And you knew it from the first-line: It was all a dream! Like so many to come before him and so many who would come after him (and wouldn't succeed)-or like anyone with any far off ambition that seems downright naive, until they make it-Big was just another kid from the streets who dreamed of becoming a famous rapper. There was everything before this song, and then, everything after it. The Notorious B.I.G.'s first solo single from his debut album is the fault line for the life-span calendar of rap, in the same way human years get a "B.C." and an "A.D" there's simply "Before Biggie" and "After Biggie," in a way no other artist would come to define the trajectory of the genre or influence others. Song: "Juicy" (1994) Album: Ready to Die It goes beyond the cliche of "a defining moment" in hip-hop. You know that old adage, If you've got nothing nice to say, don't say it? If there's any truly concrete evidence to the contrary, it's this moment in rap. changed everything in a way so many of the recorded words in hip-hop that would come before them and after them never did or ever will. Fuck them, from the underground of culture, of rap, and fuck the police because you can't help but listen as it's said, words that have been spoken privately so often, but recorded? And made into a hit? Not until that moment.Īnd with three words, N.W.A. From the places where they oppress people, and treat them like shit. But wait, there's more: Not just "Fuck the police," but fuck them from the underground. That was all it really took for Cube to get his point across. A moment in American culture had been started, like a flame that trails a spill of gasoline all the way to the pump. Song: "Fuck The Police" (1988) Album: Straight Outta Compton Three words:Īnd that was it. In other words: The opening line of "My Name Is" wasn't the first line Em ever rapped, but it might as well have been. And when it was all said and done-and by all, we mean, just that first line-Em had already brilliantly pre-empted criticism by declaring the concerns of scared parents and moral leaders his exact purpose in life. There couldn't have been a more perfect way he could've foreshadowed the totality of his work and the impact of it to come. He appealed directly to the audience America was scared of his music getting into the hands of: American Schoolchildren (though really, "kids" was anyone who was listening). Which is why the first words on his first single needed to hit hard, and they did.Įminem didn't just mock parents worried about the effects of rap by confronting the issue head-on, he sucker-punched them with it. For Dre, for rappers who were black, for rappers who weren't black, for the entire genre of rap, there was a lot on the line, let alone for Eminem. Dre released 2001, he put his reputation on the line for Eminem, a white rapper, at a time when white rappers were still a post-Vanilla Ice punch line (or making adult-contemporary music, like Everclear). Song: "My Name Is" (1999) Album: The Slim Shady LP In 1999, Eminiem had a lot to lose, and not just for himself. Before Dr. Written by Kathy Iandoli, David Drake, and Foster Kamer. These are The 100 Best Opening Lines in Rap History: 50 - 1. For the artists who did that, their first moments on a track were really more than just first impressions, but the beginning and end of a micro-legacy that usually results in more than just the start of a song, but the start of a much larger place in history, too. And you only have, really, only one line to get that first impression right. Not just the beginning of a song, but for the ones that really count, the beginning of a legacy: For a song, for an artist, for an entire body of work or era of a genre. To that end, a first line in rap might just be the first line. In the blink of an eye, the human brain fires off a series of signals after receiving information that-time and time again-studies have shown are harder to change the more time passes after it. First impressions, they say, are everything.
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