“This shit special!!!!!!!!” DJ Khaled bellows in his reverb-twisted voice on the intro to “Hip Hop”, a track off his sixth album. After several verses, when the track is winding down, Khaled says it again. If, somehow, the listener had forgotten that the shit was special, Khaled is there to remind us that this shit, indeed, special. Between contributing this grammatically incorrect but still somehow appropriate line, Khaled’s contributions to the track are hard to pin down. He doesn’t rap on the track; that’s handled by hall-of-famers Nas and Scarface, each doing a somber take on Common’s hip-hop-as-a-woman motif. Nor does Khaled produce the beat for the song; the beat was produced by young fruity-loops virtuoso Lex Lugar.  There’s even some token old-school scratching. Was that Khaled on the Serato? Nope. That’s DJ Premier, also a hall of famer. Khaled’s only clearly manifest contribution to the song is saying “This shit special,” twice. And that’s what makes him kind of awesome (emphasis on the “kind of”).

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