piece of music that contains the climactic concrete-born freedom of that turn, and its name is “Dippin.”

Album: The Platform
Label: RCA, Young Money, Cash Money, Republic
Producer: Nic Nac, Kragen

Although not born in LA, there is no artist more associated with modern-day LA radio than Chris Brown—whose music is so omnipresent that he should get his own channel.

Right below him is Tyga. And in 2015 the two joined for a Watch the Throne–like album (if the throne was shorthand for "your girl"). "Ayo" was the big single from the album and it’s the creative peak of that bright and spunky Kid Ink sound that was so dominant in the mid-2010s. it's a silly but infectious party-starter, with the two showing off a genuinely engaging chemistry. —Dimas Sanfiorenzo

Album: The Platform
Label: Capitol
Producer: Kut Masta Kurt

Alongside Jurrasic 5, the punningly named Peoples were LA's standard bearers of trad rap in the '90s.

And because tradition dictates that hip-hop came from New York, this track has NYC in its guts, with a sample of Phife Dawg ("not now but right now") and a lyrical reference to the Baseball Furies. Nevertheless, "Work The Angles" is a West Coast number due to the angular piano and fatback funk of Kut Master Kurt's production. Oh, and Evidence's shout-out to Lakers' color commentator Stu Lanz.

Album: Guerillas In Tha Mist
Label: Street Knowledge
Producer: Ice Cube, Chilly Chill, Mr. Woody, Rashad, T-Bone

In order to destroy racism from the inside out, Da Lench Mob appropriated every horrifying jungle-derived stereotype used to mock African-Americans, and turned the imagery into an insurgent assault against white America. If you are able to unpack all the semiotic implications of this song you might think about applying for tenure at Morehouse.

But even if you got your only degree from Saturday morning television, you’ll be able to catch Ice Cube’s drift: “Fuck Grape Ape and Magilla I’m a killa / Magilla Gorilla ain’t a killa / White boys like Godzilla / But my super nigga King Kong / Played his ass like ping pong.”

Album: Menace II Society Soundtrack
Label: Jive
Producer: DJ Slip, MC Eiht, Quincy Jones III

Perhaps better known by gamers as the voice of Ryder in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Compton's Most Wanted hardnut MC Eiht broke through in '93 with this key hit from the soundtrack to Menace II Society (Eiht made an appearance in the move to boot). Headsnap rimshots over an upright bassline prompt Eiht to promise "muthafuckas I ain't finished / be on the lookout for the straight-up menace." G-yeeeah!

Album: Cypress Hill
Label: Ruffhouse, Columbia, SME
Producer: DJ Muggs

The real heads say “How I Could Just Kill a Man,” the masses say “Insane In the Brain,” but in the opinion of this writer the quintessential Cypress Hill song is “Hand on the Pump.”

Here are the reasons.

Sen Dog: “Put me in chains, try to beat my brains/I can get out but the grudge remains.” The group's best nonsensical hook: “I'm headed up the river with a boat and no paddle/And I'm handin' out beat downs!” In two lines, the chorus exemplifies the spirit of Cypress Hill, specifically the pairing of marijuana hedonism with casual violence, and B-Real's adenoidal chants with Sen Dog's constipational callbacks.

But most of all, this track is quintessential is for its incorporation of Gene Chandler's “Duke of Earl,” an all-time favorite of East LA lowriders. The way that DJ Muggs rigs a tensile drum pattern to the golden sheen of doo-wop is the perfect symbol for how Cypress re-armed the LA Chicano tradition without sacrificing any of the local flavors.

Album: "L.A. L.A." - Single
Label: Street People Record Co., Saturn Records
Producer: John Lundy, Greg Ware

Funkmaster General was a pen name for the songwriting and production team of Greg Ware and Jon Lundy. “L.A., L.A.” is one of dozens of songs that appeared in the wake of Ronnie Hudson's “West Coast Poplock,” which changed the sound of ghetto party music in Los Angeles. “L.A., L.A.” is shoddy, unstable, lyrically thin, and seemingly improvised, but these all are things that make it great.

It is a premier piece of basement funk with all the mold left in, and even though the redundant hook is no more complicated than a toddler's carseat rhyme, it somehow epitomizes the hallucinatory spirit of early L.A. electro, when there were no rules and aspiring producers were encouraged to be as bizarre as possible, as long as they could provide a glutinous low-end assault on par with Funkmaster General.

Album: Bitch Betta Have My Money
Label: Select Records
Producer: AMG, DJ Quik

Not long after he was rechristened AMG, 19-year-old Jason Lewis bonded with DJ Quik over their shared enthusiasm for the particulars of the vagina. They’ve been collaborating since 1991, which saw the release of “Bitch Betta Have My Money,” the most convivial song about snatching pussy in the history of California.

Key stanza: “Bend your ass on over and touch your toes / Hold your breath, cause I’ma hold my nose / This dick of mine ain't friendly baby / Will it hurt you? / Yeah maybe, probably.”

Album: Victory Lap
Label: Atlantic / All Money In No Money Out
Producer: Murda Beatz and Mike & Keys

Like much of Nipsey Hussle’s work, "Grinding All My Life" centers on Crenshaw Boulevard and Slauson Avenue. T

he music video shows the South Central lifer running racks through a money counter, fulfilling Marathon Clothing orders and stunting around the shopping center he reclaimed with his brother. It’s the rare banger about sacrifice, a club hit about early morning shifts. It’s also a Lakers starting lineup song that shouts out the Rolling 60s and looks back at county jail fades.

Nipsey knows what he’s doing when he references Tiny Cobby and Floyd Mayweather in the same verse. No one’s music is better at making small stretches of land feel so massive. —Steven Louis

Album: "Soul On Ice Remix/Marinatin" - Single
Label: Priority
Producer: Diamond D

If it weren't for Diamond D hooking up a sample of composer David Axelrod's 1968 song “The Mental Traveler,” the remix of “Soul On Ice” might just be another razor-sharp attack from LA's most New Yorkish MC.

Even though Diamond was full-blooded Bronx, something in him recognized the compatibility of Axe and Ras, a pair separated by race, generation and genre, but united in the themes of their work: namely, the paranoia and doom lurking beneath the majesty of Los Angeles.

Album: Hispanic Causing Panic
Label: Virgin
Producer: Baker Boyz, Frost, Julio G, Will Roc, Tony G., Ern-Dog, Fred Wreck, Pablito

“La Raza” has stood the test of time.

In 1990 the idea of a Latino rapper making a song in Spanglish that basically lists every East LA cliché was suspect at best. “La Raza” was popular, but at the time it felt like it was regarded as a novelty. In retrospect, since television and movies showed us just how cynical Latino stereotypes can get, it's easier to recognize the authentic sense of pride running through Kid Frost's first big hit.

There's nothing corny about it. It's sharp and lean, and it incorporates El Chicano's “Viva Tirado”-the unofficial East LA national anthem-shrewdly and seamlessly while honoring the trancelike groove of the original. At the time, critics vainly reached for a new marketing term: “Spanglish rap,” “Hispanic rap,” etc. In reality, the song is pure soul music, delivered with a maximum of style and self-respect.

Album: "Radio Activity Rapp/Radio Activity Syndrome" - Single
Label: Rappers Rapp Disco Co.
Producer: Rich Cason

There are at least 15 12-inch vinyl releases-you can quickly spot them in the wild by their slate-gray labels-marked at the top with RAPPERS RAPP DISCO CO., which was the symbol of high quality and unusually entertaining electro music that was “produced, arranged and conducted” by Phoenix native Rich Cason, a former funk organist who used a variety of pseudonyms for his 1980s productions, including Captain Rapp, Galactic Orchestra, and Magic Mike Crew.

If you have to pick just one for the ages, make it “Radio Activity Rapp,” where Bamabaataa's steel-on-steel electro meets the fat-ass wallop of Roger Troutman. The blueprint for G-funk and pretty much everything else is contained in this song, including the seeds for DJ Quik, Battlecat and Soopafly. “Radio Activity Rapp” remains perpetually fresh in Los Angeles, so much so that every few years it gets recycled to great effect.

Album: Hip-Hopera
Label: RCA
Producer: Mega Baka Boyz

Hundreds of rap songs have sampled “More Bounce to the Ounce”—why aren't there hundreds of rap songs like “Pistol Grip Pump”? Volume 10 is simply fighting at a different weight than all other gangsta rap hopefuls. The song has a left hook, a jab and an uppercut.

It is relentless. It cracks asphalt. Hardness doesn't do it justice. Best of all, it came out of the stew of the Good Life Café, the bastion of anti-gangsta rap creativity in the mid 1990s. We'd wager that's where Volume 10 learned to rhyme “chivalrous” with “ligaments.” If you can name a more ferocious rap song, you should play it for Rage Against the Machine, who took to playing “Pistol Grip Pump” in concert between “Down Rodeo” and “Killing In the Name.”

Album: "Batterram" - Single
Label: Epic
Producer: Leon Haywood

Let's face it: LAPD Police Chief Daryl Gates is the godfather of rap in Los Angeles. Gates' approach to poverty was so supremely dehumanized, his lust for military force so all-consuming, and his hatreds so unapologetic, that without him, LA rap might never birthed the confrontational fire it needed to grow.

At the peak of the crack epidemic in the mid 1980s, Gates petitioned the city government to purchase tank-sized vehicles called batterrams. Gates then used them to run over homes in South Los Angeles. Some of the destroyed homes belonged to drug dealers and some belonged to working families-by the time he had his fleet, it was clear that Gates made no distinction.

At the peak of this atrocity, “Batterram” hit the streets and made deejay Toddy Tee one of L.A.'s first big rap stars. He wrote the song after watching one night's evening news, and created a track that contained a primitive approximation of the chaos and thunder of a paramilitary police raid. The LAPD is still around and still suspect, but you could say that Toddy Tee won this battle: Gates died a bitter man in 2010 while “Batterram” lives on.

Album: Bow Down
Label: Priority
Producer: Bud'da

Formed as coastal tensions reached a rolling boil, hip-hop's definitive LA supergroup featured Ice Cube clicking with Mack 10 (red rag) and WC (blue rag). Their sole purpose? Proving that the West is the best. The title track to their 1996 debut was a squelchy demand for obeisance with an equally indelible video that peaked with WC getting his C-Walk on in his walk-in closet. How epochal a track was "Bow Down"? It inspired its L.A. radio parody hit "Chow Down." Eat up.

Album: Act A Fool
Label: Capitol
Producer: DJ Pooh

“Verse four, the part where I get it off / Then, try to rush it cause the studio costs / I mean the main idea is BASS / And you probably get a bruise when it's at your face.” In this, the song that inaugurated King Tee's career in 1987, is the artist's search for the perfect metaphor to describe the life-giving quality of bass.

It's like an earthquake, he says. It's toxic. It makes your heart shiver. It kicks like a ninja. It's more addictive than crack. It is The Main Idea. This is the song that bridges the party-rocking roller-rink raps of the early '80s to the brass-knuckle attack of the Ruthless era-and the brickwork is BASS.

Album: The Documentary
Label: Aftermath, Interscope, G-Unit
Producer: Dr. Dre, Mike Elizondo

The way 50 tells it, this song, along with several cuts from The Game's debut album, was intended for 50's sophomore album The Massacre. It's believable because he owns the menacing Dre beat with his bicoastal flows, but Game makes it an LA record with car-centric lyrics like: "I put gold Daytonas on that cherry Six-Four / White walls so clean it's like I'm ridin on vogues / Hit one switch mang, that ass so low / Cali got niggaz in New York ridin on hundred spokes."

Album: Domino
Label: Outburst/Def Jam
Producer: DJ Battlecat, Domino

Domino met Battlecat when they were both hired to work on the Bangin' On Wax project, which had hundreds of Crips and Bloods audition for an album that was something like the Making the Band for gangbangers.

Bangin' On Wax turned out to be bang-by-numbers, but thankfully Domino and Battlecat stuck together for a more fruitful collaboration in the form of Domino's debut album. “Getto Jam” was one of the biggest rap hits of 1993, rivaled only by the debut of Snoop Doggy Dogg.

It was the first No. 1 Rap song to utilize strictly melodic rapping and it's probably the only time a former Long Beach Crip has scatted on a hit song. (To paraphrase: “Du-bum dway / Da-bumdway / Da-bum dway-yay.”) At a time when South Los Angeles hip-hop was divided into two camps-the Death Row/Ruthless gangstas and the Good Life jazzsters-“Getto Jam” proved that they had more in common than anyone was willing to admit.

Album: 21 & Over
Label: Loud
Producer: E-Swift, Tha Alkaholiks

Of his many gifts to LA rap, the great King Tee introduced the world to Tha Alkaholiks at a time when they were desperately needed.

Gangsta rap was overfed and too self-serious to stand upright. When LA rap seemed in danger of turning into one endless song about eating a fat dick, the Liks came to the party, jumped on the couch, spilled their drinks on the carpet, and relieved L.A. from a period of mourning left over from the 1992 riots.

There's a sound in “Make Room” that mimics a burp. That's intentional. DJ Homicide has the song's best line: “But that's cause I'm slick tossin' records like a discus / Y'all niggas feel these beats from fuckin' Halloween to Christmas.” It turned out Tha Liks had a much longer shelf life. Perhaps because he was severely calendar-challenged, Homicide would soon leave the group to throw in with the frosted tip-hop of an Orange County quartet called Sugar Ray.

Album: 40 Days & 40 Nightz
Label: Loud
Producer: Jesse West, Xzibit

A staple of BET's Rap City: Tha Basement, X to the Z's "What U See Is What U Get" is best remembered for its incredible video, in which Xzibit walks to the store to get some milk while all kinds of wild shit happens around him.

Our favorite part: A cameo by Flavor Flav at the 2:03 mark—right when he's mentioned in the song. Turns out what you saw is what he said. The song itself was a 360 roundhouse to the mouth that hit with the pimps, players, hoes, hustlers, willies, thugs, ballers, busters, gangstas, macks, everyday all day, shot callers, and even the high rollers.

Album: Music to Driveby
Label: Orpheus
Producer: DJ Slip

The queasy apex of the curl-and-locs era, “The Hood Took Me Under” is Compton's Most Wanted's masterpiece. The group's first three releases were pretty much flawless, but they really hit their stride when LA ascended to the top of the entertainment industry and G-funk slowed to a crawl, allowing MC Eiht to flex his naturally throaty, unhurried cadence and show why he is the Ben Webster of West Coast rap.

Eiht inhales the nihilism of Tragniew Park Compton Crip life like a pull of smoke from a long spliff: “I loads up the strap and I step/Cause my brain cells are dead and all I think is death.” To outside observers who pondered the mentality that would lead a city to generations of perpetual killing, Eiht provided the coldest, truest answer: “Gee-yea, who gives a fuck about another / Only got love for my fuckin' gang brothers.”

Album: It's On (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa
Label: Ruthless, Priority
Producer: Rhythum D, Eazy-E

Admittedly, calling Snoop an “anorexic rapper” might not have been the most effective tactic in combating the career-ending juggernaut that was The Chronic. But Eazy had some salient points, especially in highlighting his financial stake in Dre's success: “E they tried to fade you on 'Dre Day' / But 'Dre Day' only meant Eazy's payday.”

Eazy's smartest move in rebutting Dre's attacks was to employ a beat that undermined the smooth likability of “Nuthin' But a G Thang.” Cooked up by Cold187, “Real Muthaphukking G's” is not a sociable piece of music. It is seasick. It is toxic. It is grotesque. The public was not on his side but Eazy's conversation was more sonic than verbal. The song's venom comes not from the rhymes, but from the juxtaposition of the song's oily, globular bass and Eazy's high-pitched taunts.

Album: Colors
Label: Sire, Warner Bros.
Producer: Afrika Islam

The most indelible anthem from the hoodsploitation movie trend of the '90s, "Colors" is also apex of the type of first-person gangsta rap Ice-T had spent years perfecting. "Death is my set / Guess my religion" he intones amidst a cacophony of bird calls, gun shots, and nasty scratching. The song is indivisible from the film of the same title.

Album: good kid, m.A.A.d city
Producer: Sounwave, THC, Terrace Martin
Label: Top Dawg Entertainment, Aftermath, Interscope

Kendrick’s “m.A.A.d City” is the album’s moment of transition.

Built around brooding production, the track traces the streets’ gravitational pull, the violence, and the slow erosion of innocence, while MC Eiht—a Compton OG whose voice has always worked as both protagonist and narrator—adds a scathing verse that feels pulled from experience.

The tone moves conversationally, then suddenly visceral, with a techtonic beatswitch two-and-a-half minutes in. Kendrick plays with vocal inflections over stabbing strings that punctuate the song’s finale. More than a dramatic coming-of-age tale on a conceptual sophomore opus, it secured Kendrick’s gift for expanding rap’s emotional range, turning personal reckoning into a collective experience, as he often does so well. —David Ma

Album: Death Certificate
Label: Priority
Producer: Ice Cube, Sir Jinx

After bouncing from N.W.A. in '89 because he wasn't being paid what he was due, Cube quickly fell out with former mates Eazy-E and MC Ren. So Cube put the beef on wax, clowning the guys for siding with their white manager, and saying they must have enjoying being bent over by him. "It ain't my fault, one nigga got smart,” he rapped. “And they rippin' your asshole apart.” Ouch.

Album: Above The Rim: The Soundtrack

Label: Death Row
Producer: Dr. Dre

In this Snoop-assisted spiel from the First Lady of Death Row, Rage flexed skills instead of flaunting sexuality: "Let me loosen up my bra strap / And um, let me boost ya with my raw rap." The only woman who rocked effectively over Dre's ultra-masculine gangsta tracks, here Rage offers a shout-out to her hometown (Farmville, VA) and has two words for those who ain't down: "tough titty."

Album: All Eyez on Me
Label: Death Row Records
Producer: Tracy Robinson, Daz Dillinger

2Pac and Snoop Dogg were on Death Row, and only one would make it out alive. But for now, "break out the champange glasses and condoms" and have nuthin' but a gangsta party. Snoop's stated desire to "do it all legal" gives Pac's "I live in fear of a felony" a ghoulish glow in retrospect. "My destiny release me to the streets," raps Pac. It was written.

Album: Livin' Like Hustlers
Label: Ruthless
Producer: Above The Law, Dr. Dre, Laylaw

Of all the works of aural architecture overseen by Dr. Dre, Above the Law's “Murder Rap” might well be his most underrated building.

Released in the creative crosscurrent that existed in the space between Straight Outta Compton and The Chronic, “Murder Rap” is a monstrous piece of work, clearly inspired by the density of Ice Cube's collaboration with the Bomb Squad on Amerikka's Most Wanted.

Beginning with a snippet of Eazy talking about meeting President Bush, the song goes on to layer no less than six different samples. The hellacious opening assault contains of a collision of drums (borrowed from James Brown and Eddie Bo), bass (from Public Enemy) and a sample of Quincy Jones' theme from the cop show Ironsides (it could be a police siren; it could be a hissing asp).

Dr. Dre suggests an alternate path that LA gangsta rap might have taken if it wasn’t for G-Funk: a bombastic, tribally heavy sound that's closer to heavy metal than Blaxploitation funk.

Album: 2001
Label: Interscope / Aftermath
Producers: Dr. Dre, Mel-Man and Scott Storch

The first decade-plus of LA rap mostly boiled down to two production modes—drum machine break wrecks and velvet G-funk. Then, at the edge of a new century, "Still D.R.E." pushed the whole West Coast into the future. Rap had indeed changed, and this was how he felt about it. The keys hydroplane, chiming along with precise finesse. The strings curl up, like gold flourishes on Old English.

It sounds like both fine art and flying saucers. Its vibe belongs to "them gangstas all across the world," while it stays as essential to the city as swap meets, sticky green and bad traffic. —Steven Louis

Album: Deep Cover
Label: Epic
Producer: Dr. Dre

The Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum crime thriller Deep Cover was better than you might expect, but long after the movie is forgotten Dr. Dre's soundtrack cut-which introduced a lanky Long Beach rapper named Snoop Doggy Dogg to the world-will be boomin' in your system. The unbearably tense beat is one of Dre's simplest but it's also timeless. Big Pun, Fat Joe, The Notorious B.I.G., and Ghostface Killah have all taken the "Deep Cover" instrumental out for a spin, but nobody ripped it better than Dre and Snoop.

Album: Straight Outta Compton
Label: Priority, Ruthless
Producer: Dr. Dre, DJ Yella

The song that put N.W.A on the FBI's radar was also the one most often cited as predicting the simmering tensions that would explode four years later during the Los Angeles riots. For all its sociopolitical significance, "Fuck Tha Police" is first and foremost a great rap record. Framed as a court case with Judge Dre presiding and prosecuting attorneys MC Ren, Ice Cube, and Eazy Muthafuckin' E, this one's an open and shut case.

Album: One Track Mind
Label: Egyptian Empire Records
Producer: Egyptian Lover

In the words of Los Angeles county native Frank Zappa: “All the corny tricks you tried / Will not forestall the rising tide of HUNGRY FREAKS, DADDY!” There is undoubtedly some cosmic connection between Zappa's 1966 debut Freak Out! and the deep-cavity scan of freakology that Egyptian Lover undertook between 1982 and 1989.

Ponder a world in which Greg Broussard was not deposed by N.W.A and the ascendancy of G-funk, and was given a chance to make his version of The Chronic. Then again, “Freak-A-Holic” might well be his version of The Chronic. Suffice to say that this is the dirtiest rap song without any dirty words that the West Coast has ever produced.

Egyptian Lover had a way of transmitting sleaze telepathically. Call him the Ludwig Van Beethoven of LA electro. Not since Symphony No. 5 has the repetition of a four-note figure been delivered with such belligerent lust. It's inadvisable to give the last word to a YouTube commenter, but in this case the top response to the “Freak-A-Holic” video says it all: “This is that old school taco meat swag.”

Album: Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde
Label: Delicious Vinyl
Producer: J-Swift, L.A. Jay

The Pharcyde were experts of their craft that didn't take themselves too seriously, and that's why 30 years later we're still taking their music seriously. “Passin' Me By” does much that is difficult to pull off: Being goofy and somber at the same time; incorporating saxophone into a rap song in non-cheesy fashion; a hook that is not quite sung, but yelped.

Millions of rap outfits talk about being brothers, but Pharcyde made songs that weren't premised only on a fraternal bond, but on authentic day-to-day friendship. Even now, “Passin' Me By” seems like it was made just for them, that the listener is incidental, that we happened upon a group of friends while they were running styles on their couch.

Their talent seems so casual and J-Swift's track is so casually orchestral, you can still get twisted by the shift in depth perception that occurs when the verse of this song slips into the chorus. Quincy Jones should have gotten some kind of honorary LA rap medal for providing the dank samples for 2Pac's “How Do U Want It,” Above the Law's “Murder Rap” and this, based on a 1973 cover of “Summer In the City”—suitably muggy for the Pharcyde's mischief.

Album: Way 2 Fonky
Label: Profile
Producer: DJ Quik, Rob 'Fonksta' Bacon

“Just Lyke Compton” has Quik's handmade bass. It has one of his catchiest hooks, and has him rapping in his 22-year-old prime. It even has his signature sleigh bells. All these factors make for a classic Quik song, but this is more than a classic Quik song. This is one of the all-time great rap songs, because of its point-of-view. While most LA rap looked at itself in the context of the city, “Just Lyke Compton” looked at LA rap in the context of the country at large.

His tone is not dispassionate, nor is it judgmental. He never strays from his role as reporter, and like any good reporter he returned from his travels with images and stories. He's obviously tripped-out by the evidence that Compton gang culture has been imported to cities as far-flung as St. Louis, Denver and San Antonio, and his feelings are not delivered verbally, but tonally-a tone of pride mixed with exasperation and amazement that something that he thought grew only in his backyard has infected the entire country.

Album: Regualte...G Funk Era
Label: Def Jam / Death Row / Interscope Records
Producer: Warren G

Back in 1990, while his cousin Dr. Dre was making noise with N.W.A, Warren G founded the trio 213-along with Nate Dogg and Snoop. By the summer of 1994, when "Regulate" dropped on Death Row's Above The Rim soundtrack, Snoop was one of the world's biggest rap stars. But folks were still sleeping on Nate Dogg, whose menacing melodies-along with Warren's slick flip of a Michael McDonald sample-helped make "Regulate" a No. 2 pop hit.

Album: N.W.A. and the Posse
Label: Ruthless
Producer: Dr. Dre

When Macola pressed the first copies of “Boyz N Tha Hood” in the spring of 1986, the only place it was sold was at the daily Compton Swap Meet in the old Sears building on Long Beach Boulevard.

Then it got popular in suburban San Fernando Valley, and after that, Tower Records locations all over the state started ordering more copies. By the end of the year, a Slauson hustler named Eric Wright had become a rap star. He was so scared to perform in front of crowds that he assembled the first incarnation of N.W.A to back him up (including Ice Cube, who had written the lyrics to Eazy’s big hit).

Several lawsuits, innumerable pairs of leather biker gloves and one tragic AIDS-related death later, “Boyz In Tha Hood” remains a street classic, and the only Dr. Dre production that can be convincingly reproduced on a pair of upturned garbage cans.

Album: Cypress Hill
Label: Ruffhouse, Columbia, SME
Producer: DJ Muggs

Well, here it is, the symphonic masterwork of one Lawrence Muggerud, aka DJ Muggs. He cooked up the beat in a tiny apartment in Hollywood that he shared with DJ Aladdin of Low Profile. In one room, Aladdin, WC, Coolio and Crazy Toones were making We're in This Thing Together," and in the other Cypress was making demos for their first album.

LA is famous for producing homicidal maniacs who are also incredibly charming, but has there ever been a song as exceedingly lovable and homicidal in the same note? “Didn't have to blast him but I did anyway/Young punk had to pay/So I just killed a man!”

It may well be the most danceable murder ballad ever written. Now here is something you can't understand: A musicologist from the University of Oregon wrote a dissertation to explain all the different things Muggs accomplished in “Kill a Man.”

Album: Dog 'N The Wax (Ya Don't Quit-Part II) (B-Side)
Label: Techno Hop Records
Producer: The Unknown DJ

Ice-T was pushing 30 when he released “6 N Da Mornin'” in 1986, a veteran of both the rap scene and the gang scene. He cut his teeth rapping at clubs like Radio and Rhythm Lounge when LA hip-hop was in its gestation period, but didn't find his true voice until he heard Schoolly D's “PSK,” which showed that a record could be raw story and nothing more.

“6 N Da Morning” has a sharper beat than “PSK” with sharper details. In nine verses, the song takes us through three apartments, two clubs, three shootings, three cars, a chase, a jail term, and a plane ride from LA to New York.

The seven-minute epic would be unwieldy if it weren't pinned by a circle of sensory details: the squeak of sneakers on a clean floor; a safe full of cold cash; a shootout that concludes with a getaway and a warm bath. The writing is as hard-boiled as a page of James Cain prose and Unknown DJ's beat is as black-and-white as a LA Times headline.

Album: Doggystyle
Label: Death Row
Producer: Dr. Dre

“I Get Lifted” was a pretty ill song to begin with, but when Dr. Dre finished with it, it was a symphony-woozy, lusty, boozy. It would have been a huge song even if some Death Row benchwarmer like RBX had taken it.

But it was destined for Snoop and he for it, because his syrupy, genetically Mississippian flow already smells like menthol and liquor. What's it about? It's about Slick Rick, Seagrams, and a bitch named Sadie. It had bankers, schoolgirls, and every other citizen singing about indo for most of 1993 and all of 1994, and continues to do so.

Album: N/A / single

Label: pgLang and Interscope

Producer: Mustard

When zoomed out, "Not Like Us" is an all-time power move. It became the first rap song ever to top the Hot 100 on a five-day tracking week. It was the centerpiece of his Super Bowl halftime show, the first solo hip-hop set to reach that stage.

Serena Williams crip-walked to it. Drake filed a rage-quit lawsuit over it. Tens of millions chanted along, fitfully and faithfully, with bars about pedophilia and settler colonialism. The whole thing was surreal.

But zoom in on "Not Like Us" and find communal triumph. Kendrick Lamar didn’t just fight a giant for the soul of the art form. He also let Compton land the finishing move. Kendrick positioned this battle as fake versus real, then rooted his realness in his city—from the producer to "The Pop Out," Alondra down to Central, "they" against "us." —Steven Louis

Album: Straight Outta Compton
Label: Priority, Ruthless
Producer: DJ Yella, Dr. Dre

Here it is, the song that made a relatively small hamlet south of downtown Los Angeles one of the most famous cities in the world. Compton had been a middle-class white suburb for most of the 20th century, and following the LA riots it would slowly change to a predominantly Latino neighborhood. In the public consciousness, however, it will always been the territory of a crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube, from the gang called Niggaz With Attitude.

Compton is not nearly the most dangerous part of Los Angeles, but the name had symbolic potential and syllabic force. The word Compton is shaped like a bullet, and it punctuates in a way that Hawaiian Gardens or Wilmington never could.

The genius of N.W.A was that they treated Compton both as a place and a symbol. They could rap about its dirt motels and swap meets and stash houses because they had lived them, but the real accomplishment of “Straight Outta Compton” was that gave a name to innumerable ghetto neighborhoods in Los Angeles-and over the world-where gang violence, drug commerce and police brutality are major motivators of everyday existence.

Album: All Eyez on Me
Label: Death Row Records
Producer: Dr. Dre

The remixes of “California Love” are split into a daytime version and a nighttime version. The original-based on a piano-driven Joe Cocker sample first used by Ultramagnetic MCs in 1987-has all the sharpness of hard sunshine, while the remix is smokier, smoggier, more perilous.

The pinnacle of G-funk is contained in this consummate production, which brings together Ronnie Hudson, Roger Troutman and Dr. Dre in a holy trinity of South Central sound design. And in the middle of it all, a Northern California transplant named Tupac Shakur, “fiending for money and alcohol,” while rhyming “slow jam” with “Rosecrans.”

Album: The Predator
Label: Priority
Producer: DJ Pooh

In 2012 an internet addict with too much time on his hands determined the exact date of Ice Cube's “Good Day” by making a list of everything that's mentioned in the song, and using a highly fallible method of deductive logic. He came out with January 20, 1992.

A critical detractor arrived at a different date: November 30, 1988. In the midst of these calculations, a charmed public excitedly brought word to Ice Cube, who, when he was eventually contacted, said something to the effect of: “Dudes… it's just a song.”

Of course, “Today Was a Good Day” is much more than a song; it's a timeless incarnation of Southland ambiance. What the Internet fanboys didn't understand in their well-intentioned quest to locate the calendar date of the mythical “Good Day” was that his good day is our every day.

Donuts, basketball, Fatburger, the Goodyear Blimp. When the song gets specific, it gets eternal. As soon as that Isley opening kicks in, it's clear that this isn't a song about a date, but a state of mind.

Album: The Chronic
Label: Death Row Records
Producer: Dr. Dre

Because this is one of the only rap songs with flawless orchestration. Because the beat winds around the rappers and the rappers wind around the beat and nothing ever bumps into anything else. Because there is so much tension embedded in this song and yet it couldn't be more relaxed.

Because it's a picture of rap in 1992 and yet it plays like a page from the Cold Crush Brothers. More pimped out, definitely, but in its essence it is two improvisers trading the microphone, swapping tongue twisters and blue jokes and barbs about sex, all of it revolving around a call-and-response routine so old that it would have worked in 1960, 1940, 1920: "It's like this and like that and like this and-uh…"

Because Calvin Broadus has made 100 shaky career moves and he might make 1000 more, but none of it matters because in this song he is 20 forever-the thin phenom from Long Beach who couldn't even look straight at the camera when they filmed the video.

Because no matter where you are in the world-and this is one of those songs that's always playing somewhere, Barcelona, Zimbabwe, Sao Paulo, Shanghai-when that old Moog whistle starts to whine, you are in LA.