The 125 Best Rap Singles of 1995

Despite standout work by Wu-Tang Clan and others, the rap industry warred with itself, yielding an unmistakable feeling of dread.

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June 18, 2025

On August 3, 1995, The Source magazine held its second annual Source Hip-Hop Music Awards, a night that has gone down in history for a series of moments triggered by Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight as he and R&B singer Danny Boy accepted the Motion Picture Soundtrack of the Year honor for Above the Rim. “There’s one thing I’d like to say,” he said after giving a shout-out to God, a then-incarcerated 2Pac, and “both sides,” a reference to the increasingly divided West Coast and East Coast rap industries. “Any artist that wants to be an artist and wanna stay a star and won’t have to worry about the executive producer tryin’ to be all on the video, all on the record, dancin’, come to Death Row!” As sundry Death Row acts like Snoop Doggy Dogg erupted in cheers, much of the audience booed Knight for targeting Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, the executive “all on the video” of Bad Boy stars like Craig Mack and The Notorious B.I.G.

2Pac & Suge Knight. Photo by Nitro. Published in *The Source*, January 1996.

Ironically, The Source didn’t mention the incident in its post-show coverage, choosing to pat itself on the back. “As we promised last year after the first show, this year’s event was a big improvement,” wrote Marc Landas in its October 1995 issue. “Respect to the Hip-Hop Nation for a display of world class talent and an evening of peace.” But over the next several months, as tensions between the coasts reached a boil, Knight’s speech and the on-stage acrimony that followed – Snoop yelling, “The East don’t love us??!!” after the crowd booed him during a performance; and Andre 3000 declaring, “The South got something to say” when the crowd booed OutKast for winning New Artist of the Year – Group over local faves Ill & Al Skratch and Smif-N-Wessun – were identified as the beginning of a heartbreaking and ludicrous regional rivalry. Knight may have intended to show that his beef was with Combs and Bad Boy, not “both sides.” That’s not how his shit-stirring speech was received.

As 1995 unfolded and bled into 1996, it became increasingly clear that the rap world would look far different than the R&B industry it began to dominate, one that wouldn’t be tamed by Christian uplift, liberal assimilation, and civil-rights piety. Large, unwieldy crews of aspirants pushed and bullied their way through annual confabs like the Jack the Rapper conference, a scene captured in Peter Spirer’s 1996 documentary Rhyme & Reason. Those occasional moments of thuggery seemed to taint street conscious yet politically minded perspectives by association, ensuring that noble efforts like Rap Sheet’s Working Towards a Unified Hip-Hop Nation conference and the Panther and Pump Ya Fist soundtracks seemed irrelevant. When 2Pac released Me Against the World, he became the first musician to debut at number one on the Billboard album chart while in prison. Mainstream rock critics recoiled at a noxious celebrity triumphant while serving time on a sexual abuse conviction and claiming in an explosive Vibe magazine interview that Combs and Biggie set him during the infamous 1994 Quad Studios shooting. Meanwhile, Pac’s growing number of fans warmed to a poet finding his voice, reflecting on his troubled life and paying tribute to his mother Afeni Shakur on the unforgettable ballad “Dear Mama.”

Hardcore listeners learned to absorb rap through the visual personas men and women projected on Yo! MTV Raps (before it was canceled in August 1995), BET’s Rap City, and The Box. These images drifted between heightened reality and pure fantasy and often didn’t reflect the troubling implications of the artists’ lyrics or their actual lives. When Prodigy strutted towards the camera in Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones” clip, Solo red cup filled with liquor in his hand, he seemed like a charismatic villain warning us to avoid him, the modern and urban personification of the Stagger Lee myth. When E-40’s major-label debut, In a Major Way, as well as the Luniz’ “I Got 5 on It” brought mobb music style to the globe, they depicted the Yay Area as an oasis of funky, herb-smoking, slang-dropping D-boys. When Raekwon and Ghostface Killah chanted “Point out the baddest bitch in the crowd and watch me scrape her” on “Glaciers of Ice,” folks were too dazzled by the duo’s stylized cadences to wonder if they were bragging about consensual sex or sexual assault.

*(left) Mobb Deep: Prodigy and Havoc. Photo by Chi Modu. Published in The Source, January 1996. (right) E-40 in “Sprinkle Me.” Directed by Rubin Whitmore II.*

Meanwhile, innumerable displays of sonic inventiveness smoothed out the genre’s rough edges. After serving notice with 1993’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Wu-Tang Clan flowered with a brilliant array of releases. Method Man’s duet with Mary J. Blige, “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By,” was hailed by the New York Times as the song of the summer. He’d also score a classic smoker’s anthem alongside Redman, “How High.” Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers was a delightful mess, a hip-hop twist on X-rated Black comedians like Dolemite, Blowfly, Lady Reed, and Moms Mabley. Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx felt like a fiery blast of illy blunt smoke, a mash of Five Percenter wisdom and crack dealer stories. Finally, there was GZA’s Liquid Swords, a masterclass in storytelling set against the tragic environs of Staten Island’s “killa hills.” Each album – Method Man’s 1994 bow Tical as well as Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Raekwon, and GZA’s releases – were mostly produced by the RZA, sounded wildly different in tone from one another, and were received as new chapters in the Wu-Tang saga. Collectively, they were a staggering artistic achievement.

While Wu-Tang expanded with auxiliary acts like Shabazz the Disciple and Sunz of Man, critics praised sounds emanating from the East Coast while declaring that the West Coast was played out. (They largely ignored Southern gems like TRU’s True and its breakout single, “I’m Bout It, Bout It,” even after the Vallejo-to-New Orleans supergroup led by Master P hit number one in the Pacific market of Billboard’s Regional Heatseekers chart.) Case in point was a pair of Billboard reviews for two albums that vacillated between ingenuity and mediocrity, AZ’s Doe or Die and Tha Dogg Pound’s Dogg Food. In an unsigned October 28, 1995, review the outlet praised AZ’s effort as “the struggle to make it and the drastic means by which ghetto dwellers survive.” Compare that praise with its damning assessment of Dogg Food onNovember 11, 1995. “Tongue-tied and stale, Kurupt and Daz remain content to peddle trite ghetto ghoulishness,” read an unsigned review. It was this kind of coastal bias that fueled tensions.

More broadly, the music industry was struggling to make hip-hop culture conform into something less beholden to unpredictable street codes that could foment outbreaks of violence. “Rap has become predictable and, on some levels, very, very boring,” onetime Public Enemy associate turned Stepsun Records executive Bill Stephney told Billboard’s Havelock Nelson in “Hip-Hop, Rap Wrestle with Predictability as Demand Dips,” a news feature that unfavorably compared the year’s crop to the likes of multiplatinum R&B superstars such as TLC and alternative rock heroes like No Doubt. People have always argued whether hip-hop is in decline or not. But even casual fans in 1995 knew this statement wasn’t true.

However, give Billboard credit for noticing that the genre was at a crossroads. Venue operators were scared to book acts out of racialized fears of attracting local thugs as well as legitimate worries those artists couldn’t stage a professional performance. (“We don’t need no rap tours,” Method Man memorably said on “How High.”) Black (or “urban”) radio stations continued to ignore hardcore rap in favor of G-funk-influenced singers like Brandy and Xscape, R&B-leaning club bounce like Naughty by Nature’s “Feel Me Flow,” and impossible-to-avoid crossover smashes like Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.” How would it overcome professional agitators like C. Delores Tucker and the Rev. Calvin Butts, who found increasing success in sparking Congressional hearings, forcing stores to ban the product, and agitated for Time Warner to divest from its holdings in Interscope, which distributed Death Row?

*Bone Thugs-N-Harmony (l-r): Flesh-n-Bone, Krayzie Bone, Wish Bone, Bizzy Bone, and Layzie Bone. Photo by Chi Modu. Published in The Source, August 1995.*

All these questions yielded an unmistakable feeling of dread. It wasn’t just Eazy-E, who became the first major gold-and-platinum-certified rap star death when he succumbed to AIDS complications, stunning the world and triggering long-overdue conversations about how the disease afflicted the cisgender Black community. There was Eazy’s protégés, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, who rendered Gothic harmonies about urban horror. Mobb Deep’s The Infamous was shrouded in menacing aural darkness, and Sticky Fingaz of Onyx rapped, “And I live by the bullet, ‘cause I’ll die by the gun.” Conspiratorial talk about the Rapture and the “last days” abounded in lyrics.

Amid incessant turmoil, hip-hop continued to inspire a generation to add their own twists to the form, whether it yielded record sales or not. There was Houston’s DJ Screw turning 12-inches by UGK into hallucinatory sludge, and Daly City’s Invisibl Scratch Piklz needle thrashing old-school boom-bap. Cities across the U.S. teemed with locals that cobbled together hissy demo tapes full of ideas, from Oakland’s Mystik Journeymen to New Orleans’ Magnolia Slim. In L.A., lyrical experimentalists gathered under the umbrella of Project Blowed. In New York, onetime music executive Robert “Bobbito” Garcia and Stretch Armstrong used their “The Stretch and Bobbito Show” – which The Source called the best radio show ever in 1998 – to nurture a fresh crop of underground acts, from major-label refugees like Kool Keith and Cage to independent renegades like Company Flow and Natural Elements. The culture sprawled in ways both delightful and disturbing.

“The apocalypse generation?” asked The Source in its August 1995 cover story on Bone. Perhaps it was silly to believe that “the world’s about to end,” as Group Home announced at the start of “Supa Star.” Still, something was amiss.