Rolling Stone Playlist: Cee Lo: Southern Hip-Hop

1. "We Want Some Pussy" | 2 Live Crew, 1986
It was provocative, but I'm wild and loose, so I can appreciate their honesty.

Listen: Cee Lo's Top Southern Hip-Hop Songs
2. "Space Age Pimpin'" | 8Ball and MJG, 1995
I call these guys ghetto griots. They came from Memphis and became our first representatives of real Southern rap.

3. "The Piz" | Kilo, 1991
Kilo was an Atlanta pioneer. He introduced that "boyz in the hizzle" slang.

4. "Action" | Poison Clan, 1992
They were very vocabulous, full of analogies and wordplay.

5. "Feel The Bass (Speaker Terror Upper)" | DJ Magic Mike and the Royal Posse, 1989
The hardest and deepest bass you've ever heard. If you had a Granada or a Caprice Classic, with the Cerwin Vega speakers, it was rock & roll to be offensive with the bass. It was a hood way of saying, "Fuck you."

6. "Sho Nuff" | Tela, 1996
This is a skanky song with a nice, slow, sexy groove. It definitely was a crowd-pleaser in strip clubs like Nikki's.

7. "Watch for the Hook" | Cool Breeze feat. Outkast, Goodie Mob and Witchdoctor, 1998
This one is fast and hard – an East Coast kind of vibe. If there was any competition between those of us on this track, it was just friendly competition. Because everyone was rhyming so differently.

8. "Stay Fly " | Three 6 Mafia, 2005
I love how DJ Paul and Juicy J produce something so angry and urgent. And that beat! It's a sample of [Motown singer] Willie Hutch that they turned into something just tribal.

9. "Cell Therapy" | Goodie Mob, 1995
I'm very proud of this song. Busta Rhymes was in the same studio as us and said, "Hey, bubbas, I want to bless you all with some knowledge. Read this book." It was a copy of [conspiracy-theorist tome] Behold a Pale Horse. I must say we were heavily influenced by it. I think Goodie Mob helped usher in a new consciousness for Southern music, and this song was a part of that.

10. "B.O.B." | OutKast, 2000
This was just... mega. That image, that intensity, that urgency, that groove. It was like Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" but with more of a youthful feel to it. All of us working at the time in Atlanta grew because of Outkast's success.