"Mama Said Knock You Out" (LL Cool J)

So back in the late 80s, pretty much everyone had written off James Todd Smith, a.k.a. LL Cool J.  The words "commercial" and "sellout" got bandied about quite a bit in reviews of his 1989 album Walking with a Panther, a glossy collection of songs that included one too many poppy ballads.  After he got booed by the crowd at The Apollo in late '89, he was considering packing it in.
But the person he looked up to most, his late grandmother Ellen Griffin, convinced him to go back into the recording studio and prove his detractors wrong.  Her advice was simple: "Knock 'em out."
The result was one of the rawest tracks and all-time best song titles in hip-hop: "Mama Said Knock You Out."  
LL delivers an unrelenting lyrical beat down, addressing both his critics and his nemesis, rapper Kool Moe Dee.  The two had been trading blows since Dee threw the first punch in 1987's "How Ya Like Me Now," a track that took LL to task for his young lion swagger.  In fact, LL name-checks "How Ya Like Me Now" as well as his own rebuttal, "Jack the Ripper," in the lyrics of "Mama Said Knock You Out."  I don't think there's any doubt by the end of the track, though, who delivered the knock-out punch.
But the key to the track is Marlon "Marley Marl" Williams's production, which surrounds the rapper with a hip-hop version of the "Wall of Sound"—not unlike The Bomb Squad's productions for Public Enemy in that same era.  Samples are interwoven and layered on top of each other in surprising, "how did he pull that off???" ways.  Case in point: the backing track primarily is a mix of two Sly & The Family Stone songs ("Sing a Simple Song" and "Trip to Your Heart"), "Gangster Boogie" by Chicago Gangsters, "Funky Drummer" by James Brown, and LL's own "Rock the Bells."  Thing is, the samples are so intertwined and beefed up with bass, it's hard to tell where one begins and the other ends; it's as if they were meant to go together, all along.  
In short, the atmosphere of the track is about as far from poppy balladry as you can get.  And although LL famously announces Don't call it a comeback at the beginning of the song, it was exactly the comeback his career needed at that moment.