“Can I Get A...” by Jay-Z featuring Amil & Ja Rule

"Can I Get A..." pulled double duty in 1998: Def Jam put it on the Rush Hour soundtrack to help push the film, and it also opened the singles run from Jay-Z's third album, Vol. 2... Hard Knock Life. Jay-Z shares the mic with Amil and Ja Rule, billed here as Jah, and the track put both young newcomers on the map. Irv Gotti produced it with Lil' Rob, and Gotti later claimed Ja Rule handed Jay-Z the hook and the flow.

At its heart is one blunt question, whether his girlfriend would stick around if the money disappeared, and the chorus needed a scrub before radio would touch it. It climbed to 19 on the Hot 100, among his biggest singles to that point, and VH1 later ranked it 57th among the 100 greatest songs of the '90s.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.