Hip-hop has always been a genre highly susceptible to gimmicks. I wouldn’t go as far as to blaspheme Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”, because it did make rap palatable to the major labels (and helped usher out the God-awful overproduced R&B of the early ’80s), but there’s also no denying that the success of that particular track was partially due to its benign oddity holding sway with the less-conservative label execs of the time. Of course, now we’ve got specific styles for every major region, numerous sub-genres including a growing LGBT scene, and even geriatric WASPs doing their best head nods while delivering flows on tax reform. Hip-hop is highly individualized, with a low cost of entry and without most of the limiting factors of, say, a four-piece rock band, and success in that environment can be found simply by being different.

Professional athletes fit the bill quite nicely, and of them all, NBA players have the best combination of street cred and innate showman to pull it off – with the help of ghostwriters, ready-made production and auto-tune if need be. The top of the heap is Shaq, surely the greatest crossover in the history of sports. His five albums blow away the output of any other athlete rapper, and his first two efforts, Shaq Diesel (1993) and Shaq Fu: Da Return (1994), both went platinum. Hell, he already had a greatest hits album out in 1996.

After him, the field thins dramatically. There’s 1994′s seminal – at least in terms of NBA rap – compilation Basketball’s Best Kept Secret, featuring the usual boasting and bad puns from the likes of Cedric Ceballos, Brian Shaw, and Dana Barros, with the highlight being Gary Payton’s D.A.R.E. friendly “Living Legal and Large”, which surprisingly sounds like it was produced by a lazy E-40 in his early days. That aside, we’re stuck with a host of single attempts from Kobe’s painfully generic “K.O.B.E.” and Chris Webber’s anemic and emo “Too Much Drama”, the video of which starts with a weird minute and a half long church sequence. Oddly enough, Allen Iverson’s “40 Bars” has enjoyed a bit of success with collectors after the supposedly homophobic lyrics pissed off David Stern enough to derail its release.

Meanwhile, with much less of the exposure given the much bigger names above, Ron Artest has been chugging along with this own attempts. He’s surely the only athlete crazy or savvy enough to shout out a already-recorded championship single after winning it all. “Champion” is surprisingly well put-together, with the requisite auto-tune hook and a beat that sounds influenced by his time in Houston. In contrast to Kobe’s distant, listless delivery or Webber’s glacial codeine drawl, Artest knows how to actually rap a little bit. The single is apparently an attempt to resurrect what Artest started with 2006′s My World. The album has a fair amount of Dirty South influence, and while it largely fits under the umbrella of club rap, Artest – who is listed as a producer on every track – put it together with a lot of polish, especially with the help of then club mainstays Mike Jones and Juvenile. The top single “Fever” is an uptempo New York stripper jam that utilizes an impressively throwback break, but I’d pick the soulful “Haterz” as the top track on the record, if only for the fact that Artest’s hook openly wonders why people don’t like him with a vulnerability that your average lunatic NBA player turned rapper couldn’t muster.

Everything highlighted in Artest’s background – Queensbridge, the Palace, the MSG camera, halftime Hennessy – suggests that Artest would put out an aggressive, frenetic NYC battle record, and yet instead he tends to focus on the polar opposites of playboy partying or musing about what he’s done to deserve his reputation. Artest the rapper is never going to be a top rapper, largely because he lacks the superstar name that guarantees him a gimmick hit, but at the same time it’s obvious that he cares enough to spend the time and money to put out something respectable. In light of his peers’ work, Artest’s music is impressively multifaceted, something that for a long time many had assumed he was incapable of. It makes more sense lately as we’ve gotten a clearer picture of who Artest is. We’ve never really seen a deep Artest aside from a few excellent glances at the people around him, and combined with his controversies, he’s been plagued by the assumption that he’s simply a snarling dog in need of a cage. Now we’ve got a post-game interview where he alternately invites the whole media room to the club and is frankly honest about his own shortcomings. There’s no denying, even from him, that he is a tad bit crazy. It’s just that now it seems he’s finally getting the credit of being a complex subject as well.