T.I. - "Prayin For Help"
From that 6 track block of plainspoken realness at the beginning of Urban Legend before they get on with the features and club concessions, pretty much my favorite song besides maybe some of the obvious ones, I dunno, maybe it's everyone's favorite, if it's not it should be. When Tip first got locked up and it looked like he'd be gone for a while, Gel & Weave speculated hopefully that it would result in his All Eyez On Me, this is one of the only points where you really get a glimpse of that (and when he invokes All Eyez on "My Life"), and it was supposedly recorded when he was going through that. No running the king of the south shit into the ground, just calm and humble over that beautiful tinkling beat with those amazing parts where the snare drops out at the beginning of the 2nd and 3rd verses and he just rides the kick drum. All that after school special wisdom that I love about Thug Matrimony: "it ain't a way I can help nobody til I save myself/technically I'm still a slave myself/I gotta climb out the grave myself/man I played myself/but when I look at all the mans I touched/I ask how can a man that's done so much/be treated so unjust/cause I'm tryin to inspire the folks/you wanna condemn cause they sell dope/well man show em the ropes/be a father a football coach a role model or a symbol of hope/take another approach/Instead of testifying against em in court/handcuffin em and closin the door so they can be worse than before"

The Firemen - "Smoke Wit Me"
So I'm watching Uncut and ok, it's another west coast party rap video about weed, but wait, holy shit, is that Teck Money from Real World Hawaii? It is! The worst deluded RW wannabe celebrity of them all, parlaying his lame bargain bin reality show antics into a short-lived VJ gig and a small role in Van Wilder, now dude's tryin' to rap! Actually I was kind of impressed by his flow just by virtue of it not resembling his speaking voice in the slightest.

8Ball & MJG f/ Lloyd - "Forever"
Still spinning singles off an album that didn't sell thanks to lames like me who never got around to copping it, Bad Boy South brother Chopper all up in the video, and the kid from the Inc. with the slept on R&B hits doing one of those sung hooks that tries to shoehorn too many syllables in there. The beat sounds pretty much just like "Don't Make", which is cool with me because I love that song, I dunno about anywhere else but it was way bigger than the a-side here, and was sampled for one of the biggest best Baltimore club tracks of '04.