16. It ain’t where you from, it’s where you’re at.
15. Cash rules everything around me.
14. Ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks.
13. Season’s change, mad things rearrange, but it all stays the same like the love doctor strange.
12. The suckers have authority.
11. Kings lose crowns but teacher’s stay intelligent.
10. Elude the hook and your whole beat’s tookin’.
9. Straight out of Compton there’s a brother that’ll smother your mother and make your sister think I love her.
8. When sales control stats I place no faith in the majority.
7. If you find true love hold on till the end, ’cause we all know the women outnumber the men. I caught one to play me close like her name was Glen, and I’ll be damned if I ever let it happen again.
6. The meaning of raw is Ready And Willing.
5. Jay Dee don’t do no parties for free (no lie).
4. You want to learn how to rhyme you better learn how to add, it’s mathematics.
3. It’s about love for cars, love for funds, loving to love mad sex, loving to love guns. Love for opposites, love for fame and wealth, love for the fact of no longer loving yourself, kid…Stakes is high.
2. It’s bigger than hip hop.
1. Notorious B.I.G. — the best that ever lived, the best that ever did it, that best that ever lived it.

In keeping with some “Best Alive” hyperbole, over the past couple years Minnesota rapper One Be Lo has somewhat quietly become the greatest rapper to walk the earth since March 9th, 1997.

Some evidence from “The Axis“:

Every night you hear the bullets blast / Even if you in the suburbs every night, you see the footage flash / across your screen, I’ll tell you my biggest pet peeve / You lookin at it thinkin like, “It don’t affect me” / You livin large I’m thinkin like, “It don’t impress me” / Rockin them chains, Sojourner Truth is tryin to set free

or

In this land of Pocahontas, natives lost to conquest / Your false gods get framed, buffed and polished / If you ask who the prophet, they say Nostradamas

The whole album is an absolute hip hop masterpiece.

UPDATE: His underground solo debut from 2002 just recently received an official release.

This incredible:

I’ve had a beat off of Dilla’s album “Donuts” set as my cell phone ring tone since sometime late last November. Every time my cell phone has rung over the course of the past five months, I have heard this song, usually in short, inconvenient snippets. This beat enters my life on a hyper-daily routine, interrupting me while I take a shower, while I’m scrambling to make dinner, while I’m trying to relax with my water colors.

And yet…

I still love this fucking song.

I’ve never had a cell phone ring work this way. The default Cingular ascending scale makes my spine crawl. Europe’s “Final Countdown” no longer reminds me of Gob Bluth’s prancing magic routines; it’s like prying off my fingernails with broken shards of chalkboard.

Yet not Dilla’s “Worikonit.” I pop in “Donuts,” perhaps the greatest collection of hip hop beats ever, and it gets my head bobbing in that special way hip hop heads bob heads; it can’t be helped, it’s too beautiful.

Here’s to you, Dilla.