Words Past The Margin

Several emcees were considered for inclusion and just missed the cut. Here are, in alphabetical order, the honorable mentions (some have str...

Few emcees are as unassuming, as understated, as un-rap-star-like, as Kelvin Mercer is. But no emcee is better. As the driving verbal fo...

Any guesses? When I started putting together this list, I thought that the end game would come down to the two guys most heavily discussed...

I've gone back and forth on these last two guys for weeks, waffling as recently as yesterday. In the end, Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones fal...

Sometime around 2003 or 2004, just before Encore came out, I said that Marshall Mathers was one or two more solid albums away from making h...

For the longest time, it was considered blasphemous to consider anyone other than William Michael Griffin Jr. — better known as Rakim — to b...

Carlton Douglas Ridenhour doesn't always get his due when people start talking about the greatest emcees of all time — but he's goin...

The top six on this list are a pretty clear cut above the rest for me, and I at least toyed with the idea of each of them as my No. 1 at som...

Kids today know Ice Cube primarily as a movie star and TV producer — but long before he even made the first Friday film, O'Shea Jackson...

Antonio Hardy's reign at the top of the hip-hop world probably didn't last as long as it should have. But for that too-brief period ...

Yes, Anthony Criss is ahead of Chris Wallace. And no, I'm not totally crossed out. It might be considered sacrilege to say so, but her...

Though Christopher Wallace will always be linked with Tupac Shakur because of their untimely, and likely related, deaths, they're side b...

Even though 97 percent of readers probably just saw the number in the header and tuned me out forever, I'm going to explain this one...a...

It may have been dumb luck that Kendrick Jeru Davis — that's Jeru The Damaja to you — wound up becoming high-school buddies with DJ Prem...

It's a damn shame that Christopher "Big Punisher" Rios couldn't manage to weigh less than a small car — otherwise, we migh...

Okay...for both of you who have been following along, you may remember back in the mid-30s of this countdown when I admitted that I had a bi...

The son of a professor, Lonnie Lynn Jr. has always been capable of putting together top-quality verses...and more often than not, he's d...

Part of the reason I couldn't put Big L any higher than 17 is the fact that it would've been wrong to rank him ahead of the rapper w...

I really, really wanted Lamont "Big L" Coleman to be higher than this. And were it not for some mindless idiot with a gun, he almo...

Yeah, I said it. Here's where I undoubtedly start catching some heat. I'm well aware that there is a growing segment of the hip-ho...

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...

I was never a huge, huge EPMD fan, so I got hyped up for Redman's solo career through word of mouth. When Whut? Thee Album dropped in 1...

If you've been following — and if your name isn't Dan Silver, you probably haven't been — then you know I've never been a fa...

In a way, it's fitting that Lawrence Krisna Parker, better known to the world as KRS-One, is ranked right next to LL Cool J, because the...