Anaconda’s flagship product, Anaconda Enterprise, allows organizations to secure, govern, scale and extend Anaconda to deliver actionable insights that drive businesses and industries forward.” continues to lead open source projects like Anaconda, NumPy and SciPy that form the foundation of modern data science. I wanted to celebrate the period that built and led to the influence that got me a record deal.“With over 4.5 million users, Anaconda is the world’s most popular Python data science platform. I wanted to concentrate on the period that I was not professionally involved in the art form. Just keep that clock radio on.ĪDDITIONAL NOTE: For this top 50 list, I decided to concentrate on 1979-1995, the former being the year I got my first taste of hip-hop, the latter being the year my major-label debut with the Roots made its mark. The best hip-hop songs aren’t blueprints – they are calls to action, reminders that you change the world in three minutes. It could be a song that sets your neighborhood on fire (“Rapper’s Delight”) or a song on your headphones that makes you rethink what hip-hop is (Schooly D’s “PSK”). Whether you’re loving every second of it (“The 900 Number” by DJ Mark The 45 King) or not (Vanilla Ice). So what makes a great hip-hop song? It’s when a track has the power to pull energy and excitement and anger and questions and self-doubt and raw emotion out of you. I’ve seen “Ice Ice Baby” go from ruling the world to being a musical pariah to being an ironic statement in my DJ set that makes people smile. are they allowed to do that?”) to age 29 (“It was kinda different when I was a kid but I guess I can’t fight it”) to now (“What the fuck was THAT?”). I’ve seen my reactions to hip-hop change from age nine (“What the hell was that?!”) to age 14 (“That was incredible!”) to age 22 (“Wait. When you are a hip-hop devotee of my age, you’ve been given a set of rules that you follow like the law, only to see them change every five years. Not every big song was a “Eureka!” moment of elation. (My father, unimpressed, told me that “There ain’t a living spinning other people’s music” – little did you know, Dad, little did you know.) There were so many times when a song premiere could stop you in your tracks, then become a subject of discussion for the next four hours: The high school lunchroom when me and Black Thought heard “The Wrath of Kane” for the first time, or my first listen to “Fight The Power” – it sounded like Pharoah Sanders and Rahsaan Roland Kirk had gotten into a knife fight. There was the summer I spent trying to match the mix to “Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” note for note on two Fisher Price turntables. There was nothing like growing up with the power of hip-hop. “Rapper’s Delight” turned this future high school band geek into a superstar for the month of October 1979. My boy Aantar became my agent that week, scheduling performances and negotiating written lyrics for snacks or hand-holding with girls in gym class. This song single-handedly made me the man in my fourth grade lunchroom. The next night, I was prepared, with a prehistoric tape recorder in hand and a black-and-white composition notebook. My friends starting calling, way past grandma’s weeknight deadline: “Did you just hear that!?” It was like our version of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. Philadelphia row house walls were thin, so I could hear the neighbors on both sides blasting this jam on their stereo. I said a hip, hop, the hippy to the hippy/To the hip hip-hop you don’t stop/The rock it to the bang bang a boogie say up jump the boogie/To the rhythm of the boogie the beat! How was I to know that my world would come crashing down in a matter of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 … Me and my sister Donn were sneaking a listen of the local soul station while we washed dishes when an army of percussion and a syncopated Latin piano line came out of my grandma’s JVC clock radio – what appeared to be Chic’s “Good Times,” or a good duplicate of it. on a Thursday night, after a dinner of porgies, string beans and creamed corn. I was eight years old when “Rapper’s Delight” made its world premiere on Philadelphia radio.
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