Illustrations by Jordan Kay

The early ’80s were not exactly the best time for love and romance in rap. And with good reason. Most of the rappers, in a genre that was just 10 years old, were male and fresh out of puberty (if not still in it). The surge of women (or mature) rappers had to wait for the second half of the ’80s: MC Lyte, Salt-N-Pepa, Queen Latifah, Monie Love, and more. But in the beginning, rap was, to be frank, a boyz-to-men affair: Run DMC, Beastie Boys, Boogie Down Productions, Eric B and Rakim, and LL Cool J. As a consequence, expressions of sensitivity, affection, and longing were all but banned.

Permissible were raps about women being “crafty” (Beastie Boys), or “dumb” (Run-DMC), or “sophisticated bitch[es]” (Public Enemy). Then, out of the blue, LL Cool J (as in: Ladies Love Cool James Todd Smith) dropped “I Need Love.” This 1987 track, this confession, this expression of vulnerability from a rapper who, at age 17, claimed to be “as hard as hell” (“Rock the Bells”) and mocked Prince and Michael Jackson for being wusses, was now 19 and “alone in [his] room” longing for “a girl who’s as sweet as a dove.” This admission shook the rap world to its core. Love was now in the house, and there was no way of throwing it back out the door. It was here to stay. 

The list we present here of love’s movement through nearly four decades of a musical form that’s still, admittedly, dominated by hetero men, is by no means comprehensive. What we do here is provide 20 tracks that, in our estimate, are all up in it. 

1) “The Look of Love, Part One” by Slum Village (2000)

Four things to know about Slum Village. One, they called a city known for techno, Detroit, home. Two, Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest thought, in 1999, they would be hiphop’s next big thing. Three, though Slum Village remained for the most part obscure, the crew’s producer, J Dilla, achieved a status among hiphop’s deepest headz that borders on religious. And, finally, they dropped a lyrical but frank assessment of love called “The Look of Love, Part One.” And what does love look like, according to Slum Village? Pretty much fucking and little else. “What love got to do with it / Ask SV it’s all bullshit.” 

2) “You’re All I Need to Get By” by Method Man feat. Mary J. Blige (1995)

This song, a remix featuring Mary J. Blige, which peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1995, is sometimes referred to as an archetype for what has come to be known as “thug-love duets.” However, Professor Daudi Abe’s personal preference is the original version of “All I Need” from Method Man’s 1994 debut album Tical. The rugged, RZA-produced track (RZA also produced the remix) was a departure from the soft and melodic sound of a song like “I Need Love.” Meth’s final lines from his last verse on the song state, “Then I can be your sun, you can be my earth, resurrect the God through birth.” 

3) “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)” by Khia (2001)

Khia does not mince words in this absolutely bumping track. Released on the album Thug Misses, and produced by Michael “Taz” Williams and Plat’num House (the latter also produced the Dirty South Divas), “My Neck” expressed a directness that put the masters of “dirty rap”—Oakland’s Too $hort and 2 Live Crew (who, like Khia, hail from Florida)—in the back seat. Although “My Neck” reached 42 on the US Billboard Hot 100, it went all the way to number four in the UK. We wonder, with good reason, if “My Neck” made an impression on a young Prince Harry. 

4) “Electric Relaxation” by A Tribe Called Quest (1993) 

As great as the original version is, the remix, which includes new lyrics and a more uptempo sample from “Between the Sheets” by the Isley Brothers, is also terrific. Native Tongues members certainly contributed to the love-rap dynamic with songs like “I’ll House You” by Jungle Brothers, “It’s a Shame” by Monie Love, “La Menage” by Black Sheep, and others. However, “Electric Relaxation” is iconic both sonically and lyrically. In 2024, the website Rock the Bells named it the third greatest hiphop beat of all time (behind “Still D.R.E.” and “Shook Ones Part II”), and the takeaway line from Phife—“Let me hit it from the back, girl I won’t catch a hernia / Bust off on your couch now you got Seamen’s furniture”—has been closely examined by hiphop scholars. It turns out that Seamen’s Furniture is a chain of furniture stores in the New York area. 

5) “Drugs” by Anderson .Paak (2014)

The love on this track is certainly bleak, but it deserves our attention and even amazement. What rapper/singer Anderson .Paak describes to a background of a booming/rolling beat is the foggy relationship of two spent junkies. Apparently, the woman only loves him (the rapper) when he has the goods and they are both sky-high. At that impossible point of addled bliss, she is his “wifey.” If there are no drugs, the two are as far from fucking as Venus is from Uranus. 

6) “Your Love” by Nicki Minaj (2010)

In 2010, Billboard referred to this song—which heavily samples Annie Lennox’s “No More ‘I Love You’s’”—as containing “a new brand of hood majesty.” Minaj, generally known for faster-tempo songs, slows this one down to ballad territory and she sings the chorus with the help of ever-popular auto-tune. Further, Billboard added, “The Young Money rap princess puts the sleazy talk aside and finds herself smitten with a young man... Minaj proves that even the wildest ones can be tamed.” Culture critic Tricia Rose argued that love-rap from women can cast a different light on male-female sexual power relations and cast them as resistant, aggressive participants. However, she noted that “even the raps that explore and revise women’s role in the courtship process often retain the larger patriarchal parameters of heterosexual courtship.” 

7) “Temptations” (1994), “Can U Get Away” (1995), and “How Do U Want It” (1996) by 2Pac

In the decades since his death, Tupac Shakur has come to represent a number of things not just in hiphop, but in mainstream culture overall. His ability to simultaneously maintain both “hardcore” and vulnerable personas was unique for the time. Speaking openly about crying in a song like “So Many Tears” caught a number of hiphop fans and artists off guard. In “Temptations,” Tupac acknowledges that “even thugs get lonely” and “even the hardest of my homies need attention.” “Can U Get Away” includes the line, “cuz if he touch ya, I got some drama for that busta”—a threat towards the abusive partner of the woman who is the subject of the song. 

8) “Killing Me Softly” by Fugees (1996)

The track that sent the brilliant rapper (but so-so singer) Lauryn Hill into a solo career is her attempt to match the emotional power of one of Roberta Flack’s three number-one Billboard hits, “Killing Me Softly.” Though Hill came nowhere close to the original (nothing hurts so hard like a broken heart), the track cleverly sampled the beat of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum,” which was dropped in 1990 and included the groundbreaking (for rap at the time) line: “I like to kiss ya where some brothers won’t.” 

9) “Woman” by Doja Cat (2021) 

With this track, Doja Cat (who Charles Mudede never fails to point out has roots in South Africa; Mudede’s roots are Southern African) makes a clearing for the appearance of a womanhood that’s not uncomplicated but certainly centers feminist themes. She is not so much asking to be a woman but to be a human. The track was a huge hit (it reached the stratosphere of Billboard Hot 100) and employed Nigerian pop, which is also called Afrobeat beats. 

10) “Romantic Interlude” by Sir Mix-a-Lot (1988)

This song from Mix-a-Lot’s debut album SWASS contains Egyptian Lover-inspired instrumentation, Roger Troutman-esque vocal modulation for the chorus, and an aerobic cadence that sounds more like a spoken-word piece than a traditional rap delivery. This is an example of early love-rap evolution/experimentation, particularly in a local sense. As in “I Need Love,” the premise revolves around the hectic, promiscuous life of a rap star who struggles to get the women he meets to understand that he can be relationship material, despite the trappings of fame. “You said, ‘Now you got what you want! Don’t you want to leave?’ / I said before it’s love, girl, not a one-night stand / You’re not a sleaze, ah!”

11) “Hey There, Home Boys” by Man Parrish (1985)

Man Parrish is one of the most fascinating figures in the history of hiphop. He produced “Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop)” in 1982, which was, from top to bottom, as pure a b-boy beat could be. It’s impossible not to start popping and locking the minute the needle hits its groove. Man Parrish also produced “Boogie Down (Bronx)” (1984), which featured the legendary Freeze Force. This stuff is deep. Man Parrish was there at the moment hiphop was transitioning from electro-funk to the boom-bap announced by Run-D.M.C.’s “Sucker M.C.’s” (1983). And so you can imagine the surprise Charles Mudede experienced when, in 1987, he found and bought a record by Man 2 Man Meet Man Parrish called “Male Stripper.” Was it hiphop? It was not. It was high-energy and unrepentantly gay. Mudede loved it and discovered, to his shock, that Man Parrish was not only gay, but white. He also realized that the video for “Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop)” was hardly hetero. Gay culture was there at the birth of hiphop. As for romance, Man Parrish released in 1985 the track “Hey There, Home Boys.” 

12) “Funky Dividends” by Three Times Dope (1988)

In the 1980s, pop music went hardcore materialistic. There was Gwen Guthrie’s “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On but the Rent” (1986), and Madonna’s “Material Girl” (1984). Hiphop responded to this crassness with the sobriety of “Funky Dividends.” The rapper, EST, lamented the death of romantic love and the rise of “ain’t nothing going on but the rent.” EST pleads to his girlfriend: “[Why] it always gotta be about money?” She responds: “When I was with Steady B, I had it all /Gucci, Louis Vuitton, gold, Liz Claiborne, I had it all / You ain’t giving me nothing.” Steady B was a real rapper. And, like Three Times Dope, from Philly. But unlike Three Times Dope, he, according to his ex, was down with Guthrie’s “no romance without finance.”

13) “Rough…” by Queen Latifah (1993)

This tune is for the S&M crowd. You are represented in hiphop. The track is by Queen Latifah, a rapper who famously played a masc lesbian in Set It Off. In “Rough,” she makes it clear that: “If it ain’t rough (I could do without it) / If it ain’t rough (just throw it to the curb) / If it ain’t rough (he could do without it) / If it ain’t rough (it’s working my nerves).”

14) “I Need Love” by LL Cool J (1987)

As David Toop noted in the book Rap Attack 2, “LL discovered exactly how important the ‘hardcoreness’ was to his audience when he attempted to go soft,” performing “I Need Love” from his second album Bigger and Deffer. “In London,” Toop continued, “the crowd booed him for this transgression, forgetting that LL’s formula had always been a mixture of hard and soft.” That said, it could be argued that the scene in the video for “I Need Love,” which takes place on a hotel balcony overlooking the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, is one of the most transformative sequences in the history of hiphop. 

15) “Hotline Bling” by Drake (2015)

This is Drake caught in the classic fantasy of a dumped lover: The ex regrets leaving them, the ex can’t stop thinking about them, the ex will certainly call again. “Hotline Bling” is for lovers in the gutter.

16) “One Love” by Whodini (1986)

Whodini, one of the earliest groups to gain national traction in rap, also produced one of the earliest love-rap videos. “From the L, to the O, and the V, to the E.” Although not necessarily considered a ‘hardcore group,’ the dilemma of, one, presenting oneself as vulnerable on wax, and, two, having that vulnerability take the form of the male rapper getting the short end of the relationship stick was another discussion entirely. Co-vocalist Ecstasy rhymes about being left a note by his departed lover: “Maybe one of these days you’ll have to learn that love is something that you gotta earn / And once you earn it gotta know how to keep it, you got to want it as well as you need it.” However, in the world of contradiction that is hiphop, one of Whodini’s other best-known songs from the same album was: “I’m a Ho.” 

17) “Let’s Talk About Sex” by Salt-N-Pepa (1990)

Though Salt-N-Pepa were not the first female rappers, they clearly were the first female rappers, as a crew, to reach the mainstream. Their breakthrough album, Blacks’ Magic, featured a track that was a huge commercial success and promoted safe sex at a time when AIDS was ravaging the Black community. This track saved lives. Many of the millennials who read this paper would not be here if Salt-N-Pepa didn’t rap: “Don’t be coy, avoid, or make void the topic / Cause that ain’t gonna stop it / Now we talk about sex on the radio and video shows.” (Mudede recalls this track was banned in Zimbabwe by the prime minister, Robert Mugabe—Black Africans can be as conservative and stubborn as MAGA.)

18) “O.P.P.” by Naughty by Nature (1991)

The piano sample from the Jackson 5’s classic song “ABC,” paired with the concept behind “O.P.P.,” made this song a surefire hit. Although it was released in the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis, this anthem for infidelity—O.P.P. as in “Other People’s P-ssy” and “Other People’s P-nis”—was an irresistible musical treat. It reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming one of the early rap-pop hits. Naughty rapper Treach summarized the approach: “There’s no room for relationships, there’s just room to HIT IT!” 

19) “Funky Ride” (1994) or “Hey Ya!” by OutKast (2003)

“Funky Ride” is an interesting one. It appeared on OutKast’s 1994 album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and is a slow and sexy song, but all vocals are sung by Sleepy Brown, with André 3000 and Big Boi nowhere to be found. Along with a killer guitar solo—performed by legendary Atlanta, Georgia guitarist Ed Stroud—“Funky Ride” stood out on OutKast’s debut. In contrast, “Hey Ya!” was sung entirely by André with an acoustic guitar accompaniment, and it generated discussion on what was or was not considered rap music. The song also asked some deeper philosophical questions not always found in love-rap, such as, “If what they say is, ‘Nothing lasts forever,’ then what makes (what makes what makes) love the exception?” Regardless, “Hey Ya!” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks and helped the album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below win Album of the Year at the 46th Grammy Awards in 2004.

20) “Work It” by Missy Elliott (2002)

The professor and The Stranger’s senior staff writer agree: Missy Elliott is one of the greatest rappers of all time. Her dexterity, her flow, her attention to detail are rarely surpassed in this genre. And she worked with the greatest producers of her time in the sun, Timberland. In Mudede’s estimation, “Work It” is at the top of the list when it comes to what the hiphop scholar Tricia Rose called “Black joy.” Elliot expresses nothing but the total blast of desire. It’s not aggressive, it is not problematic, it’s not complicated. It is just plain old fun. And the fact that Elliott transforms a penis into an elephant blowing its trunk makes our point incontestable. 

See Charles Mudede and Daudi Abe perform I Need Love: The Story of Romance in Rap with DJ Vitamin D and Taylar Elizza Beth at Clock-Out Lounge on Tuesday, February 11.