Android - SQLite Select the first N occurrences of each differing column value

Question

Suppose I have a SQL table "songs" with three columns: "title", "artist" and "ranking":

 track   | artist | ranking     
---------+--------+---------  
    A    |   A1   |   3
    B    |   A1   |   2
    C    |   A1   |   1
    D    |   A2   |   4
    E    |   A3   |   7
    F    |   A3   |   6
    G    |   A3   |   5

I want to make a SELECT query that will return just the first N (e.g. two) row for each artist while ordering by the ranking. I'm aware that using GroupBy on the artist column will return one row of each artist, however I want two in this scenario like so:

 track   | artist | ranking     
---------+--------+---------  
    A    |   A1   |   1
    B    |   A1   |   2
    D    |   A2   |   4
    E    |   A3   |   5
    F    |   A3   |   6

If it is possible, I would preferably want to construct this within android using a queryBuilder, this is as close as I managed to get:

SQLiteDatabase db = getReadableDatabase();
SQLiteQueryBuilder qBuilder = new SQLiteQueryBuilder();

    String[] sqlSelect = {"title", "artist", "ranking"};
    String sqlTable = "songs";
    String orderBy = "ranking DESC";

    qBuilder.setTables(sqlTable);
    cur = qBuilder.query(db, sqlSelect, null, null, null, null, orderBy);

I have seen related questions, however I haven't been able to find a way to apply it to this scenario - any direction on how to accomplish this would be appreciated.