No. 13: Big Punisher

It's a damn shame that Christopher "Big Punisher" Rios couldn't manage to weigh less than a small car — otherwise, we might be talking about him as one of the three or four greatest emcees of all time.

Big Punisher burst onto the national hip-hop scene quickly after meeting up with fellow Bronx Boricua Fat Joe in 1995, making a guest appearance on his mentor's album Jealous Ones Envy and outshining him on a "freestyle" for the first Funkmaster Flex 60 Minutes Of Funk LP later that year. With the underground buzz building, Pun set his solo career off with "I'm Not A Player," a virtuoso performance laced with the clever multisyllable rhymes that would become his calling card. Overnight, he had earned a place alongside the genre's most respected lyrical heavyweights.

Sometimes pictures scream 1,000 words we don't want to hear.

The growing legend expanded with his debut LP, Capital Punishment, in 1998. The remix of his first hit, "Still Not A Player," brought him major crossover appeal, but it was the rest of the album that continued to bring him underground acclaim. "Twinz," his back-and-forth with Fat Joe over Dr. Dre's "Deep Cover" instrumental, was another masterpiece:

Dead in the middle of little Italy, little did we know that we riddled some middlemen who didn't do diddly...

Two months before his second album, Yeeeah Baby, Rios died of a heart attack. On the lead single released just after his death, "It's So Hard," Pun says, "I just lost 100 pounds...I'm trying to live!" — yet he was reportedly 780 pounds at the time of his passing, the highest he'd been in his entire life.

Yeeeah Baby was a disappointment, and that's not the only pock mark on Pun's scorecard. Perhaps in part because of his weight issues, Pun had trouble with breath control, making it difficult at times to spit his intricate verses without punch-ins. Other top rappers like Raekwon and Slick Rick have been guilty of the same, though, so that's not a legacy-killer — and almost every rapper on this list is guilty of at least one flop album.

(He's the only one guilty of lifting a hook from me, but that's another story for another post. I've forgiven him.)

Would Pun have gone full-blown sellout in the earlier part of the aughts like his buddy Fat Joe? His final album (posthumous releases after Yeeeah Baby don't count) seems to indicate that he might have, but we'll never know for sure. All we can go on are the rhymes that he spit while he was around — and there weren't too many who ever wrote better verses.

Like Big L, Big Punisher could have easily become at least a top-10 emcee with a little more time. Unfortunately, his inability to take care of himself cost us all. Still, he did enough during his short career to assure that he'll never be forgotten.