All 13 Guests on Redman’s Ridiculous New Jersey Rap Posse Cut “Lite It Up,” Ranked

2024 was productive for older rappers, many of whom dropped good-to-great projects, reminding the world they’re still plenty capable of melting mics. This past Christmas Eve, Newark legend Redman added his name to the pile with the long-awaited Muddy Waters Too, the follow-up to his sneering 1996 masterwork Muddy Waters. A firestarter whose sense of humor—constantly teetering between witty and juvenile—has made him a household name on record and the big and small screens since the ’90s, he’s spent most of this decade dropping singles and bombing stages, so it’s nice to hear him return to the album format for the first time since 2015’s Mudface.

For a 28-years-later sequel to an East Coast hip-hop classic, Too is energetic and fun in spurts. This is the Redman listeners remember, for better and for worse—the album is entirely too long, with 32 tracks in just over 80 minutes, and is so shamelessly steeped in ’90s nostalgia, you can practically smell the White Owl cigars and feel the FUBU shrink wrap. Outside of “Lalala,” the latest in a long line of stellar collabs with Method Man, Too is at its most entertaining on the epic New Jersey rap posse cut “Lite It Up.”

“Epic” isn’t an exaggeration, either. Twelve Jersey rap luminaries—plus one guy you may, like me, have forgotten is technically both a rapper and from New Jersey—bless the instantly recognizable sample of Love De-Luxe’s “Here Comes That Sound Again” in five minutes, including Queen Latifah, Treach and Vin Rock of Naughty by Nature, Rah Digga, DoItAll and Mr. Funkee of Lords of the Underground, and yes, Newark’s native son, Shaquille O’Neal. None of the verses are longer than eight bars, but the barrage hits hard and fast. If this song dropped in 2023, it would’ve made for a perfect Hip-Hop 50 showcase, a cipher ushering every unc and auntie within a five-mile radius to the dancefloor.

The beginning of the year is a notoriously slow time for new releases—otherwise this fun but fleeting cipher released the day before Christmas might not have made it into the Hearing Things weekly staff listening session. But it did, and as we listened, a consensus emerged: This song is profoundly removed from the zeitgeist, but it undeniably hits. All that considered, here’s my power ranking of each verse on “Lite It Up.”