So who like rap music?

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'English' was not related to the country but to the language...

It's actually difficult for me to think of something... Prince Ital. Joe feat. Marky Mark - United is a good song, of which I know some of the rapped parts by heart.

Wow.. broad and sweeping indeed. You've sucsessfully proven that you know nothing about hip-hop.

Real hip-hop is about real life, politiical and social issues, and is truly poetic.

As for metal.. Here's a classic.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoLkaGcpJFA[/youtube]

Look up Plan B and Skinnyman.

Oh, and while I'm at it, how about I list some rap songs that aren't about hos and blunts.

NWA - f**k Tha Police - police brutality
Tupac - Brenda's Got A Baby - teenage pregnancy
Eminem - Stan - An obsessive fan
Eminem - Sing For The Moment - The litigious, blame culture the USA has managed to create
Eminem - Lose Yourself - Opportunity and real life in a ghetto
Beastie Boys - An Open Letter To NYC - The state of New York following 9/11
Public Enemy - Anything of theirs is political.
Exalt - City Streets - Street crime and Christianity
ReDefined - What I Need - How relationships needn't be all about sex
Skinnyman - Council Estate Of Mind - Council estate life. If you can find me a song in metal with an opening line as awesome as 'talking about the science of social deprivation,' then I'll gladly leave this thread.

Ill second that. Some other UK favs of mine, with a strong youtube prescence;

Foreign Beggars
Jehst
Phi Life Cypher

I like the thoughtfull, dark + brooding stuff!
(with a few bangers thrown in here & there)

I'd like to add Roots Manuva to that list with his subject matter including paranoia, mental illness and depression.

If you're going British with it also add Lewis Parker - Rise as well as his Masquerades and Silhouettes cd (particularly A Thousand Fragments) all very sick and hi intellect existentialism. He actually got signed by Massive Attack to their label.

'its all happenning now' was a class album, but ive not found much of his other stuff yet. Apparently he drops loads of star-wars references?

When the Amazon.com review brought that up I thought it was kind of a stupid way to look at it. He really doesn't, just that if your an alternative rapper and you drop one or two they'll try to make you sound like your Kool Keith or something. The way I got familiarized with is stuff was a Dj Midas hip hop mix that was posted I think on Drum & Bass Arena a couple years ago - Rise and A Thousand Fragments were both in there and I thought the combination of his voice, the beats, his choice of words and ideas he meant to express were extremely articulate.

So this is the way I'd explain him - take the types of flows that Maxi Jazz from Faithless puts out (like in Reverence or something like that - his sort of mood and mindset) but make it much more tightened up in the sense of actually being rap for rap's sake rather than rapping over house or trance beats. Very introspective, in A Thousand Fragments and a lot of other tunes he really likes to drive home existential severity in things (which I LOVE rappers who know how to and chose to do that - one of the things I can give Eminem props for aside from the onomatopeaias).
I'd say if you do tune in on Lewis Parkers stuff, try to forget you heard the Star Wars bit, that's just people being corny because they've got nothing else to pigeonhole it with.

By the way, thanks for bringing up 'Its all happening now', if it weren't for someone telling me about that I wouldn't have even known it existed. Still haven't heard it though, Amazon.com (US) won't even sport it and Amazon.co.uk doesn't have audio that'll work for me :/

Archive's kinda like that as well - I never would have found out about Londinium if I hadn't been bumping around Youtube looking to see if anyone had posted Rainbows of Color by Grooverider.

I think it was a www.ukhh.com interview i got the starwars thing from. Actually i first heard about Lewis Parker from an austrailian guy that popped up on WP briefly a year or two ago, when i was still pretty new to hh - he also got me listening to hilltop hoods, a great act from adelaide.

Well, if your not averse to filesharing over the net im sure we could get the mp3s sent over somehow...
Im surprised you cant use the UK CDs though- i thought they were all the same

They are, I just couldn't make the Amazon.co.uk sample files play. I did finally find it on something like a pay-per-download where I got the 30 second tidbits finally - not bad but, not quite what I would have hoped for (kinda scrapped a lot of what made his style unique - seen Dilated and Little Brother do a bit of that as well).

I like all types of music, except for Country.

Ah country... another underrated genre.

so... no poll options for UK, conscious/political/radical or nerd/underground/experimental hip hop then

(although i'm pleased that some stuff from those genres has been discussed in this thread...)

Roots Manuva's first album is one of my favourite albums in any genre. Other UK MCs i like include Klashnekoff, Braintax, Blak Twang (aka Tony Rotten), Rodney P and Phi Life Cypher (altho the latter piss me off sometimes with the random homophobic lyrics that they seem to like to drop, really jarringly to me, into the middle of really good anti-capitalist or anti-racist stuff).

US stuff... Public Enemy and KRS/BDP are of course the twin colossi that still loom over just about everything else (IMO). More recent stuff i like includes Talib Kweli, dead prez, The Coup, Blackalicious, Mos Def, Immortal Technique, etc... Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu if you count "hip hop soul"...

tho my favourite current US artist (whether or not you consider him "rap" or more like performance poetry) is Saul Williams, whose most recent album (a collaboration with former Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor) is incredible... it was available for free download from his website for a while, but i believe you now have to pay $5 for it, but as that's only about £2.50 i'd still strongly recommend it...

(if there's one musician within hip hop who i'd stake a bet on their being neurodiverse, Saul would have to be the one...)

Wow, Saul Williams is a US rapper? I just know him from Coded Language with Dj Krust:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HerpGwbLSM8[/youtube]
Just hope that his rhymes for rapping are little better than his freeverse though...