No. 37 & No. 38: Ghostface Killah and Raekwon

How could I not lump these two together?

From the moment the Wu-Tang Clan burst onto the scene in late 1993, Corey Woods (Raekwon the Chef) and Dennis Coles (Ghostface Killah) have always seemed to be a package deal. When Raekwon dropped his "solo" debut in '95, the classic Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, it was "featuring" Ghost, who returned the favor by sharing the bill with Rae on his 1996 "solo" effort, Ironman.

The move made sense — the two play off each other well, and much like Q-Tip and Phife, their chemistry probably made them seem better than they actually were. I'm the first to make fun of Ghostface for rapping about absolutely nothing (and often not even rhyming)...shit, one of my favorite pastimes back in the day was freestyling pretend Ghost lyrics:

Mashed potatoes/fresh ass Wallabees
Parallel parking/fuckin' with the onion rings

Half-ass fools get demolished and bruised.

...and so on. But through the nonsensical flows about shoes and arts and crafts and what have you, Rae and Ghost were always strangely ferocious. Shit, go back to Cuban Linx and find a song that wasn't awesome. Dare you. "Ice Cream" was in constant rotation in my whip at the beginning of my senior year in college, and when Ghost dropped a year or so later, I was just as quick to loop "Daytona 500." Everything these two put together just...worked.

Until it didn't. After the second Wu-Tang project kind of flopped, Rae and Ghost continued to make solo records, gradually relying on one another a little bit less. The unofficial split seemed to have less of an impact on Ghostface, who has a more impressive solo catalog (hence him getting the one-spot nod), but neither achieved the same heights that they had managed from 1993 to 1996.

Everyone cools off from being hot, as another top-50 emcee reminds us.

When Rae and Ghost were on it, though, they were at or near the top of the game for a stretch that covered the last three years of hip-hop's golden age...which means they were better than almost anything we've seen since.