![]() ![]() For this playlist, we’ve selected 29 of our favorite 1980s tracks most of which hardly ever show up on 1980s ‘best of’ lists. There’s also a lot of artists and/or songs that tend to be overlooked for all the wrong reasons. There are a lot of artists who pioneered and helped define the Hip Hop genre in the 1980s, who are widely celebrated on this and other platforms, as are the classic albums and songs they released during Hip Hop’s breakout decade. T’s track ‘6 In The Mornin’ from 1986 was one of the first tracks to be labelled as gangsta rap, but N.W.A would quickly follow and solidify gangsta rap’s place in hip hop with songs such as ‘F*k Da Police’ and ‘Straight Outta Compton’ spreading nationwide like wildfire.29 Forgotten 1980s Hip Hop Songs: Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. Over in the ‘Wild Wild West’, Gangsta Rap was the main sound, with Ice-T considered one of the genre’s godfathers. It took the clubs by storm as it would fuse the two most popular sounds in Chicago, making a new one perfect for everyone. A great example of hip-house music is ‘Turn Up The Bass’ by Tyree Cooper, released in 1988. Eventually, they fused the two together, and by the late 80s, Chicago had established its sound of hip house. In the windy city of Chicago, by the mid-80s, rappers were experimenting with house music, another form of underground music taking hold of the clubs. However, Miami Bass remained extremely regional and barely reached anybody outside of Florida. Not too dissimilar to Electro, Miami Bass was much faster and shares some similarities with Jungle music, with songs such as ‘I Wanna Rock’ by Luke containing chopped up high pitch vocals and a lot of repetition designed to make people dance. So as Electro was gripping inner-city youths on the chilly Eastern Seaboard, down in sunny Florida, Miami Bass music was beginning to take over the clubs. Electro, as a sound, also embraced the scratch far more as its emergence coincided with the invention of the technique popularised by Bronx DJ Grand Wizard Theodore. Electro tracks such as ‘I’m The Packman’ by The Packman and ‘King of The Beats’ by Mantronix are a far cry from a song such as ‘Rapper’s Delight’, which is more groovy. The emergence of Electro on the Eastern Seaboard saw the warmness and soulfulness of funk taken out of hip hop and replaced by a more aggressive, raw and rugged sound that reflected the streets of New York far better than its predecessor. A self-explanatory term, electro saw hip hop become more electronic, with producers relying less on old funk records and instead turning to electronic drum machines such as the Roland TR-808 to create more brash, industrial-sounding records. The New York tri-state area was beginning to break away from funk and embrace a newer sound called Electro. The 1980s was an exciting era in hip hop because the genre started to generate its own sub-genres after only a decade of existence. With this being the case, it is only fitting that we delve deeper into the 80s to see the figures that were dominating the decade and see if we can get to the top ten hip hop tracks of the 1980s. However, there were others all over America, you had the Geto Boys running the South in Houston, and other Chicago rappers were on the rise. Hip hop scholar Michael Eric Dyson stated, 'during the golden age of hip hop, from 1987 to 1993, Afrocentric and black nationalist rap were prominent', and critic Scott Thill described the time as 'the golden age of hip hop, the late '80s and early '90s when the form most capably fused the militancy of its Black Panther and Watts Prophets. ![]() On the East Coast, you had Run-DMC and LL Cool J running things, and on the West Coast, you were getting the emergence of Gangsta Rap with Ice-T and N.W.A.
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