Hello, Hip Hip History Month readers/contributors/community members/interested lurkers! A dozen days, a dozen and more ways to pay tribute to a cultural force that has shaped popular culture around the world for half a damn century!

In a way, today is a variation on a couple of challenges that have already been posted, but I’ll set this out with a bit of specificity for those reading along (and thanks for reading!). One of the most interesting things about hip hop, to me, is the energy and momentum it gets from collaboration. To me, hip hop is about collaboration, whether it’s with a DJ, a producer, with dancers, with graffiti artists, etc. It’s about searching for a particular alchemy, and we’re all privileged to see the best of these attempts. This is part of the spirit of the posse cut, but that is something like the collaborative approach writ large.

What we want today is a verse you like/love/admire/think is cool/that you want to share with the community that is a featured verse on a song. So, we’ve had posse cuts, which emphasize both the strength of the group and the individuality of each rapper, and we’ve had verses, bars that demonstrate the skill, lyrcism, flow, and emotion of an artist, but now we’re looking for standouts on tracks that are attributed to someone else. I have two examples!

So it could still be a posse cut, but maybe a verse that stands out because of the way it unites the song/pushes it from a good song to a real head-nodder/is proof that they understood the assignment but were on some next level shit/etc, like this verse from Earl Sweatshirt at the end of an already fantastic song- you learn so much about his unique style through his relation to the beat and the other verses:

Or it could just be a straight up collab where the ball was passed to a teammate and they scored a goal/touchdown/home run/sports thingy, metaphorically speaking:

So bring em out!

1.) The tricky/fun thing about this 30 day ‘challenge’ is that you get one choice (see, it’s a challenge! If you’ve already mentioned a song from an album you’d like to pick on a previous day, it’s cool-just pick a different song if you can. If you can quote some of the lyrics so we can read *and* listen, that would be awesome. Feel free to use genius.com as a resource-you don’t have to paste the whole verse in, but a few bars will do the trick!

2.) In order to keep the thread from borking, please limit yourself to one YouTube/media link per post. If someone ‘beats you to it’ and posts a song you would’ve posted, reply under their post saying why you like this song/why it was your pick as well, etc. Let’s not give Disqus a reason to make the thread hard to navigate for those of us listening to the songs! If you want to mention some others, of course that’s fine!

3.) Let’s keep this as positive as we can. Don’t yuck anyone’s yum, don’t snark on someone who may not be as familiar as others, don’t ‘Um, actually’ people, etc. Remember that it’s not always possible to know what a song or artist means to someone, and try to give grace around that. Ain’t nobody earning any Internet Points out here.