You need these people on your album.

Let’s say for example, you’re a rapper. Rappers, for the most part–unless you’re Yeezus–need pretty good features here and there to make it interesting. Features are a very tricky thing to execute. As an artist, you have to get the right artist, at the perfect time, to spit the perfect verse that’ll simultaneously and coherently fit your song. Those that have executed it in the past have benefited from it greatly (Jay-Z‘s “Big Pimpin”, Kendrick Lamar‘s “Money Trees”), but there have been some serious missteps, especially in recent history, and U.O.E.N.O. 2013 has been a historical year already, and we’ve still got six months to go, but take a gander at what we think are the best guest verses of the year thus far. We had some seriously heated debates about this, and hopefully you will too.

*In our debates, we discarded unofficial remixes, songs that were singles in 2012 but lived on 2013 albums, and any material officially released after June 24th.

-Khari Nixon (@KingVanGogh)