2009: #7 - "I'm Ill"

(Not an official video)

Call us suckers for 80's hip hop cliches, but we loved this Red Cafe track. Hard beat, sparse instrumentation, call and response hook? Check, check, check. It might have even sounded dated 20 years ago, but we don't care.

And it's built around a Jay-Z vocal sample (from a remix of Lil Wayne's "A Milli", which has it's own interesting history - see below). In the absence of anything from Jay in the top 10, this is the next best thing. It's everything we wished his "Jockin' Jay-Z" would have been. (FYI - that song sampled Run DMC, who probably would have thrown out the title "I'm Ill" for being too cliche, but oh well.)

The site Otherground Hip Hop actually has a much cooler, historically-angled write-up of this song. Despite the misspelling of "its" in the post title, it's an interesting read.