BUCKWILD IN THA SKREETZ

Buckwild is the dark horse of the '90s super-producers. Maybe it's his name, so generic it could be a self-referential parody of the East Coast ruffneck style, but he's the kind of paradox who's so consistent and omnipresent that he can fade into the background, until one day you pull out an old chessnut, peep the credits, and bug out: "Oh shit, he did that?"

I didn't know, for example, that he produced the best song on The B. Coming. A couple years later he was working with Playaz Circle. If you heard anything from those sessions it was probably "U Can Believe It" off Supply & Demand (co-produced with JR Rotem, a riddle who deserves his own debunking). You'd be forgiven for not knowing "You Ain't Got Enough," which appeared on a DTP comp fated to rot in dusty corners of FYEs across the nation, absorbing the exhaust of the Cinnabon and Wetzel's Pretzels stalls as Fast & Furious movies came and went. Lines like "My ring look like I peed on my pinkie" are why I consider the erstwhile Tity Boi to be the greatest bad rapper of his generation.

Looking back, although it already seemed like New York had been dead forever, the mid-'00s were more textured than that - a strange transitional time when Primo hit the pop charts, Buckwild worked with 2 Chainz, and Ego Trip had a show on VH1, before the formalists closed the borders and became a micro-concern unto themselves.