As one half of the Clipse, Pusha-T helped raise crack rap to new artistic heights, mainly through a kind of mono-mania: Every rhyme offered a kitchen-counter vision of the drug trade. This solo mixtape debut offers little evidence that Pusha — now signed to Kanye West's GOOD Music label — has changed his worldview. "Searching for the fish scale like I'm tryna find Nemo/I still wanna sell kilos," he crows. He pours freestyles over tracks made famous by Lil Wayne and Bun B; originals include the Kanye collabo "Touch It," which jettisons drug talk for sex talk. Overall, it's what we've come to expect: tight rhymes delivered in an insistent rasp, and an amazing facility for making new punch lines out of old metaphors.

Listen to Pusha-T feat. Kanye West's "Touch It":

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“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.