The 100 Best Rap Singles of 2005

In 2005, Young Jeezy led a Southern trap paradigm shift, marking the beginning of the end of East Coast hip-hop dominance.

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September 28, 2025

If 2005 was destined to mark the merciful end to a bloated era of platinum-encrusted East Coast thugs cranking out boorish club hits and strangling anyone who objected, then it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time. That year, as he had for the previous two, 50 Cent dominated the charts. His second full-length, The Massacre, yielded sluggishly rote yet inexplicably popular singles like “Disco Inferno,” “Candy Shop,” and “Just a Little Bit.” He ginned up wearily predictable beefs with Nas, Jadakiss, and Fat Joe like a WWE champion desperate for new opponents. He commissioned a movie very loosely based on his life, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, directed by acclaimed Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan and starring himself.

As 50 Cent positioned G-Unit as a rising empire by hiring familiar mercenaries like Mobb Deep, Mase, and M.O.P., one of his sentries waged a noisy revolt. The Game was an eccentric Compton rapper with questionable Bloods gang ties and a doggedly fascinating flow marked by strange verbal tics, including stocking his lyrics with innumerable references to other rappers. Critics and fans didn’t quite know what to make of him, but no one could deny that his debut album, The Documentary, was a slick and punchy epic that dazzled in all the ways that The Massacre didn’t. (50 seemed to tacitly acknowledge as much by including a remix of their collab, “Hate It or Love It” on the latter.) By the summer, both men were trading shots at one another, with The Game launching a “G-Unot” campaign against his onetime mentor. It all seemed like kayfabe, dumb antics to sell more records as well as copies of XXL magazine, which put 50 on its cover three times. (The Game got two covers.)

*(left) The “troublesome” Game in XXL’s September 2005 issue. Photo by Bryce Duffy. (right) The G-Unit “gang” in XXL’s Jan/Feb 2006 issue. Photo by Benoit Peverelli.*

The Massacre may have been the biggest-selling rap album of 2005. But it was the last time to date that a New York rapper earned the honor. 50 Cent felt like an apt symbol for an East Coast colossus stuck in a rut of self-satisfied Funk Flex world premieres, mean-mugged hot bars collated by the likes of Clinton Sparks and DJ Green Lantern into an avalanche of CD-R mixtapes, and blandly calculated R&B seductions for drivetime airplay on “urban” radio stations. There was a sense that the Bad Boy ethos of the 90s was fading, no matter Sean “Diddy” Combs’ vain efforts to repackage the late Notorious B.I.G.’s stray verses into new product like Duets (The Final Chapter). Still, it seemed unimaginable that the East Coast wouldn’t be the fulcrum of the rap industry. Perhaps that’s why Jay-Z, who only several months before proclaimed his retirement with a farewell concert at Madison Square Garden, sent folks into a tizzy with a few carefully placed cameos – a song on Memphis Bleek’s 534, a verse on Young Jeezy’s “Go Crazy” – heralding his return. They hoped he would save them.

It was obvious now that the Southern rap world had outgrown stereotypes depicting it as backward and country, good for only booty-bass novelties from Ying Yang Twins, the occasional hardworking crew like No Limit and Cash Money, and the odd A-list act like OutKast. Rap aesthetes thrilled to T.I.’s cool poise and effortless swagger, and took notice of Lil Wayne’s sharply imaginative punchlines. And they could no longer deny that Lil Jon was an effective producer with staying power.

Then there was Young Jeezy, whose debut, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101, was promoted with all the muscle Def Jam Recordings could muster. His omnipresence was not only sourced in heavy rotation on MTV and BET, but also a very real street buzz. Southern rappers copied his ad-libs (“Yeeeahhh!” “That’s right!”) for years. Kids around the country wore bootleg T-shirts with his “snowman” logo. Controversy fomented around his ties to BMF, a drug-trafficking organization that also dominated Southern nightlife before being broken up by the DEA. That association helped lend his trap boasts a measure of credibility. Less appealing was his messy conflict with another Atlanta rapper, Gucci Mane. After Gucci denied Jeezy permission to include their “Icy” track on Thug Motivation 101, he sent associates to Gucci’s house, resulting in a shoot-out that left a man dead.

Regardless, Young Jeezy was a charismatic big voice touting legendary feats, and the industry happily rallied around him, even as some skeptics complained that he couldn’t rap. More important than his self-proclaimed “movement,” Jeezy represented the beginnings of an aesthetic shift in rap culture. Vocal presence, cadence, and syllabic rhyme schemes would no longer be the primary criteria for GOAT status. Melodies, hooks, and gruff vocal force, no matter how illegible, were becoming equally important. “I spit that gangsta rap, forget that hip-hop,” said C-Murder on “Yall Heard of Me,” a track he released as he battled an indictment for second-degree murder.

*D4L: Stoney, Fabo, Shawty Lo, and Mook B.*

If Young Jeezy’s plug talks didn’t make it obvious that a new paradigm was emerging, then D4L’s surprise hit “Laffy Taffy” made it unavoidable. The bare-bones keyboard arrangement by Atlanta producer K-Rab, the repetitively sung hook “Shake your laffy taffy”: how was this hip-hop? The apparent primitiveness of “Laffy Taffy,” which soared to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, challenged mores in a way that past novelties like Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” and Do or Die’s “Po Pimp” did not. It felt like the beginning of a conceptual change, and not just because it as well as Dem Franchize Boyz’ “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It” kicked off a memorable but brief “snap music” fad.

The underground evolved as well. Though fans were hesitant to admit it, the indie scene that formed in the mid-90s was creatively exhausted, leaving a hardy circuit of dependable stars and record labels like Atmosphere, Aesop Rock, and MF DOOM as well as Stones Throw, Rhymesayers, and Definitive Jux to plow onward. Little Brother jumped to a major label with The Minstrel Show, only to alienate with a wicked satire of the Black entertainment industry. Their love-hate relationship with the mainstream augured poorly for themselves and their Okayplayer peers. Meanwhile, Duck Down Records unexpectedly offered seeds of renewal with cult hits like Sean Price’s Monkey Barz and Buckshot & 9^th Wonder’s Chemistry. One can trace a line from these veterans’ exploitation of traditional street-rap styles to modern-day boom-bap revivalists like Roc Marciano. Still, it would take years for it to become apparent.

That left the increasingly undeniable primacy of Southern rap as one key marker of this transitional year. The other was Kanye West, who quickly followed up 2004’s The College Dropout with his second album Late Registration. While he couched the former in aspirational gospel and soul, Late Registration represented his increasing comfort in melding contemporary styles: chirpy pop-rock alongside Adam Levine, Houston-like slow-and-chopped grooves with Paul Wall, and Neptunes-like keyboard funk on the album’s biggest hit, “Gold Digger” with Jamie Foxx. If Southern rap would become the locus of hardcore authenticity for the next several years, then West’s conception of rap as a synthesis of fast-moving trends would help the genre continue to conquer the global pop market.

But the Hurricane Katrina disaster overshadowed it all. The tropical cyclone destroyed much of New Orleans, caused over 1300 deaths, and turned the privations of working-class Black Americans who were stranded at the New Orleans Superdome, pleading for help on national TV, into portraits of a political and humanitarian crisis. Innumerable songs about the event were released over the next several months, like Public Enemy’s righteous “Hell No, We Ain’t Alright” and Juvenile’s troubling “Get Ya Hustle On.” But most only remember when West used his appearance on an NBC prime-time benefit concert to declare, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

Twenty years later, it’s remarkable to recall how much of a hero West seemed at that moment, and how much he’s perverted his legacy of speaking truth to power since. For certain, 2005 unfurled a roiling series of changes that transformed rap culture in sound and look, some undoubtedly for the better, and others undeniably for the worse.