The Gift Of Gab didn’t need to prove that he could rap. He’d already done that. If you were paying attention to underground rap in the late ’90s and early ’00s, you already knew that the rapping half of the Bay Area duo Blackalicious could do things on the microphone that could boggle your mind. The Gift Of Gab was so good at rapping, in fact, that he had to make up little challenges to keep himself interested.

That’s what Gab did on “Alphabet Aerobics,” the opening track from Blackalicious’ 1999 EP A2G. On that song, Chief Xcel, Gab’s producer partner, came up with a barebones track that gradually sped up faster and faster. Gab used that perpetual-motion-machine beat to run through the entire alphabet. The wordplay was dizzying even as the song began: “Artificial amateurs aren’t at all amazing/ Analytically, I assault, animate things.” By the time Gab got to Z, he was rapping so quickly that you could barely process every word, but Gab didn’t sound like he’d broken a sweat.

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