HIP HOP 1988-2015 ish
mostly hardcore, some underground. I’m going to try to keep it to a top 10, we’ll see how we do. hip-hop is almost more of a medium than a genre, you’ve got all the sub-genres and I don’t get along with or know a ton about some of them, so caveats aside –
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Eric B. & Rakim - Paid in Full (1987)
There is rap before Rakim - “I met this little girlie, her hair was kind of curly” - and then there was rap after Rakim - “I write a rhyme and graffiti in / every show you see me in / deep concentration cuz I’m no comedian.”
Rakim pioneered internal rhyme and multisyllabic rhyme schemes, where ‘the whole setup bar rhymes with every syllable of the punchline bar’ as Vox or somebody put it. It was like a slap in the face to the whole genre. Hip-hop become the dominant music form of the 90s and 2000s, and you can date at least some of that to Rakim’s wordplay.
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A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory (1991) & Midnight Marauders (1993)
I think of these albums together. Midnight Marauders is more cohesive qua album, but The Low End Theory has more tracks recognized as instant classics. Together, they are landmarks in laid-back, jazz-influenced lyricism about daily life. Smooth as anything.
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Nas, Illmatic (1994)
There’s a lot of other albums that could fit in this role, but for a 90’s classic boom-bap album focused on rugged poetic street storytelling, it’s very hard to beat the classic Illmatic. Nas is a top contender in the conversation for greatest MC’s ever, and one of the era’s prime documentarians.
“[W]hen my rap generation started, it was about bringing you inside my apartment. It wasn’t about being a rap star; it was about anything other than. I want you to know who I am: what the streets taste like, feel like, smell like. What the cops talk like, walk like, think like. What crackheads do… It was important to me that I told the story that way because I thought that it wouldn’t be told if I didn’t tell it.” - Nas to NPR
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Mobb Deep, The Infamous (1995)
I’m only 19 but my mind is old / and when things get for real my warm heart turns cold. It’s bleak, it’s dark, it’s cold, relentlessly violent and lyrical. Havoc’s production on this album is one of the most haunting things to come out of NYC hardcore hip hop. Mobb Deep is the answer to the question “what if Nas was the young gangster holding the gun instead of the kid on the stoop writing in his notebook about it.”
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DJ Shadow, Endtroducing… (1996)
No one needs to ‘prove’ sampling is an art-form, but DJ Shadow did it anyway. Endtroducing… was produced entirely on an Akai MPC60 sampler, a Technics SL-1200 turntable, and an ADAT eight-track. The product of a life spent digging in record crates for snippets of interesting sound, often named as the first completely sample-based album, and the intersection of instrumental hip-hop, ambient, and electronic. “I am, I confess, totally confounded by it. I hear a lot of good records, but very few impossible ones… You need this record. You are incomplete without it.” - David Bennun for The Guardian
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Wu-Tang Clan - Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993)
Wu-Tang Clan was developed as a 9-man crew after several of its members failed at careers making glitzy radio rap. It was decided that 1) fuck that noise, we’re getting paid as a crew with the freedom to make solo albums on whatever label we each decide, and 2) fuck that noise, we’re making the type of music we want to make. What proceeded sounded like it was recorded on someone’s tape deck in the back of a van. RZA, their producer and the project’s leader, set stories of warfare and violence in NYC to a soundtrack of samples of old kung fu movies, clicks, snaps, and howling wind. Each crew member was invited to display rhymes that mixed free-association references to brands, political events, and conceptual storytelling. The album somehow reached #8 on Billboard’s Hip-Hop chart and jumpstarted each of their solo careers. Check out Liquid Swords by GZA.
"War of the masses, the outcome disastrous / Many of the victim families save their ashes …
Another heart is torn as close ones mourn’ / Those who stray, n****s get slayed on the song."
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DMX, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998)
It feels like I’m running out of ways to say “hard but passionate,” but DMX was the epitome of that. He sounded like nobody else - who else barks on the track? Who else raps about being abused as a child, and rather than revel in continuing that cycle of abuse (hi Eminem), uses it to find God and foster dogs? NYC rap had become shiny and glam thanks to Puff Daddy and them, all Escalades and luxury liquors; DMX reminded folks that there was a street out there, still producing battle-rapping kids like him. The best way to understand him is to quote him, or to quote folks talking about him:
“He was the first living rapper to have two albums go platinum in the same year, and the only one to have his first five studio albums debut at #1.”
All I know is pain / all I feel is rain /How can I maintain / with that shit on my brain? …
Home of the brave / my home is a cage / Ayo I’ma slave / 'til my home is a grave.
Just witness the outpouring of love when he passed away this past year. Makes me wanna cry. RIP DMX.
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Outkast, Stankonia (2000)
Does there need to be Outkast on this list? Almost certainly. Which album? It’s hard (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is a strong shout, and I went back and forth) but Stankonia is the one that cemented them in the mainstream of American music. Consider the hits, which you will have heard on the radio in the early 2000’s: “Ms. Jackson,” “So Fresh So Clean,” “Bombs Over Baghdad,” “We Luv Deez Hoez.” Nothing else sounded like Outkast back then. Andre 3000 was some kind of jazz genius with the harmonies and syrupy lyrics, to take nothing away from Big Boi (who had a great solo album in Sir Lucious Leftfoot later on).
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Madvillain (Madlib & MF Doom), Madvillainy (2004)
The hip-hop underground has to be on this list, MF Doom has to be on this list, and the best thing I can think of for it is Madvillainy. The weirdo comic-book rapper with the perfect punchlines who never took his metal mask off, ‘your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper,’ meets his counterpart in Madlib’s perfectly-vintage-animation sampling. RIP Doom. “slapdash and dilapidated, wholly unconcerned with making sense” - Clash magazine
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The Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury (2006)
The Clipse weren’t Pharrell’s origin story, but they were maybe his finest work. Pusha T went on to have a solid solo career. The Clipse’s discography is a testament to how cleverly you can rap about selling drugs, and they are brilliant: I yell “Re-up” til I’m locked like Mumia, And get it cross-state with the grace of Maria… Fuck the Bureau, rather be spending Euros, We get fed grapes, fuck hoes in plurals. The production by Pharrell presages modern trap in its groovey electronic minimalism.
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J Dilla, Donuts (2007)
Everyone in hip-hop fandom probably knows the story: a virtuoso producer bursts from the Detroit underground, making underwater-sounding sampled beats with off-kilter drums that punch thru like hits on the heavy bag, chopping and re-purposing jazzy samples that seem to yearn for the heavens. It comes out that he is dying of a rare blood disorder. He composes a final 31-track beat tape from his deathbed, using a handheld SP-404. I don’t think Donuts is Dilla’s most representative work, but it’s maybe his most thrilling - the tracks, each between 1 and 2 minutes, seem to hint towards a higher fulfillment of a life cut short. Some of the beats eventually did get repurposed into released tracks by other groups. It’s also a great way to get interested in who this guy was, and why he became ‘your favorite producer’s favorite producer.’ “[Dilla] invented the sound we call neo-soul” - Questlove, of the Roots.
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Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)
Kanye is an interesting one. He dropped two amazing albums in the early 2000’s (The College Dropout and Late Registration) that could easily be on this list and absolutely changed the game for radio hip-hop, with his trademark production style of sped-up soul samples and rapping about working bullshit service-industry jobs in capitalist america, dreaming of making it big. he as much as Common or anybody helped to put Chicago hip-hop on the map, and his lush producing provided the power behind artists like Common and Jay-Z. then he got experimental; 2008’s hugely successful Graduation began to integrate house and arena rock influences while his lyrics moved towards rapping about being a famous rapper. 808’s and Heartbreak got especially weird with it, moving in an extremely electronic autotuned direction, and Kanye became a lightning rod for his various antics, including the famous feud with Taylor Swift. MBDTF was his integration album, bringing together the various directions he’d been trying out, and going fully maximalist with it; orchestral string arrangements, rapping about his celebrity, drug use, relationships, and the terrible things his life has done to him and the people around him. More than anything it’s his magnum opus. “Picasso-like, fulfilling the Cubist mandate of rearranging form, texture, color and space to suggest new ways of viewing things” - Ann Powers for the LA Times
epilepsy warning!!! --------- Kanye West - All Of The Lights ft. Rihanna, Kid Cudi - YouTube
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Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
It’s Kendrick, it’s good, you know Kendrick, it’s about racism in America and has received many accolades. “Alright” became a BLM protest anthem. To me, TPaB feels like a time capsule conveyinga desperate sincerity that stands a little at odds with our jokerfied present state of affairs. But that’s just maybe where I was at in my life when I heard it. Regardless, Kendrick is essential, and of his albums this one is the most essential.
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Vince Staples, Summertime '06 (2015)
To me, Vince exploded on the scene when he dropped this album. A supremely confident West Coast MC who rapped not only about the pleasures of driving around with the top down smoking weed, but about the brutality of the poverty and state abandonment, the thing it does to a person’s mindstate, the armor you have to wear to make it through gang violence. Where Kendrick speaks at the system level, Vince brings through deeply personal lyrics. “Cut class cause it wasn’t bout cash / School wasn’t no fun, couldn’t bring my gun / Know a change gon’ come like Obama an’ them say / But they shootin everyday ‘round my mama an’ them way.”
Honorable(?) Mentions:
Despite how undeniably talented he was, I don’t think future generations will need to know Eminem’s whole deal - try The Marshall Mathers LP or watch 8 Mile. Post-2005, Jay-Z hasn’t cared to show off how sometimesgood he is at rapping - if you like this freestyle, try Reasonable Doubt. The Roots are amazing, but there’s no one album I can point to as the must-listen - Rising Down gets closest, but Game Theory is bookended by Dilla beats. Blu & Exile’s Beyond the Heavens was my AotY 2007 but never had the influence or reception it should have. Dr. Dre is fine, Tupac I never really fell in love with: All Eyez on Me is overstuffed so I’d go with Me Against the World. The Fugees could have gone on the list, but their influences largely moves to other genres imo. I was tempted to put Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star on the list, but it’s a little bit of a singular achievement without influencing the genre as a whole. “Be (intro)” is the best song Common ever did. Check out Lupe Fiasco Food & Liquor. A lot of the modern stuff isn’t written as albums anymore. If you’ve ever been to a house party, you already know as much about Biggie as you need to know.
