4. E-40Charlie Hustle: The Blueprint Of A Self-Made Millionaire

I’m from the Bay Area, and E-40 is incredibly important to our region. I don’t remember a time not knowing E-40 – he’s been around forever. As a rapper, he does things that no one else can do. He’s a master of every cadence, he can change his flow at will, and he pioneered flows of his own. Charlie Hustle… is a great example of that: fast-talking, conversational, but still able to hit every rhythmic marker in a beat. It feels like listening to an incredible free jazz player: the cadence can be all over and around the beat and then immediately snap into place and tell you exactly where you are. And he’s creating language on the fly, inventing new words all the time. This happens to be my favourite of his albums. This is towards the end of the “mob music” era of E-40, and is the one I tell everybody to go listen to, if you don’t know who E-40 is. It’s the quintessential E-40 album, the one with the most of him doing the things that he does better than anybody else.