I hear the same thrust in a track like “Bonus Flow.” Oddisee spends the rest of his excellent Tangible Dream mixtape spinning literate yarns over tasteful beats. Who could blame them for playing faster, screaming louder, and moshing harder than anyone else? Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Scream: these guys lived at the epicenter of Reagan’s America. Even at the height of hardcore’s vitriol, the Washington strain spewed the most bile. It’s a tableau that practically invites defacement. is: creaky septuagenarian lawmakers in tacky suits shuffle around Capitol Hill, trailed by gaggles of twentysomething graduates of Georgetown and Cornell, the supposed best and brightest who gave up six-figure investment banking salaries to sweat through their seersucker suits in the District. The unsettling part is that by an extension of the artist-audience relationship, that victim is you. He holds his victims’ life in his hands and he doesn’t care if that life is continued or extinguished. He comes across as a perfectly dispassionate tool of destruction. There is no urgency in the delivery of the lyrics, nor is there any sense that the author is in any way perturbed (or conversely, excited) by his actions. The beat is creeping, languid and unhurried. This song unspools with similar chilling tranquility of temperament.

In The Silence Of The Lambs, there’s a memorable moment where Hannibal Lecter brutally attacks a nurse while his heartbeat remains at only 85 bpm. What really gets under my skin is the prevailing calm with which the song is executed. It’s not the slick video, full of mean mugs and big guns and culminating with the shot of the tied up squirming victims. It’s not the reality of Maxo’s violent personal history in which the song is rooted, he’s far from the first to talk it and actually live it. But even so, I find ‘Lewinsky’ slightly unsettling. By now I should be wholly desensitized to them.

So in the name of entertainment, I’ve heard and seen scenes of unimaginable carnage, described or shown in minute gory details, and never flinched. I am a big fan of gangsta rap and maybe an even bigger fan of action movies. There is no Drake because the executive board of this website has a long-standing grudge with his family dating back to the Purim of 343 B.C. Wealth was attempted to be spread, so as this subjective litany isn’t identical to the Best Album list. Even the Wet Bandits agree with this list.

Rap or go to the league zip