Songs Rhino loves, #83: Funkdoobiest - “Lost In Thought” (prod. DJ Muggs)

I think this one is basically flawless.

Jason “Son Doobie” Vásquez is a Latiné rapper from Southern California, and this song appears on Brothas Doobie, the second album he made with the group he was in, Funkdoobiest. Of all the dozens of great rap songs that my elder brother, who is one of this newsletter’s most avid readers, introduced me to starting around the year 2000, when I was first developing a relationship to rap music, it’s one of those that has the strongest nostalgic hold on me, especially because I have such fond memories of dancing to it with him when I went to visit him during the period when he was attending Concordia University in Montréal, sometime around the year 2002. But it ain’t only nostalgia that causes this song to mean so much to me – I consider this individual song to feature one of the most lucid performances any rapper has ever given in the entire history of the artform, and I also think that, with its perfect freaky organ and chiming bells, it’s one of the finest hours in the career of the illustrious DJ Muggs, the Italian-American don who has been making trippy, funky, head-blown rap beats for 30 years. Content note for some mildly salty language, but if you like hearing a rapper really attack the microphone with “I’m the shit and I know it!” presence and verve, I feel like what Son Doobie does here is a very difficult achievement to deny.

I also think Brothas Doobie, which was made in 1995, is one of the best full-length rap LPs ever; it has a little bit of material that’s too filthy for my taste, songs like “Rock On” (which is a beautifully executed tribute to the somewhat weird but mostly benign Black nationalist cult known as the 5% Nation of Gods and Earths) and the searing “Dedicated” have been important to me for years, too. There’s even a chance that one of them could show up in this column at some future point. And I can virtually guarantee that Son Doobie’s mentor B-Real, of the famous and popular Latiné stoner rap group Cypress Hill, will appear in this column before long. The second Cypress Hill album, Black Sunday, is even better than Brothas Doobie, so I’ll discuss it here eventually. In the meantime, for those of you who like dirty rap, this one gets my highest recommendstion!