With the basketball season about to start tonight, I thought this would be a good time to put up a few of my favorite rap songs involving NBA players. The following videos are by no means the best examples of NBA rap, certainly not by any musical standards, but merely the few that have managed to keep me entertained over the years. Peep:
Though it doesn't have quite as many quotable lines as his classic freestyle Kobe How My Ass Taste?, nor does it benefit from a Biggie guest verse, What's Up Doc? is the pick from Shaq's vast catalog simply for the fact that it was the first song to show that, given a good enough ghost writer, professional athletes were capable of putting together marginally successful rap songs.
Shaq might be the most successful NBA center turned rapper, but he wasn't the first. Akeem Olajuwon (he wouldn't add the "H" to his first name until 1991) released this single with the aforementioned Hurt 'Em Bad in 1987.
Everyone of course remembers Jay-Z's beef with Nas, a beef that resulted in two of the best songs of the decade: Ether and Takeover. Often overlooked is the shot that Jay also took at Allen Iverson and his (and Nas') former girlfriend Carmen Bryan on Supa Ugly, with the line, "Me and the boy A.I. got more in common / Than just ballin and rhymin, get it? More in Carmen." Though Iverson had given up his backup career as a rapper by the time Jay's song came out - it's unclear whether it was the rhymes about guns and weed or just the fact that A.I.'s fumbling on the mic made Shaq look like Rakim by comparison, but either way NBA commissioner David Stern wasn't having it - The Answer got back in the booth one last time to fire back at Hov on Big Tigger. Some street cred was lost for shouting out Mase's Harlem World, but at least Iverson outdid Carmen's diss record.
Iverson isn't the only NBA baller that Jay-Z has attacked on wax. In an attempt to curry favor with Lebron, perhaps hoping that he will one day sign with the Nets (the team that Jay owns a minority stake in) Jay-Z put out this diss record after Deshawn Stevens called James 'overrated' during the 2008 playoffs.
Almost a decade later, it's easy to forget that at one point both Kobe Bryant and Allen Iverson were both threatening rap audiences with solo rap albums. As mentioned, A.I. was forced to shelve his album after it became clear that the general public just wasn't ready to hear a multimillionaire athlete rap about committing homicide. As for Kobe, any chance of his album seeing an official release disappeared as soon as he chose vocally-challenged supermodel Tyra Banks (who was also working on an album of her own around the same time) to sing the hook on his lead single K.O.B.E..
I have to admit that I have been utterly fascinated by virtually every song Ron Artest has ever put out. Ron Ron can't rap to save his soul, but damn if he doesn't pour his heart into every malformed lyric that he spits. Thus, I'm more than a little concerned when he drops this line during his tribute to Michael Jackson: "MJ, I know you in heaven, I hope to see you next year."
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