And I'm saying that as someone who thinks it's clear Kendrick has the better discography - he has four releases better than Ice's second best (Death Certificate), but if we want to call OD his first real project that's about on Bow Down / Guerillas in the Mist status and it got there on ambition and potential, not necessarily quality songwriting. Those Cube records are more enjoyable to listen to.


And that's where the argument starts. We're talking about pop music here, and Kendrick hasn't made enough of it. When Ice Cube wrote a pop song, he wrote the best fucking pop songs you could while staying hard. "Today Was a Good Day" didn't need a singing hook to be catchy as hell, and he could get his point across on stuff like "Endangered Species" or "Once Upon a Time in the Projects" without being melodramatic. Ice Cube was a funnier guy, and brought levity to his serious topics that Kendrick often fails or refuses to match.


(All the below paragraphs are just wankery of me messing around with my Handbook stuff because I haven't taken a look at it in a while and I just felt like it so feel free to read the first sentence or two and then give up.)


Granted these are all subjective things and there are going to be people out there that value the high art of Kendrick's work, and one could certainly argue that Ice Cube played it safe by rapping over 'typical' hip-hop beats and making fun songs rather than actually antagonizing his white audience. There's also a lot to be said for how many great projects Kendrick has compared to Cube. I stopped running the Handbook prior to TPAB, but for sake of argument let's give it the same score as Good Kid. Personally, I think Good Kid's a better record by a significant amount (on my scale, 'significant' was about .5-1.0), but I'll concede to popular opinion for this conversation.


KENDRICK LAMAR
1. good kid, m.A.A.d city: 8.95
2. To Pimp a Butterfly: 8.95
2. Section.80: 8.94
3. Overly Dedicated: 6.65
___________________________________
Average: 8.37/10

I'm going to include Straight Outta Compton on Ice's resume here, but my rule was you had to rap on 75% of the tracks for a release to be considered part of your discography originally (aka The "36 Chambers Counts for Raekwon But Can't Artificially Boost the Discography of U-God" Rule) so on balance, while 10 releases would give Ice another 0.5 boost to his average, I won't let him have that here.

ICE CUBE
1. AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted: 9.40
2. Death Certificate: 8.88
3. The Predator: 8.19
4. Lethal Injection: 8.14
5. Straight Outta Compton: 7.91
6. Bow Down: 6.66
7. Guerillas in tha Mist: 6.62
8. War & Peace Vol. I (The War Disc): 5.54
9. War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc): 4.99
10. Raw Footage: 4.76
___________________________________
Average: 7.61/10


Within this hypothetical, I'm also willing to argue that Ice Cube was the better MC despite Kendrick now having three albums in my Top 50 - at 44, 45, and 46, respectively - which isn't actually the case since I'm pretty confident TPAB would score a fair amount outside the Top 50. Part of it is the aforementioned enjoyable nature of Ice Cube at the height of his power even when he was calling me a total piece of shit, part of it is his ability to get a point across without any need for abstraction or dramatics. He loses a little for the misogyny and blatant racism (not just toward whites), but I think he gets a pass for the era he came out in.

But more than anything, I think Kendrick has to get the opportunity to have a Raw Footage or a War & Peace Vol. 1 & 2. We also have to see if this current era of production ever falls off - the west coast went from incredible to terrible in record time for a style of music, and the producers Cube worked with hurt his case as much as the work he was doing on their beats; I often wonder if he was really uninspired by the opportunities he had as a musician repping the west coast and it wasn't all Hollywood that doomed him.

Sometimes by the same token Kendrick comes off as, for lack of a better term, a try hard, doing too much just to prove a point about his talent and distracting from what he's saying rather than emphasizing it. I worry that it'll get the better of him at some point and he'll become a #woke Recovery-era Eminem, making gibberish sound good and handicapping his own concepts with bad jokes that took a PhD in rhyming to come up with but land with a thud anyway. I have to give him the opportunity to reach that stage of his career.

I can definitely see him surpassing Cube. Anyway, I'm just rambling because I don't have any assignments at work. One last Handbook thing, just on the raw discography numbers, a Top 10 WC discographies (not straight rappers, but I'll leave Madlib out since his is almost entirely production) list (minimum 3 releases reviewed).

Really helps put in perspective how much I ignored the west through my career, or how little work some of my favorites (like Twinz) ended up doing. I think if/when I rev the engine back up that'd be my first focus considering how hot the west is right now, it'd only be right. For example, DJ Quik is one review away from being on this list, and if it were on of his albums I loved, he'd likely have the #2 spot immediately.

1. Dr. Dre - 8.35
2. Blu - 8.24 (a lot of shit releases weren't reviewed)
3. 2Pac - 8.19 (AEoM not reviewed)
4. Kendrick Lamar - 8.18 (TPAB not reviewed)
5. ScHoolboy Q - 7.91 (Blank Face not reviewed)
6. Ice Cube - 7.52 (LNCL, I am the West not reviewed)
7. Snoop Dogg - 7.47 (Da Game..., Paid tha Cost..., 2015/16 stuff not reviewed)
8. Fashawn - 7.41 (just Boy Meets World and a couple tapes, really doesn't count)
9. Del the Funkee Homosapien - 6.78
10. Tyler the Creator - 6.74


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz