The best and most bizarre ad-libs and signature sounds in rap

This week saw The Bawse himself Rick Ross link up with 1Xtra's own Charlie Sloth for a very special edition of The 8th, discussing his recent Wireless Festival set, new music coming with Cardi B, Meek Mill and Diddy, and more. Listen back here.

There were plenty of Ross tunes played throughout too, of course featuring Rozay's signature grunt. "Something you've always brought to the table is your own sound. You know it's a Rick Ross record before it's even dropped," Sloth told Ross during the show and, likewise, Ross's gruff, chesty grunt has become one of the most instantly recognisable ad-libs in rap.

Explaining his much-imitated sound in a recent interview, the rapper explained: "It's got to come from the gut - for when you say something you really mean." In fact, Ross's grunt is so iconic that it was even recently referenced in the lyrics of a Kanye track ("Made me say, 'Ugh, uh', like a mix of Master P and Rick Ross" from 4th Dimension).

For those unacquainted with the legitimate art of the ad-lib, it's basically like a hip hop signature sound. Ad-libs can start off as improvised and unplanned or take the form of an artist's long-running catchphrase. They are sometimes strange, often brilliant, hardly ever make sense to those unfamiliar, but always delight rap fanatics the world over.

To mark Rick Ross's appearance on The 8th, we take a look through the best, and most bizarre, rap ad-libs - from Kanye to Krept & Konan, via Migos and more.

You can also put your knowledge to the test and see how many rappers can you name by their ad-libs in the clip below. Tweet your answers to @1Xtra on Twitter.

The best...

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DJ Khaled is a man of many catchphrases. There’s "bless up" (which, as you might have guessed, is his version of a blessing), "major key alert" (for important things you need to pay close attention to) and "another one" (basically a sure-fire indicator that you’re about to hear another Khaled banger).

More than any other of his catchphrases though, Khaled is mostly known for his penchant for yelling his own name. So much so that's it has led people like Jack White to believe that it's all the producer actually does.

Actually, Khaled's self shout-outs are an astute form of marketing and self-promotion. They may seem strange at first, continuously saying your own name, but if you just made massive hit songs with the likes of Rihanna and Justin Bieber, wouldn’t you want to put your name all over them and shout about it from rooftops too? The answer is most definitely yes.

This could so very easily have come under the “bizarre” category, but was saved its brilliance and idiosyncrasy. Rivalling Rick Ross’s grunt, Pusha T’s throaty “yuck” sound has become not only a staple of his music but rap as a whole.

The ad-lib dates back to Birdman’s 2002 Clipse-featuring track What Happened to That Boy, which features Pusha’s first recorded utterance of the trademark as well as Birdman spending most of the song making actual bird noises, making for pretty much the best ad-lib-filled track of all-time.

It’s not quite clear what Pusha originally intended with the sound, but it has varied from track to track over the years, from expressing his own shock and amazement at the sheer quality of his verses to adding a punchline to his more recent Drake disses. “Yuuuck,” indeed.

Despite Big Sean asserting that he has the "best ad-libs in the game", over the past few years Migos are the ones that have proven themselves to be the undisputed masters of the ad-lib. Their tracks are pretty much stuffed full of them, sounding like they record all their songs in a rap echo chamber.

The ad-lib action in Bad and Boujee was perhaps the highlight of them all, with the trio even managing to make sounds like "brr", "grrah" and "skrrt" sound cool. Fast forward a couple of years and pretty much every artist - even Beyoncé on Apes**t - is saying "skrrt" now. Definitely not a coincidence.

There was even a brilliant moment back in March when member Offset actually got to shout "skrrt, skrrt" while at a NASCAR rally. Can you think of anything more apt? We cannot.

The most bizarre...

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Kanye West has long been a premium-tier ad-libber. "Uh", "Huh", "Heh" or "Ah": name a sound and Ye has probably uttered it over the course of his career. Long stretches of his songs have been filled by the sound of him panting (I Am a God) and he even went full-on Big Shaq on his recent Kids See Ghosts album opener, Feel The Love, making some really illegible sounds.

But when Kanye took to Twitter in April to promise that he was about to drop a verse with some fire bars to silence the haters that said he couldn’t rap anymore, nobody could have predicted what was about to come next.

Three days later and what Kanye delivered what a track consisting largely of scatting. “Poopy-di scoop, Scoop-diddy-whoop, Whoop-di-scoop-di-poop,” Kanye spouted on his pre-album single Lift Yourself.

Obviously rather pleased with his new ad-lib, Kanye has delivered the odd additional vocal "poop scoop" again on numerous tracks since (for example, on Pusha T's What Would Meek Do?). The trolling never ends, does it?

Like Khaled, Jay-Z isn’t a stranger to shouting out his own moniker at times (“Young Hova” and “Jigga man!” being among his early-day examples), but one of the Hov’s most distinctive ad-libs is the strange throaty sound he sometimes conjures up.

Is it a cough? Is it a stammer? Has he got 99 problems and a bad case of strep throat is one of them? Or is Jay simply articulating agreement? Or disapproval? It's really not clear.

If Migos are the modern-day kings of the ad-lib, then Panda hitmaker Desiigner is definitely more of an acquired taste, managing to make sounds almost unimaginable - and all over the course of a single track.

When the rapper’s breakthrough hit was sampled by Kanye back in 2016, many thought the track actually featured Future, pointing to supposed similarities in flows and cadences between the pair. Despite accusations of style-jacking though, Desiigner has still managed to carve a niche for himself in the ad-lib game.

You can always count on the Internet to come up with the goods whenever something mildly humorous happens and it duly delivered when it came to pointing out other things that Desiigner sounds like - everything from water sprinklers to seals. Bravo, people, you can be very proud of yourselves.

Ad-libs have become so commonplace and prevalent in current rap and trap that many may argue that we’ve reached saturation point. Regardless though, there have still been loads of highlights over the last couple of years that stand firmly next to the classics.

French Montana’s ad-lib efforts on the remix of Stefflon Don’s Hurting Me (“haaan” being one particularly addictive example) were almost as good as the London MC’s banger of a track. Steph's very Rihanna-like hum - delivered after the chorus - was a definite highlight too.

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Meanwhile, Travis Scott has managed to produce some of the most soundbite-worthy (and Instagram quotable) ad-libs of recent memory with “straight up” and “it’s lit”.

The UK has had its fair share of killer ad-libs too. Kojo Funds’s “yeah yeah yeah yeah” on his Craig David-sampling and RAYE-starring Check is nothing short of infectious, while “behave” from Krept & Konan’s Don’t Waste My Time is the perfect retort for anyone testing your patience. Let’s not forget the iconic “base!” from England’s base defender himself, Big Narstie, either.

And how can we possibly overlook “oh gosh” from 1Xtra’s very own Charlie Sloth.

A very honourable mention...

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Technically not an ad-lib, but how could we not mention the one and only Cardi B? 2018's undisputed rap conquerer is full of amazing saying and signature sounds, like "Eeeeooowwww!" or "Okuuuuuuurt!".

But what do they actually mean? Well, it's best coming straight from Cardi's own mouth. "Eeeeooowwww!", she explained to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show earlier this year, is halfway between "a sad cat in pain" and "a plane landing", reserved for moments that you're delivering "good news that's not very exciting". "Okuuuuuuurt!", meanwhile, is more "like a cold pigeon".

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