In most other genres, it hardly matters wether a singer has written his/her song him/herself. As long as the singer is able to put believable emotions and some individual personality into the rendition of the song, we tend to perceive it as honest. Not so in hip-hop. The ability to write is seen as vital to the role of the emcee, as much, or maybe even more so, than the performance of the words itself. We often can accept that a rapper plays a role that doesn’t resemble his life, or is only parallel to it or an extrapolation thereof, but with such a large emphasis on wordplay and lyrical intricacy, we feel swindled when an emcee hasn’t written his own words. Still, despite the stigma ghostwriting has, it’s been a part of hip-hop ever since Sugar Hill Gang’s Big Bad Hank took Casanova’s rhyme book to take a verse of his for the recording of Rapper’s Delight. There’s no reason to assume the practice disappeared in recent times (“We grew up doing graffiti” and “Insh’Allah” don’t sound like Rozay words to me. Waddup Nas?) but here are seven rap hits everybody knows and those that (presumably) took the pen to the pad to ghostwrite them.
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