Gunsnhalen said:

TonyVanDam said:

The irony of this thread is that Ice-T didn't start off as "gangsta" per se.

And lets not forget about Dr.Dre & DJ Yella in their pre-N.W.A. days as members of THAT other rap group:

True! but to be fair... Ice-T had some good morality tales in his albums.

Dre barely had that minus maybe Lil Ghetto Boy.. and he tried to forget he started as a fruity looking guy in a pretty good funkish group.

Sigh, at least Ice-T is cool & has always been honest about who he was & how he became more mainstream ALA Law & Order. Dre is still trying to pretend he has always been gangsta

World Class Wrecking Crew got off, especially with "The Fly" and as for the makeup and looking "gay", well hell, that's what everyone should strive for. Actually, some of NWA's early stuff was much faster and funkier similar to Egyptian Lover or Arabian Prince. Dr. Dre wasn't always the dull ass he became in the 1990s. One thing for sure, he could mix his ass off as a DJ and throwdown hard in his much earlier years like this here.....

MickyDolenz said:

purplethunder3121 said:

So what rappers DO have street cred for real?

DJ Quik, Eazy E, Bone Thugs n Harmony, Kurupt, Snoop, Suga Free, etc...not everybody was a studio gangsta, some were def the real deal West Coast Gs.

That said, ironically enough Ruthless Records' 1st big hit was JJ Fad's "Supersonic"!

^^^Just to clarify, Bone Thugs ain't West Coast, per se...but thugs and Gs they are most def! They were/are the real thing. Allegedly they scared the shit outta Tone Loc when they were scouting a deal pre Eazy/Ruthless. The cats is crazy!

Tupac was not a gangsta/thug/G either...recall he started out in Digital Underground! He got "hard" later in the day.

vainandy said:

Gunsnhalen said:

True! but to be fair... Ice-T had some good morality tales in his albums.

Dre barely had that minus maybe Lil Ghetto Boy.. and he tried to forget he started as a fruity looking guy in a pretty good funkish group.

Sigh, at least Ice-T is cool & has always been honest about who he was & how he became more mainstream ALA Law & Order. Dre is still trying to pretend he has always been gangsta

World Class Wrecking Crew got off, especially with "The Fly" and as for the makeup and looking "gay", well hell, that's what everyone should strive for. Actually, some of NWA's early stuff was much faster and funkier similar to Egyptian Lover or Arabian Prince. Dr. Dre wasn't always the dull ass he became in the 1990s. One thing for sure, he could mix his ass off as a DJ and throwdown hard in his much earlier years like this here.....

What people sometimes forget is how much the West Coast sounds/looks of that time were SOLAR inspired around this time. The World Class Wrecking Crew were bacially a hip hop version of the SOLAR thing. Before Eazy and em started clowning Dre about it, I don't think anybody thought it was gay or anything. That was just the look back then.

brooksie said:

Tone Loc

Tone Loc was on Delicious Vinyl, which was more dance/pop rap like Jesse Jaymes & Young MC. Brand New Heavies was on it too.

Tommy Lee, not a rapper but tried to go gangsta

SuperFurryAnimal said:

Tommy Lee, not a rapper but tried to go gangsta

He did?

purplethunder3121 said:

SuperFurryAnimal said:

Tommy Lee, not a rapper but tried to go gangsta

He did?

S

MickyDolenz said:

purplethunder3121 said:

He did?

See this made me go

They made a big deal about this tape being stolen... and how it invaded there privacy.

Yet he shows chunks of it in this video... yeah him & Pam where just attention whores

That song is silly & anything with Fredy Durst is

Hammer had that Hamma and Pete Rock & CL Smooth were actually pretty good

MickyDolenz said:

Edited 8/6/12 13:46pm]

This use to be my jam. Rev Run however tried to get to gangster with

the last verse in the song.

I don't know why a few of these rappers then felt the need to be something

they weren't. Sadly even acts like Troop and Melvin Riley(RFTW) tried to

get West Coast with early 90 cd's. Right in the middle of all this Tribe Called

Quest did their thing without trying to be west coast with their masterpiece

Midnight Maurauders.

MickyDolenz said:

Weird Al is hit or miss, but this is just sooooooo

imago said:

MickyDolenz said:

Weird Al is hit or miss, but this is just sooooooo

When Weird Al hits the funnybone, he hits hard!

vainandy said:

In the late 1980s, there was some of that dull ass "talking over a slow beat" type of rap (in other words, shit hop) but the majority of it didn't make it onto the radio. The majority of rap that made it onto the radio in the late 1980s was the jams that deserved to make it onto the radio. Folks like Egyptian Lover, Pretty Tony and Freestyle, LA Dream Team, etc. that were actual songs that made you want to move. That stripped down "talking over a slow beat" was considered as a bunch of "nothing" back then so radio didn't play it.

When a lot of rappers say they had to fight like hell to get airplay in the 1980s, it was usually somebody who recorded a bunch of "nothing" similar to what took over in the 1990s because there has always been plenty of rap on R&B radio since 1979. The difference is, only the good stuff made it to the radio back then. Actually, a lot of the rap of the 1980s was even more uptempo than funk and was more along a disco tempo. And before anyone says "that's not rap, that's electro" there was no such term back then. The term was created later in the 1990s when the shit hoppers wanted to distance themselves from anything that even resembled disco. Yet, another reason to hate shit hop.

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[Edited 8/6/12 20:41pm]

LA Dream Team was one hit and done. Eyptian Lover's Egypt Egypt was cool but

Freakaholic was mad corny. I can't believe that shit even made it to radio.

aardvark15 said:

purplethunder3121 said:

So what rappers DO have street cred for real?

2Pac. That's kind of a duh moment

Eazy was a serious drug dealer and used the proceeds to fund NWA.

Can't believe no one has mentioned Marky Mark Wahlberg.

phunkdaddy said:

vainandy said:

In the late 1980s, there was some of that dull ass "talking over a slow beat" type of rap (in other words, shit hop) but the majority of it didn't make it onto the radio. The majority of rap that made it onto the radio in the late 1980s was the jams that deserved to make it onto the radio. Folks like Egyptian Lover, Pretty Tony and Freestyle, LA Dream Team, etc. that were actual songs that made you want to move. That stripped down "talking over a slow beat" was considered as a bunch of "nothing" back then so radio didn't play it.

When a lot of rappers say they had to fight like hell to get airplay in the 1980s, it was usually somebody who recorded a bunch of "nothing" similar to what took over in the 1990s because there has always been plenty of rap on R&B radio since 1979. The difference is, only the good stuff made it to the radio back then. Actually, a lot of the rap of the 1980s was even more uptempo than funk and was more along a disco tempo. And before anyone says "that's not rap, that's electro" there was no such term back then. The term was created later in the 1990s when the shit hoppers wanted to distance themselves from anything that even resembled disco. Yet, another reason to hate shit hop.

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.

[Edited 8/6/12 20:41pm]

LA Dream Team was one hit and done. Eyptian Lover's Egypt Egypt was cool but

Freakaholic was mad corny. I can't believe that shit even made it to radio.

When it comes to rap, Egyptian Lover was the baddest of them all. He was like Prince, he did it all and when he wrote those songs, he made them from the ground up as an actual original song and not a sample of someone else's song. And the few times that he did sample, the samples were not the foundation for the song. They were just mere quick snips mixed over the song in a very creative way. Apparently, Prince must have been his favorite because he used a lot of Prince's stuff such as "Head", "Lady Cab Driver", "Let's Work", etc. but if you weren't a hardcore Prince fan and if you didn't listen carefully, you wouldn't catch them because they were mixed so creatively. But mainly, he made his own songs with his own groove and not someone else's and best of all, his music was ass shakable, funky, and jammed which is a hell of a lot more than I can say about those tired ass closet rough trade trash rappers from the 1990s thinking they're so hard but their music never gets faster than a sissy ass, nerdy, dorky, Lawrence Welk tempo. His songs were actually "music" and not simply "poetry" to be spoken over a slow dull beat as entertainment at a prison dance (more like a prison waltz) for rough trade and their "gangsta" queens.

Oh, don't get me started on Egyptian Lover, that motherfucker used to get completely off. If ever there was a rap version of "me", he would be it.

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[Edited 8/8/12 6:39am]

missfee said:

Can't believe no one has mentioned Marky Mark Wahlberg.

Marky Mark did a lot of bad things before he got into the business and had been in jail. So maybe he was sort of a gangsta. Also Donnie Wahlberg was the Bobby Brown of the New Kids, setting fire in a hotel and other hijinks.

[Edited 8/8/12 8:39am]

MickyDolenz said:

missfee said:

Can't believe no one has mentioned Marky Mark Wahlberg.

Marky Mark did a lot of bad things before he got into the business and had been in jail. So maybe he was sort of a gangsta. Also Donnie Wahlberg was the Bobby Brown of the New Kids, setting fire in a hotel and other hijinks.

[Edited 8/8/12 8:39am]

Are you serious?

missfee said:

MickyDolenz said:

Marky Mark did a lot of bad things before he got into the business and had been in jail. So maybe he was sort of a gangsta. Also Donnie Wahlberg was the Bobby Brown of the New Kids, setting fire in a hotel and other hijinks.

[Edited 8/8/12 8:39am]

Are you serious?

Yes I am. Mark was accused of being a racist and doing hate crimes, mugging, vandalism, robbing, and beating up people.

MickyDolenz said:

missfee said:

Are you serious?

Yes I am. Mark was accused of being a racist and doing hate crimes, mugging, vandalism, robbing, and beating up people.

Really? Wow.

purplethunder3121 said:

imago said:

Weird Al is hit or miss, but this is just sooooooo

When Weird Al hits the funnybone, he hits hard!

YES, the first 40 minutes of the fake Eminem "Know-what-I'm-sayin" interview is the funniest shit ever!