Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...

Argue about the parentage of “Mafioso rap” all you want, but it’s without question that Raekwon’s ’95 solo debut set the bar so high that Shaq would have a hard time touching it. Rae and co-billed Ghostface Killah mastered a vision of high-crime storytelling that made the tragedies inseparable from the triumphs, while the litany of top-tier guest verses from other Wu members and RZA’s most dramatically vivid scene-setting collections of beats proved that their collective steel had only gotten sharper since ’93. The rap-sheet intricacy of “Criminology” alone makes the Scarface it samples seem Disney by comparison.

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