The saga continues... for 10:24.

​Last week, the new Gorillaz track "DoYaThing" dropped. It's long—a full 13-minutes and some seconds of music, a lot of which involves Andre 3000 getting frenzied and inspired with that rapping thing he does so well. With "DoYaThing" and persistent talk about Outkast reunion rumors bedazzling up the Internet, it seems like an apt prompt to get all expansive and cobble together the world's longest rap mixtape.

But first some rules! We're imposing a ten-minute minimum threshold. In the interests of listenability, we're also nixing any freestyles (sorry Game and your "300 Bars," and Weezy and your alleged "10,000 Bars"), and we're abiding by the rule of keeping it moving so the playlist spans hip-hop's growth and doesn't just dwell in a pool of lengthy old-school rap tracks (not that doing so wouldn't result in a very fine mixtape). We're also being curmudgeonly and overlooking anything that drifts into the realm of the ridiculous, like Canibus's 45-minute "Poet Laurette Infinity"—after all, if you're making your way through an artisanal 12-course tasting menu, the last thing you want is Canibus's rancid, oversized pulled-pork sandwich tampering with the delicate balance of your seared scallops with morels in a balsamic reduction sauce. In the interests of playlist culture maximization (and further clogging up your iPod), here's the world's greatest longest 12-track rap mixtape.

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​"They tell me to get my old ass off the mic, but every time my old ass gets on stage I put on a hell of a show!" So promises Too $hort, the godfather of Bay Area hip-hop who'll be hitting Brooklyn this Thursday and Friday for shows at the Knitting Factory. The back-to-back gigs mark $hort Dog's solo Big Apple stage debut; with a discography that harks back to 1985's Don't Stop Rappin' and a spell before that crafting custom songs for local customers, the East Oakland-raised, pimp-styled icon has a rap stash that runs deeper than most. But as a West Coast pioneer, Too $hort hasn't always been so readily accepted in hip-hop's heartland. In the run-up to his inaugural NYC shows, we got $hort to look back on his early days dealing with East Coast elitism, bantering with cynical Manhattan bellhops, and being told by Biggie that he was kinda like a big deal in Brooklyn.

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