"Look At Me Now" And Five Other Good Rap Songs From This Week

The venerable Busta Rhymes shows us what people mean when they talk about an MC “blacking out” on a track. He rhymes so fast, enunciates so clearly, without pausing to take a breath, you’d think he’d lose consciousness. In so doing, he steals this song — with it’s huge and spacious beat, which was produced by club music maestro Diplo and sounds like it will explode dance floors like the Yin Tang Twins “Wait (The Whisper Song)” did six years ago — from proprietor Chris Brown and fellow guest star Lil Wayne both.

Here are a bunch of other good rap songs that came out this week.

Project Pat is the older brother of Three 6 Mafia’s Juicy J, and an important part of the storied Memphis group’s greater collective. He voiced the hook on Three 6’s year 2000 hit “Sippin’ On Some Sizzurp,” and had a national hit of his own with “Chickenhead,” from the wonderfully-titled 2001 album, Mista Don’t Play, Everythangs Workin. For connoisseurs of the dirtiest of Dirty South rap, it gets no better than Project Pat. Hearing him over this tantalizing beat from the young super producer Lex Lugar is a joy, and the verse from lady rapper Tatalicious is some good give-as-good-as-she-gets stuff, but be forewarned, this song is very, very dirty. The video makes great use of terrible lighting. It’s like an amateur porn film, I guess. (But don’t worry, no actual nudity occurs.) Also, if you don’t want to use your head in the way Pat suggests, you can always put it into his wine glass.

Next is the Bronx’s Fat Joe, rapping with Harlem’s Vado over an AWESOME AWESOME track produced by Washington, DC’s Mark Henry. This is my favorite song of the week.

Raekwon the Chef released a new album this week, Shaolin Vs. Wu-Tang (a confusing title, as I thought Wu-Tang were from Shaolin, but I bet it makes sense if you’ve watched as many kung-fu movies as Raekwon has.) It sounds great to me so far, full of vintage, mid-90s-era Wu-sonics and verbal swordplay (as Rae and co. might put it.) Especially “Mollases,” featuring Rick Ross — who, I must admit, though I’ve never been a fan, is sounding better and better with his raps — and this song, with GZA and Killa Priest. Oh, Raekwon compares himself to Hitler in his verse. So, there you go.

North Carolinian producer 9th Wonder slices up a famous Flavor Fav clip and pastes it into a dreamy backdrop for Lil B’s latest stream of stream-of-consciousness rap. Where it sounds just right.

Lastly, I was very excited to hear the news that Big Boi was getting back together with his protege Killer Mike (a.k.a., “Mike Bigga”) and fellow Atlanta rapper Pill to make a full-length album as a supergroup trio. From the sound of this remix that Big Boi just did for “Ready Set Go,” the excellent song that Chicago’s No I.D. produced for Mike and T.I. last year, very good things could be to come.