10 Great Rap Songs About Family
When a rapper reaches success, there’s an unwritten rule in hip-hop that you pay back the family who held you down during those lean early days. To the uninitiated, the culture might seem obsessed with flaunting material status symbols, but there’s a deeper nuance to the “get money” trope that’s really about showing appreciation to those who supported you during the struggle. As 2 Chainz rapped it, after accumulating a seven-figure bank balance, he selflessly bought his “momma a crib before I got my own place.”
Beyond gifting kinfolk with cars and cribs, MCs have also turned their musings about familial relationships into some of hip-hop’s most honest songwriting. Sure, on occasion family rap songs have flirted a little too closely with Hallmark-style sentimentality. Will Smith may have etched out a role as the hip-hop generation’s upstanding father figure, but his own dedication to his son, “Just the Two of Us,” comes off as corny. Lines like “It’s a full-time job to be a good dad/You got so much more stuff than I had,” and a reference to a 101 Dalmatians CD-ROM, do not exactly tug at the heartstrings. But when skilled MCs revisit familial relationships and attempt to deal with the feelings involved, that’s when the real emotions pour out—as these 10 excellent family-centric hip-hop tracks prove.
Ghostface Killah - “All That I Got Is You”
Rhyming over little more than a wistful, string-laden sample of the Jackson 5’s “Maybe Tomorrow,” Ghostface Killah’s tearjerker has him spilling open his heart to deliver this moving homage to his mom. Over one extended verse, the Wu-Tang Clan swordsman recounts his hardscrabble childhood, detailing his 15 family members squashed into a three-bedroom apartment, the cereal boxes invaded by cockroaches, his hand-me-down school wardrobe, and the embarrassment he felt delivering a note to a neighbor that asked to borrow food. But the struggle is assuaged by moments like Ghost’s mom wetting her finger tip “to wipe the cold out my eye before school with her spit.” Then comes the tenderhearted sign off: “Word up mommy, I love you.”
Pete Rock & CL Smooth - “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)”
Trouble T Roy was a dancer and member of Heavy D’s crew the Boyz who was tragically killed during a stage accident in 1990. His friends and fellow artists Pete Rock and CL Smooth dealt with their grief by writing a song in his honor. Over a timeless beat hooked around an elegiac sax line from Tom Scott’s “Today”—a sample which moved Pete Rock to tears when he discovered it—CL flashes back through his childhood as if flicking through a sepia-tinted photo album. Vignettes starring his single-parent mother, a grandfather struggling with alcohol, and a father figure who stepped in when CL’s “biological didn’t bother” are couched in such relatable sentiment. “T.R.O.Y.” is inevitably the first song hip-hop heads reach for when confronted with personal loss.
Nas - “Daughters”
Given the abundance of sexist lyrics penned by some rappers, you might not think to turn to one for parenting advice—especially when it comes to raising a daughter. But this track from Nas’s Life Is Good tries to redress the imbalance. Dealing with his daughter, Destiny Jones, Nas learns to accept her relationship with a young man who’s been locked up and struggles with her posting a (now-deleted) pic of a box of prophylactics on her Instagram. Crucially, Nas also holds up a mirror to his own behavior, admitting his daughter has a point when “she looked at me like I’m not the cleanest father figure.”
Jean Grae and Quelle Chris - “River”
Some familial relationships can seem impossible. Love for one’s relatives is often muddled with feelings of anger, resentment, and abandonment. These are emotions Jean Grae and Quelle Chris try to unpack by dedicating verses to their siblings on “River.” Grae writes an open letter to her brother about their father, and Quelle addresses dysfunction in the relationship between himself and his brothers over haunting swathes of strings. Quelle is moved to recall instances of “extremes, shattered dreams/New wokes/We old folks still trying to cope” among his brothers. “I disagreed with some decisions that split the tree,” he admits. For her part, Grae wonders if “things would be different if he just was dead” before replaying happier fragments and longing for more innocent times. “Do you still remember me and you still?” she signs off, achieving a peace of sorts.
Clipse - “Momma I’m So Sorry”
The Clipse’s music is often unfairly reduced to “coke raps,” but the heart of Malice and Pusha T’s narratives is family. According to the lore of Lord Willin’, the duo’s dope boy career was determined when a four-year-old Malice “first witnessed the raw,” only to have elder family members explain it away as Ajax. Turning this upbringing into a rap verse did not amuse the family’s matriarch, their grandmother, whom Malice claimed distributed cocaine imported from the Bahamas. Cue a rapped apology and regret that respects the family order: “I’m sorry grandmama for mistakes I have made/When I aired family business, how you put me in my place.” All dynasties have secrets they’d rather keep behind closed doors.
Ed OG & Da Bulldogs - “Be a Father to Your Child”
Boston rapper Ed OG gets to the crux of his message immediately in this moralistic golden-era classic: “A yo, be a father/If not, why bother, son?/A boy can make ’em, but a man can raise one.” Over a sun-kissed Roy Ayers loop, Ed OG rallies against fathers who think gifting material possessions excuses being largely absent from their kid’s life. The pro-fatherhood stance is resolute—and Ed OG is quick to salute single mothers—but he ultimately hopes to spark a change of heart from those AWOL dads: “It’s never too late to correct your mistakes/So get yourself together for your child’s sake.”
Kanye West - “Hey Mama”
Kanye West’s “Hey Mama” resonated as a solid—if a little saccharine—addition to the mom-tribute rap canon when he included it as part of 2005’s Late Registration. But after Donda West passed away two years later, the track began to take on a heavier significance: While performing the song for the first time in Paris, seven days after her death, Ye was moved to tears on stage and suffered an emotional breakdown. Set against a gospel-infused backdrop, the lyrical progression is classic Yeezy as he moves from reminiscing over the humble joys of his mother’s chicken soup to bragging about buying her a luxury Jaguar S-Type car.
Slick Rick - “It’s a Boy (Large Professor Remix)”
Long before the Wu-Tang Clan claimed it, Slick Rick was for the children. The storytelling king’s “Hey Young World,” released in 1988, is so hopeful and well-meaning, it should be played to kids every day before class. This idea of teaching the youth was revisited on 1991’s “It’s a Boy,” a song in which Rick tells his baby’s mother about how great a father he will be, while she’s on the cusp of labor. Slick Rick vows to lavish the kid with toys, name him Ricky Jr., and school him on the birds and bees (“so [he] won’t be a nerd”), along with hoping that “dada” is the child’s first spoken word. A dusky, vibraphone-infused remix of the track by Large Professor has settled as the version of choice among fans, with the moody feel juxtaposing the Ruler’s idealistic lyrics.
2Pac - “Dear Mama”
2Pac lived a legendarily dramatic life, and “Dear Mama” is a thank-you note to his mother, Afeni Shakur, for staying by his side during all of the tumult. Interpolating the Spinners’ “Sadie” for the hook, Pac delivers a raw account of his upbringing that includes when Afeni was addicted to crack and cops to his own legal indiscretions leaving him “hugging on my momma from a jail cell.” Acknowledging the way Afeni was always there for him, 2Pac ends each verse by bucking the hip-hop norm of bragging about lavishing his mom with expensive gifts in favor of a humble confession: “There’s no way I can pay you back/But the plan is to show you that I understand/You are appreciated.”
RA the Rugged Man - “Legends Never Die (Daddy’s Halo)”
RA the Rugged Man’s tribute to his father is the rap song equivalent of a sunset movie scene where a kid reminisces about playing catch with his pops. Backed by Mr. Green’s guitar-tinged beat, the track begins with RA looking over the body of his Vietnam veteran father, who’s just succumbed to cancer. An emotion-packed chronological run through their relationship follows, mixing up happy times with personal strife: RA recalls his father buying him a Fat Boys tape, schooling him on black music and boxing, and starting a new life with a stepmom RA had no choice but to accept. As RA finally accepts his father’s departure, he says, “You lived a tough life/Now get some rest, daddy.”
