Great songs from forgotten rap albums

Big Mike - Made Men



Big Mike - Hard To Hit



Who didn't sleep on this album when it came out in 1999? Shit, in those pre-internet days when you could only find Rap-A-Lot releases in a handful of shops here in the UK i was still struggling to find 'Face's My Homies and Devin's debut from the previous year so thanks to Chek for puttin' me onto this. It's no Somethin' Serious but it does feature some classic Peterman with production from Mike Dean and Mr Lee as demonstrated on the above tunes.



Big Daddy Kane - The Beef Is On



Big Daddy Kane - Rest In Peace



After It's A Big Daddy Thing 'Kane fell off like Hans Gruber at the end of Die Hard and spent the early 90s pumping out schmaltzy r&b/njs rap (as opposed to the good r&b/njs rap that Heavy D did) but briefly rediscovered his mojo in 1993 with the Looks Like A Job For.. album. It's generally considered that, while he only got production credits on a few tunes, Easy Mo Bee was behind much of the production on here and it shows as it's very much in the same vein as the tracks he did for Biggie on Ready To Die.



Juvenile - Solja Rags



Juvenile - Pimpinabitch



A year before Juvenile blew up with the overrated Ha! in '98 (U Understand? was a far superior song with the same concept) and Cash Money Records signed with Universal for 50987 trillion dollars he dropped Solja Rags, which was his debut album for Cash Money and his first album with Mannie Fresh on the beats. Juve' had clearly been studying Broken Language by Smoothe & Trigga when writing Pimpinabitch, which was fair enough because a few years later NY rappers were clearly studying Ha! and U Understand?, with the most obvious example being Whoa by Black Rob.



Black Rob - Help Me Out



Black Rob - Smile In Your Face



And onto Black Rob himself. Did you know that Whoa is the biggest selling Bad Boy Records single ever? Meaning that it's outsold any of the Biggie or Puffy hits. Well, apparently it is. Who'd a thunk that, eh? Black Rob has spent more of his career in prison than Rosicky has spent time at Arsenal injured and his 2nd album suffered from sample-clearance problems (not to mention Heavy D re-selling a beat he'd sold to Black Rob to Beanie Sigel) and the usual awful collabo tracks which pepper any Bad Boy release but it still turned out as a suprisingly solid effort, particularly these 2 tunes with Rob gettin' busy over piano samples.