Far from MC Lyte’s most popular song, Poor Georgie relates the tragic tale of a promising young lover as told by one of the queens of late-80/early 90’s rap. Lyte’s has both bravado (the necessary component of all hip-hop) and narrative appeal, that bygone thread running through rap songs of old. This song, along with her “Paper Thin” offers a glimpse into the world of rap just before Dr. Dre’s G-funk era made much rap prior seem campy and naive by comparison. True, rappers were flirting with racier content, and there was NWA and 2-Live Crew, but prior Dre’s The Chronic, few had fully committed to what moralizers in the early 90’s termed gangsta-rap, a neologism whose nativity is as obvious today as its prevalence was then.

A side note: I discovered “Poor Georgie” on Sirius XM, when that was such a thing, before iTunes changed everything.