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Czarface & MF Doom “Captain Crunch”

You get just over a second of intro in this track before it throws you into the deep end of a high-hat clattering drum loop and MF Doom’s verse, and it just keeps going through two more verses from Esoteric and Inspectah Deck. And like, look, I have relatively broad taste in rap like most any reasonable music listener in 2018, but this sort of thing is always going to be the thing that really knocks me out: a quick succession of clever rhymes from multiple rappers over a grimy, up-tempo track, and with a chorus that exists almost entirely to punctuate verses. Doom and Deck turn in strong performances on this song but are about what you’d expect – the former is charmingly mush-mouthed and sharp-witted, the latter exudes a menacing intelligence in seemingly effortless rhymes. And Esoteric? Well, it’s impressive how many Guardians of the Galaxy references he packs into 41 seconds on the mic.

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