Rakim

Unable to produce a comparable contemporary touchstone thoughtful observers likened Rakim's sheets speech to the flurried notes of Coltrane, his icy visage to that of Miles. Yet even the accuracies in such summations shortchanged the visceral thrill so unique to Hip Hop something Rakim himself never lost sight of as a writer. Sure, he could rightly boast of being "more complex from one rhyme to the next." True, Leader's progressive production strokes rugged samples offset by frosty keyboard textures mirrored Ra's verbal sophistication. But he never stopped sounding smitten with rap's fundamentals: pen, paper, an amplified mic device, and two copes of a choice piece of breakbeat vinyl for his music maestro ("Cause we don't have a band/It's just my voice and his hands/That's what Hip Hop is, it still stands"). On the hand, such idealism Rakim focused and disciplined. You never had to stress about the God sounding frivolous or straying into ill-advised pop crossover territory like some of his colleagues. (Even when he and Eric B. did go R&B guesting on Jody Watley's "Friends" the resulting collab reflected a fitting sobriety.) On the other hand, you could argue Ra's poker-faced pursuit of the perfect verse consumed him to his detriment, keeping him emotionally detached from his listeners even as rap's expressive range began to expand. The occasional biographical details he shared notwithstanding (most memorably, his childhood dream of becoming an NFL quarterback), you couldn't ever claim to know Rakim through his music. If he was illmatic before Illmatic, he was also enigmatic.