26 of the Worst Lines by Great Rappers

Even the best MCs occasionally fall short.

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Image via Complex Original
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Nobody's perfect. The best MCs might seem immune to criticism in the afterglow of their finest accomplishments, but none of them are without faults. We spend so much time praising the classics and dissecting the hottest lyrics, but what about the worst ones? Kool G Rap had a terrible line about Chinese restaurants, Run didn't how many people are in the Beatles, and Rick Ross rhymed Atlantic with...Atlantic. We may have forgiven these lyrical blunders, but we haven't forgotten them, either. Here are 25 of the worst lines by great rappers.

"Got so many chains they call me Chaining Tatum" —Drake

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Song: Drake "Pop Style" (2016)

Do you get it?

I don't think you get it. 

It's because chains kind of sounds like Channing.

That's it?

No, there surely must be more there.

There isn't?

Well, this was just a waste of everyone's time then, wasn't it?

"I'm into distribution, I'm like Atlantic/I got them motherfuckers flying across the Atlantic" —Rick Ross

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Song: Rick Ross "Hustlin" (2006)


Rhyming a word with the same word is an art form very few have mastered; Jeezy can do it, sometimes even effectively. The trick is to have another joke within the lines, or use homonyms (words that sound the same, but mean something different). Technically, Ross is doing that here-but the way the word is lined up, and the fact that Atlantic Records doing distribution is unnecessarily specific (all major record labels do distribution...), plus the way he winds up his delivery like he's about to fire a strike-out pitch...and then ATLANTIC rings out again, and thuds on on the floor.

"'Cause I choose to use my infinite potential" —Jeru Tha Damaja

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Song: Jeru the Damaja "Come Clean" (1993)


Jeru the Damaja, or Jeru the Guidance Counsela? For whatever reason, this is one of those lyrics that will get stuck in your head for no earthly reason. Sure, it's kind of vaguely motivating, but also somewhat meaningless when you really think about it. No one has "infinite" potential; we are very limited beings, unable to, for instance, breathe underwater, or fly. There are some very real limitations that even The Damaja would have trouble overcoming.

"I'll go to a Chinese restaurant, bitch, if I wanna eat cats" —Kool G Rap

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Song: Kool G Rap f/ DJ Polo "Fuck U Man" (1992)


We don't really expect that much from rappers when it comes to overlooking ignorant stereotypes. Much like offensive comedy, rap music is home to a lot of remedial attitudes. Not only is G Rap avoiding cunnilingus, he's going to do it while offending everyone. For the record: it is a false stereotype that Chinese people like eating cats. Chinese restaurants do not sell cats as food. G Rap, on the other hand, would eat cats if they did. 

"Never let me slip, 'cause if I slip then I'm slippin'" —Dr. Dre

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"Lemonade was a popular drink and it still is" —Guru

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Song: Gang Starr "DWYCK" (1994)


Some people have gone as far to call this the most "enigmatic line in hip-hop history." We prefer to call it one of the stupidest.

"Why is the sky blue? Why is water wet?" —Ghostface Killah

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Song: GZA f/ Killah Priest, Ghostface and RZA "4th Chamber" (1995)

Ghostface ponders the mysteries of the natural world in this line, comparing Judas' betrayal of Jesus to other unknowables, such as the reasons the sky is blue and water wet. Except that water being wet is kind of a tautology—water is liquid by definition, so water being wet is true by definition. The sky is blue because of some basic scientific principles—air molecules act as prisms, and blue light scatters more from them because waves of blue light are shorter than other colors in the spectrum. The more you know.

"Fuck around, pull out my dick and I pee on her" —Future

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Song: Future "Peacoat" (2015)

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Yeah, Future casually rapping about peeing on a sexual partner. The delivery is so fast, it's like he's sorry for bringing it up. Of course, he's done this before, most notably on "My Ho 2." What you do in the bedroom is your own business, until you rap weirdly about it and make everyone uncomfortable.

"On our way to the Marriott keep 'em very hot/Westside hittin' hairy cock all night long" —Ice Cube

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Song: Ice Cube "We Be Clubbin" (1998)

OK, first things first: "cock" is West Coast slang for female genitals, too. But this line still sounds gross, even if just for the sound of the words "hairy cock." Is he recontextualizing "get ya club on" years before "beat the pussy up"-mania hit hip-hop? Either way, thinking too hard about these lyrics is nauseating.

"There's three of us, but we're not the Beatles" —Run

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Song: Run-DMC "King of Rock" (1985)

This is a terrible line because there are four people in the Beatles, and three in Run-D.M.C. And if you don't know that, you're terrible, too.

"Give the mack a taste/I wipe my ass with a rapper face" —Slick Rick

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Song: Slick Rick "I Own America (Part I)" (1999)


You know that old maxim, "Don't shit where you eat"? That should apply to rap lyrics, too, adjusted slightly: don't rap about how you want a taste right before rapping about whiping your ass in a face. In your mind, Rick, these are unrelated. To a listener, they blend together into a gross autosuggestion. Sure, it's the listener doing the legwork here, but if it takes us out of the song for a moment, it wasn't worth it.

"Sweeter than Ben & Jerry/Can I rhyme? Well you know I gets mine" —Q-Tip

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Song: Q-Tip "Vivrant Thing" (1999)

By the time he dropped "Vivrant Thing," Q-Tip wasn't a great rapper by any stretch, but sweet Bonita Applebum are there some atrocious lines on that song. It starts from the top: "Special girl, real good girl/Biggest thing in my itty bitty world." It manages to get worse by the end: "Rap slate like big weight/You buy, I sell, we split big cake." And then in the middle there's the aforementioned "Sweeter than Ben & Jerry's" poetry. And to think, this was once the Best Rapper Alive.

"At the white boy club while I'm buyin' the bar/They like 'Hey now, you're an all star'" —N.O.R.E.

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Song: N.O.R.E. "Nothin'" (2002)

This line is actually pretty funny, because there was a time when "All Star" by Smash Mouth was simply every-effin'-where, much like white people. That doesn't mean we're interested in going back to that time, though, and it's becoming harder to remember what it was like when the white boys' club meant frosted tips, chin strap beards, and that song from Mystery Men.

"My apologies, are you into astrology?/'Cause I'm trying to make it to Uranus" —Kanye West

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Song: Jadakiss "Gettin' It In" (2004)

It was a close competition between this and his comparison to the Holocaust on Watch The Throne—note to rappers: Holocaust metaphors never, ever work—but whereas that line was mostly offensive to Jews, this one is offensive to astronomers, let alone anyone who was listening to this song who didn't want Kanye up their ass (literally). Which is most people, let alone Jadakiss fans and Kanye fans. Yeezy taught us a lot of things we wanted to learn from him, but anal sex vis-a-vis the solar system simply isn't one of them. Neil deGrasse Tyson should shake the shit out of 'Ye for this one.

"When I was a geisha he was a samurai/Somehow I understood him when he spoke Thai" —Nicki Minaj

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Song: Nicki Minaj "Your Love" (2010)

Nicki Minaj is one of the most spirited, dexterous, surprising rappers to ever pick up a microphone. On "Your Love" she demonstrates that those skills have nothing to do with having any knowledge of geo-cultural realities in Asia. Granted, she gets to the offending line by suggesting that what she's describing could have come from a jumbled dream: "Anyway I think I met him in the sky." Still, it seems like she's confusing Thailand, where people speak Thai, with Japan, where samurai culture originates. And that's not cool. 

"I once was infatuated by the things that you do/But now you're doodoo" —Big Daddy Kane

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Song: Big Daddy Kane "No Damn Good" (1990)

Using the word "doodoo" is bad enough, although there are isolated instances of using the grade-school insult effectively (i.e. "Scenario"). But rhyming "doo" with "do"? Rakim would never.

"Y'all go to parties to ice grill/I go to parties to party with nice girls" —Jay-Z

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Song: Jay-Z "30 Something" (2006)

What Hov's saying here is that while everyone else goes to parties to stick people up, while he goes to parties to meet standup women. Which—besides being an implicit function of any straight, single male who socializes—makes little sense as the alternative to mugging people, which is theoretically quite the thrill (if you're into that kind of thing). And yes, "thrill" would have been a far better rhyme than what he came up with, and is also, incidentally, the opposite of what this line is.

"I'm so like a 'pip,' I'm glad it's night" —André 3000

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Song: UGK f/ Outkast "International Players Anthem" (2007)

We see what you did there, André. One thing: why are you like a pip? In order to be clever, wordplay kind of has to actually relate to the context around it. This is more self-congratulatory punning, unless there's a reason that André is comparing himself to the hard seed in a piece of fruit.

"I'm a venereal disease like a menstrual bleed" —Lil Wayne

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Song: Lil Wayne "A Milli" (2008)

Lil Wayne gets his Dr. Nick Riviera (from The Simpsons, duh) on on one of his biggest tracks of all time. Does Wayne really think menstrual bleeding is a venereal disease? You'd think with all those vayjayjay-centric rap lyrics, the guy might understand the basics of how female anatomy functions. On the flip side, though, the line sounds cool. But whatever the opposite of a knowledge jewel is, it's this.

"Dizzy Gillespie plays a sax/Me, myself, I love to max" -Greg Nice

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Song: Nice & Smooth "Funky For You" (1989)

Dizzy Gillespie played the...trumpet.

"When Comm be buckin' in the kitchen, fuckin'/On the sink, got my momma a mink" -Common

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Song: Common "Announcement" (2008)

You know that feeling of being a "conscious" rapper trying to make a "sexy" record and you're rapping about that one time you were enjoying sexual congress with a woman in the middle of the kitchen, and you need something to rhyme with "sink" but can't decide what to use? Well, learn from Common, the cautionary tale who decided to go with "mink." Because he's a rapper, so he's obviously purchased the woman he's having sex with on the sink a...mink. Who's he fucking, Mallory Archer? And also, he couldn't have gone with any of these? Or he couldn't have learned about rhyming descriptions of sex in the kitchen from R. Kelly, who did it three years before him and didn't need to rhyme "butter rolls" with anything but "butter rolls"? Sometimes, the path of least resistance is the best path to take. This was not one of those times.

"Honey ain't a politician, she's a pole-a-tican" —Nas

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Song: Young Jeezy f/ Nas "My President is Black" (2008)

"My President is Black" coincided in a minor renaissance in Jeezy's recording career—as the substantial and critically-celebrated Recession LP—as well as the arrival of Obama in the White House. The thing about Jeezy is that he gets how to stay in his lane; he's not a political MC, but a black president is a major event in world history; why not incorporate that in a way that is consistent with his image? And so a black president becomes a riff alongside his usual subject matter; the more things change, the more they stay the same. Nas, on the other hand, seems confused as to how to handle his own persona in this brand-new setting. Thus comes one of his worst lyrics ever, a bizarre pun that manages to be nonsensical, mystique-puncturing, lazy and eye-roll-worthy, all at once.

"I'm the siren that you hear, I'm the butt police/And I'm looking at your rear, rear, rear" —Eminem

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Song: Rihanna f/ Eminem "Numb" (2012)

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At one point, it seemed like the older Em got, the more juvenile he sounded. His butt jokes used to be funny (or, at the very least, were riffs on funnier bits by Tom Green.) But by this point, it seemed like Marshall had a case of "cool dad" syndrome. He captured the words of juvenilia, but none of the irreverent spirit. Pro tip, Em: no grown woman is gonna want to hear about how you're the butt police.

"If you don't judge my gold chains/I'll forget the iron chains" —LL Cool J

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Song: LL Cool J f/ Brad Paisley "Accidental Racist" (2013)

Equating the horrors of slavery with wanting to rock gold chains is one of the strangest attempts at a moral equivalence we've ever seen. It's not a fair trade on a number of levels: we'll forgive you for being oppressive and horrible in the past if you stop being jerks now? What? We're not so sure that the rest of the descendants of former slaves are all that invested in the right to rock gold chains as a fair trade for pretending slavery didn't happen. Call us crazy.

"Shit on anybody, I'm a rappin' Porta-Potty/And I probably gotta dump right now" —Kendrick Lamar

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Song: Black Hippy “Top Dawg Cypha” (2011)

These days, Kendrick Lamar is rapping with an awareness and ability that few can match. Him waste a bar? Don’t count on it.

The same can’t be said for his approach five years ago on Black Hippy’s “Top Dawg Cypha” when he was rapping about taking a dump as a form of flexing on the competition. There are a number of ways to say that; calling yourself a Porta-Potty is not one of them.

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"Dick so big it's like a foot is in yo' mouth/And I ain't babysitting, but my kids all on yo' couch" —J. Cole

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Song: Jeremih f/ J. Cole “Planez” (2015)

There are countless questions as to why J. Cole rapped this line, and zero reasons why he should have. "Dick so big it's like a foot is in yo' mouth" comes across as creepy regardless of Cole's attempt to boast about his size down there. But don't let that distract you from the fact that "Planez" went platinum... with one feature.

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