Fast-rising Mississippi rapper Big K.R.I.T. does lots of things well. He can flow on a track, produce a beat, spin a yarn and explicate the racial politics and semantic peculiarities of his stage name, in the quick of just a few lines: "What's a K.R.I.T.?/They think it's jigaboo/Why would I minstrel you?/You don't seem them dots?/It’s an acronym/Bitch, I thought you knew?" K.R.I.T.’s guest-packed, largely self-produced latest mixtape (his Def Jam debut is on the way) is a 22-song primer on his casual excellence. Over swank, soul-flavored beats, K.R.I.T. brags about his good reviews and trumpets his southern pride. ("While you was Kid N Playing/I was UGK-ing," he crows.) But it’s his profundity the humanism and vulnerability that he tucks into his rhymes that set him apart. "Too real to beg for meals/too proud to beg for help," he raps in the O.G. reminiscence "4 tha 1's." "I know about the slums and hard times/Folks and soup lines."

Listen to "Grippin' On The Wood":

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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.