No. 19: Special Ed

Few emcees were tougher to place on this list than Edward Archer, better known to the world as Special Ed.

In terms of longevity, he falls well short of many elite-level rappers — look at his discography compared to that of Redman, KRS-One or LL Cool J, for example. But that's not necessarily a deal-breaker — a handful of other rappers ranked ahead of him also come up short on quantity (though in most cases, it's because they died).

Quality wins out over quantity here, though, and so a rapper who hasn't released anything noteworthy since the age of 17 — more than 20 years ago — somehow cracks the top 20.

Yes, he was that good.

Ed was still a week shy of his 16th birthday when Youngest In Charge dropped in 1989 — and yet his rhyme structures were more complex than those of nearly every emcee alive at the time. On "I Got It Made" and "I'm The Magnificent," he showcases his mastery of the "inside" rhyme (sticking two or more rhyming words in between two different-sounding ones, for those who don't know) years before rappers like Proof and Eminem got to it.

Feel free to blink another million times. I'm broke.

His second LP, Legal, came out the following year and was nearly as strong. "The Mission" proved that Ed could tell a story as well as nearly anyone else out there, and the album clearly established him as one of the elite rappers of the time. A great career was no doubt blossoming...

...until it wasn't.

It was five years before we heard from Special Ed again, and by then his buzz had died down. In the last full year of the Golden Age, he simply wasn't able to stay afloat in a market saturated with great work from the likes of Biggie, Mobb Deep and Raekwon. Ed's rhymes, while still technically superior to most, continued to prove that he was sort of a one-trick pony who relied almost exclusively on boasts and punchlines (a la Canibus or Chino XL).

Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that if you do it well, but it takes more than that to get higher than 19th — especially if your career is effectively over before you're old enough to vote (and you looked like you could be Chris Bosh's uncle).

Special Ed managed to do something that almost no other teenager could do — lyrically hang with the best in the game. At his peak, he belonged in an elite class that included only Big Daddy Kane, Rakim and maybe Kool G Rap. He's been surpassed by a few others since, but not enough to bump him out of the top 20.

He was like that really hot girl you knew in high school who peaked too soon and skipped the 10-year reunion because she had completely lost her fastball. You wouldn't touch her now, but you still have the memory of how ill she was back in the day.

Two decades later, we still remember The Magnificent.