We Are the South comes padded with a few relative rarities from the two's not-as-good solo albums and from random mid-90s Suave House compilations. On 'Throw Your Hands Up', the two play granite-heavy foils to the stuttery speed-rapping of guests Outkast.īut this stuff is great enough that I can't conjure any real reason not to hunt down the complete albums instead of wasting time with a compilation that rips the songs out of their contexts and haphazardly shuffles them up. On 'What Can I Do', an uncommonly candid MJG gives a harsh clarity to his memory of getting arrested for dealing drugs in front of his whole family. On 'Pimp in My Own Rhyme', 8Ball spits urgent mushmouthed threats over unforgivingly trebly G-funk synths. If you were going to assemble an 8Ball & MJG best-of from two albums, these would probably be the ones. Over woozily patient soul beats, the two spent these albums shading and developing their personas, adding depth and resonance by opening up and getting emotional without ever sacrificing the ripping impact of their hardest stuff.

The good news: Those albums are both classics, arguably the two high-water marks of these guys' aesthetic. 1, two albums that the duo recorded for Tony Draper's Suave House label in the mid-1990s. The bulk of the album comes from On Top of the World and In Our Lifetime, Vol. But that's not what We Are the South does.īall & G recorded too much material for too many record labels for a real best-of to ever happen, and We Are the South is more quickie cash-in than anything else. And iPods being what they are, it's not hard to construct that narrative for yourself, to watch these guys develop over the years. (Those last two albums, in particular, are the reason best-of albums were invented: a few undeniable snarls surrounded by seas of halfhearted radio-targeted filler.) Their outlaw-duo chemistry was there from the beginning, but over the years since Comin Out Hard, the two cultivated a fascinatingly schizo approach, swinging haphazardly from visceral bone-chilling pimp-talk to warm, openhearted up-from-nothing inspirational tales. But the highlights from their last two albums, for Diddy's Bad Boy label, were exemplary streamlined head-knock club-rap. On 1993's Comin Out Hard, their national debut, they kicked exaggerated crime-life tall-tales for six or seven minutes at a time over homemade car-trunk beats, never bothering much with hooks or structure.

An honest-to-God best-of from the Tennessee rap duo 8Ball & MJG would work something like a pocket history of Southern rap.

Coming out hard album tracks