From RIAA-certified smashes to interludes to hidden gems, check out the best of the best below. With that in mind, looking at a wide-ranging spectrum of 50 rappers from both old and new school classes, here, XXL spotlights the best hip-hop songs that don’t exceed two minutes. But I think the further you get from 2, 45, it becomes labored.'Įveryone from fans to music executives alike know how formulas change over time, but one thing's for certain: brief tracks are in right now. You get enough hooks in, you get enough verses in and it’s not too much. 'I think two-and-a-half, you get the job done,' he explains. And we all know the hook is what we like to hear the most, so if you have two minutes of hook essentially or a minute of hook with a little bit of verse in between to break it up, that's an optimum experience for the eyes of the kid that has a low attention span.'įurthermore, Aroh, who has recently worked with acts like Latto, Childish Gambino and Brockhampton, believes that anything more than three minutes might take away from the effect of a song. 'When you're doing two minutes, it's compact, that means everything is in there,' he adds while noting the length of GoldLink’s jukebox favorite 'Crew.' 'You get high replay value because you replay what you like to hear. Most notably, Aroh believes that keeping a record concise in structure is a cheat code. Over the years, fans gravitated to shorter records for a number of reasons. There are almost too many amazing rap songs from the 1980s to choose from, but we’ve compiled a list of 31 of the most iconic, influential 1980s hip hop songs that everyone should hear at least once. 3.96M subscribers Snoop Dogg - Whats My Name. It also changed the landscape of American culture permanently.

That track came out in 1996, about 10 years before Lil Wayne’s Carter IItrack 'Walk Out,' a 1 minute, 8-second number, reached the masses in 2004. The Ultimate Old-School Hip Hop Songs Playlist The Notorious B.I.G. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt cut 'Friend or Foe' is only 1 minute and 49 seconds. The method of going smaller is fully in motion now, but artists have been testing the idea for decades now.

Those songs are obviously on the fresher side of time. Some of the tracks that Aroh is talking about include Sleepy Hallow’s 2020 needle-moving, platinum-selling drill anthem 'Deep End Freestyle' and Kanye West’s 2019 gospel trap hymn 'Follow God,' also a platinum record.

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