Forget music and songs. Bar for bar who do you think can match Em?All of these emcees excel at different aspects of lyrical mastery. Aesop is a master of vocabulary and abstract writing. Thought has extreme clarity and technicality in his bars, etc.
Give me only 1 track you like the most on every album Em had released.
Started betting last year and it's been an up and down shit show. Guess many people have similar stories here. I started with small bets, increased it, great months in a row, thinking I can do this for a career, my fiance even encouraged me as I was extremely consistent just to fall on my ass. My ego couldn't take the losses, and I tilted like a mf. Off course kept my losses from my fiance, so she kept encouraging me while I believed I just needed to stay logical and that I could get back to where I was before.
Low and behold after my biggest loss I made it all back and more and felt like the fuckin man. I thought I had it all figured out. Fucking awesome lifestyle, working from home, make bucks betting on a sport I love to watch(tennis) and everything will be fine and dandy. I did well for a bit and then boom. Tilt monster striked again and I almost climbed out of the hole but it all inevitably crashed.. My fiance eventually found out how much I lied to her. I didn't lose a shit ton but we were already in a tight spot, so what I lost was significant and a lot to us.
She realized I started selling shit to get out of the hole, even drove in a dodgy location to sell my tennis racket and almost got killed.. It was a scammer who just wanted my phone. Car window was shattered with a rock...Did dumb shit all because I believed I could help my fiance and I get out of our debt. (Her debt is not because of me, she had it before me)
I've never been rich so didn't have the "luxury" of losing a shit ton of money, but when your bank account says 0 and your fiance now pays for everything, it's beyond embarrassing. I don't feel like a man because I don't even feel like a human anymore. I started lying about how I would spend the money my fiance gave me working her fucking ass off while I gambled that away. Told her I'll stop. Nope..Was trapped in the fucked up cycle of lying about gambling to ease our financial pressure since that is more money than what I can earn being a teacher. Aaaand then losing more money digging a deeper hole. Then lying about that too because you already feel like such a loser delusionally believing you can turn it around.
It's extremely selfish and ego driven. I do believe most gamblers genuinely want to get their family out of the financial situation but that's the delusion.. The very thing that caused the problem can't be the solution.. The problem with my betting style is I was calculated and more of a grind better. I wouldn't do parlays and stuck to very specific types of bets. Also mostly betted on lower odds with higher amounts. So more of a slow drip with occasional higher odds to "outwork" the system carefully lol. Nah, need an outrageously high win percentage for that to work long term. It's why I had good months but with the inevitable bad months.
So my style of betting can be viewed as even more dangerous than the better who lives by parlays, ridiculous money on 50/50 bets.. I didn't really do that. Well my version of that when I tilted was still fairly tame compared to most. It was way more insidious, and that is why I felt I had it under control.
The thing now is we have bills to pay and we need money quite fast but I can't sit and watch a player miss an easy forehand or miss the line by a hair to determine if I'm happy or not. That fucking sinking and helpless feeling when you know your bet is yet again in big trouble. Heart pounding, praying to God your player somehow gets back. I hate that my money is in a player's hands who doesn't even know me. He doesn't know my specific bet and to up his game to work for me and try his best.
Sometimes players get lazy and throw matches they should win because they still have money, cars and a big house when the match is over. I don't and I need them to do their fuckin best dammit lol. Just pointing out the ridiculous nature of betting. The sheer amount of variables you don't know of. Maybe the player's uncle died, maybe his gf left him, maybe maybe maybe. You as a bettor, don't know all the variables. All of the research in the world can't give you everything.
Alas, the helpless feeling of a fish on land and having your money in the hands of a stranger who doesn't even know or care about you is fuckin insanity man.
He helps me to get rid of my anger. Other songs motivate me. Relating to him on multiple levels helped me feel less alone. I also enjoy deciphering his rhymes and bars, so it is also an intellectual activity.
Mine was The Real Slim Shady in my dad's car. I just thought it sounded like such a cool, fun black guy rapping with an ultra unique voice lol. I was 9 years old.
In no order, for me it's either Royce on the 1999 Bad Meets Evil track, Sticky Fingaz on Remember Me, Crooked on Echo or Black Thought on Yah Yah.
As there is a narritive that Em fans don't know shit about Hip Hop (which is true for maybe 30% of Em fans) I don't believe it's all of us.
My list in no order:
Nas
Em
Lupe Fiasco
King Crooked
Chino XL (RIP)
Big Pun
Diabolic
Andre 3000
Tech N9ne
Kool G Rap
1: Grandpa Mathers: Serious track about being older and having a granddaughter
2: Till The Grave and Beyond: He will spit till he dies, battle in retirement homes, and even come back as a ghost to terrorize emcees.
3:Dissing My Career: A song where he gets super critical about himself and self-deprecating about some of his songs and stuff he did, etc.
4: Rap Generations: A track featuring 1 rapper in his 40s, another rapper in his 30s and another rapper in his 20s and they're all just going bar heavy and technical.
5: Outside The Lab: Rapping about what he does from day to day when he doesn't work on rap. Like his hobbies from boxing to arcade, drawing etc.
6: Robot World: How he feels about AI in general and in music and people using Chat gpt to assist with lyrics etc.
7: Stan Encounters: Stories about his fans, what they mean to him etc.
8: Oddity: Rapping about him being on the spectrum and how it has affected him. (Not likely he will open up about that lol)
9: 9 Lives: All the times he could have died in his life beyond the overdose in the late 2000s.
10: The Bad Meets Evil Teaser: Him and Royce going crazy and that there will be a new bad meets evil album soon.
Mine is 8 mile road, Mocking Bird and Rabbit Run
Mine is the one on My Darling. "1,2,3 1,2,3, 1,2,3 now follow me."
1+2+3 = 6 and he said it 3 times. Genius given the context of the song.
Bad Guy: "I've been driving around your side of this town / Like 9 frickin' hours and 45 minutes now." Apparantly the duration of his albums combined at the time of MMLP 2.
For me it's either Psychopath killer or Stay Wide Awake.
On Psychopath killer the way he cuts the rhyming words in half at times, then rhymes it fully again for the whole verse is crazy. Incredible skill.
On Stay Wide Awake he rhymes sentences on top of each other in the second verse.
Both are crazy.
