June 8, 2022 9:29AM

The 200 Greatest Hip-Hop Albums of All Time

These are the albums that have defined hip-hop history — from Run-DMC to Playboi Carti, from G-funk to drill, from the Bronx to Houston, and beyond

By CHARLES AARON & MANKAPRR CONTEH & JON DOLAN & WILL DUKES & DEWAYNE GAGE & JOE GROSS & KORY GROW & CHRISTIAN HOARD & JEFF IHAZA & JULYSSA LOPEZ & MOSI REEVES & YOH PHILLIPS & NOAH SHACHTMAN & ROB SHEFFIELD & SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON & CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN

Two hundred seems like an almost luxuriantly expansive number when you’re making an albums list, and in any other genre, maybe it would be. But the history of rap LPs is so rich and varied, we were forced to make some painful choices — there are so many iconic artists with deep catalogs, so many constantly evolving sounds and regional scenes. That’s one reason we limited our scope to English language hip-hop. Relatedly, a list of hip-hop-adjacent albums from the worlds of dancehall or reggaeton or grime would be fun and fascinating, and something for us to revisit down the road.

When confronted with a choice between the third (or fourth or fifth) record by a classic artist (Outkast, for instance, or A Tribe Called Quest) and an album from an artist who would make the list more interesting (The Jacka or Saba or Camp Lo), we tended to go with the latter option. The result was a list that touches on every important moment in the genre’s evolution — from compilations that honor the music’s paleo old-school days, to its artistic flourishing in the late Eighties and early Nineties with Public Enemy, De La Soul, Eric B. and Rakim and others, through the gangsta era, the rise of the South, the ascendance of larger-than-life aughts superstars like Jay-Z and Kanye West and Nicki Minaj, and on and on into more recent moments like blog-rap, emo-rap, and drill, from New York to L.A. to Houston to Chicago, and beyond.

As we dug and listened, we found ourselves a little less swayed by “golden age” mystique than we might’ve been had we done this list 10 or 15 years ago. One of the incredible things about hip-hop is that it evolves and expands faster than any other genre in music history. To a fan coming up in the era of Cardi or Tyler or Polo G or Playboi Carti, the golden age is now.

From Rolling Stone US

Run-D.M.C. stunned the world in the summer of 1986 with Raising Hell —easily the most ambitious, consistent, action-packed rap album ever made up to that point. With producer Rick Rubin, they invented the whole idea of an all-killer, no-filler hip-hop album. Run and D.M.C. rock their tricky-tricky-tricky rhymes in “Peter Piper” and “My Adidas,” while Jam Master Jay plays King Midas on the turntables. Raising Hell proved how hard rap could go over 40 minutes of wax, kicking off the Golden Age — as Questlove said, “This was hip-hop’s tipping point.” After Raising Hell, nobody ever called rap a fad again. —R.S.

Lil Wayne deemed himself “best rapper alive” on Tha Carter II. And that was before he would go on to have one of the most historic runs in rap music. “Fireman” blasted out of stereos and parties all over; tracks like “Carter II” and “Hustler Musik” exhibit wordplay you wouldn’t expect from an MC from New Orleans, but if you were an avid Wayne listener, you knew. “Got Nina in my palm and I’m masturbating/Black Peter Pan, fly ‘til I die, what you saying,” he raps on “Hustler Musik.” If you’re going to debate for Weezy F. Baby being the greatest rapper alive, the evidence on your side starts with Tha Carter II. —D.G.

Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus is music for people who throw up Post No Bills stickers on random metropolitan scaffolding. Rebellious, anarchic, and resourceful, El-P, Big Juss, and Mr. Len were all about delivering a big fuck you to the system. On “Legends,” El Producto exclaims “independent as fuck,” like it’s a dating status update on Facebook. But the brilliant paradox behind Co-Flow is that, for all their forward-looking proclivities, their sensibility is unquestionably analog — almost the opposite of anything virtual. Witness “Silence” — all muddy bass and vinyl crackles and outlaw graffiti references. Funcrusher Plus turned defacing the industry into art. —W.D.

To some, Clipse’s so-called “coke rap” has glorified a decadent, criminal lifestyle. Except that fraternal duo Malice and Pusha T deploy their sparkling intelligence and lyrical élan like hypnotists swinging iced-out Rolexes, while impeccably analyzing the do-or-die psychology behind success in an “illegal” economy that exists because of its “legal” counterpart’s discriminatory hustle. From “We Got It for Cheap (Intro),” where Pusha raps, “No serum can cure/All the pain I’ve endured,” to spiritually crushing closer “Nightmares,” the brothers look over their shoulders, waiting for karma’s tap. —C.A.

Following his movie soundtrack hit “Colors,” Ice-T’s second studio album doubled down on his 1987 debut, Rhyme Pays, with funky, funny tales of street life and the women and guns that come with it. At 30, Ice-T was older and worldlier than many of his peers, and though Power is the work of a definitive, pre-N.W.A L.A. gangsta artist, the album’s producer, Afrika Islam, drew on electro and club music for a sound that wasn’t regional. As Ice-T noted, “I ain’t East Coast, West Coast, old style or new style.” “Personal” sports rock guitar riffs, “I’m Your Pusher” takes the music-as-drugs allegory to a logical conclusion, and the hilariously direct “Girls L.G.B.N.A.F.” anticipates generations of crude sex rhymes. Ice-T is now best known as a cop on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. —J.G.

After T.I.’s debut album, I’m Serious, flopped, the Atlanta rapper stoked industry buzz with his In da Streets mixtapes, resulting in what may be the first major rap album dedicated to the “trap” musical style. Debate persists over whether he really invented this deathless subgenre, but it’s inarguable that producer DJ Toomp conjures an orchestral sweep on “Be Easy” and “24’s” that underlines T.I.’s raps, and that David Banner updates UGK’s gospel-like keyboard sound for the D-boy anthem “Rubber Band Man.” Nearly every track here finds T.I. detailing his world with sharp-elbowed cadences and dense Southern slang — including the final cut, “Long Live Da Game,” where he imagines his own death as the ultimate consequence of a drug dealer’s lifestyle. —M.R.

Inspired by the platinum success of De La Soul’s 1989 classic 3 Feet High and Rising and the hit single “Me Myself and I,” De La Soul Is Dead falls into a grand pop tradition of post-fame albums. The trio (as well as mentor/producer Prince Paul) teeter between exhaustion, cynicism, alienation, and dogged determination. The album includes one of the bleakest songs in the genre, a tale of child abuse and murder titled “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa.” It also has one of the most joyous in “A Roller-Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays.’” Guiding it all is the album cover image of a cracked flower pot, dead daisies, and the sense of shedding old ideas in order to create something vibrant and new. —M.R.

Death Certificate, released on Halloween, was one of 12 rap albums that went platinum in 1991. Conceptually split as “Death” and “Life,” Ice Cube’s second album is calculated, callous, and consumed by a passion to report on the Black man’s reality. The result is a set of cunning, and at times controversial, narratives told with an enlivened impulse to remake the world in an inferno of Parliament samples and brass-knuckle lyricism. Each punchy track reinforced how Cube didn’t allow success to make him a tongue-biting pop star; no, he was still an outlaw hungry to mirror the heat he felt outside his South Central home. —Y.P.

The “turntablist” trend of the mid-Nineties may not have the deepest legacy these days, but the debut album from California DJ-producer Josh Davis remains an experimental hip-hop grail. From the old-school breakbeat throwdown “The Number Song” to the swirling astral-funk of “Changeling” to the elegiac stop-action boom-bap of “Midnight In a Perfect World,” Entroducing felt like a trap door into a whole new realm of crate-digger revelation, an album that now feels beautifully out of time and all the more transporting for it. —J.D.

BDP named themselves for their home turf, the Boogie Down Bronx. They created the template for gangsta rap with their brutally innovative debut, Criminal Minded — nobody had ever seen a rap act brandish weapons on an album cover. KRS-One keeps it hardcore in “South Bronx” and “The Bridge Is Over,” while DJ Scott La Rock mixes in dancehall reggae, funk, and AC/DC. Tragically, La Rock was gunned down soon after the album dropped. KRS-One kept BDP going, but he moved on to a new role as “the Teacher,” a voice for conscious political rage. —R.S.

It’s impossible to overstate just how firm a stranglehold “Day ‘n’ Nite,” the lead single from Kid Cudi’s 2009 debut, Man on the Moon: The End of the Day, had over the culture. The song’s infectious chorus belied Cudi’s emotional resonance. Despite being a once-on-a-generation party anthem, the song falls in line with much of the record, as an exploration of the mental health and emotional turbulence of the artist behind it. Cudi took rap’s stoner trope and turned it inward. Finally, rap music to smoke weed and be sad to. —J.I.

Supreme mathematics share the same psychic space as “skins,” 40 ounces and signifying on One for All, which captured the culture’s many dimensions in 1990. “Concerto in X Minor” spoke on the murder of unarmed teen, Yusef Hawkins, and the Edie Brickell & New Bohemians–sampling “Slow Down” turned a “crack is wack” advisory into a high-key club banger. Grand Puba vamps on single, “All for One,” like he’s a virtuoso jazz trumpeter. And “Wake Up (Reprise in the Sunshine)” teaches the uncivilized, while bursting with populist pride. This was FUBU (for us, by us) way back in the polka-dots-and-flip-up-glasses era. W.D.

Once upon a time, hip-hop acts didn’t rap about weed. Cypress Hill took a massive bong hit, and by the time the blue cloud dissipated, this largely Cuban-American crew had changed the game completely, mixing tales of enthusiastic gun usage (“How I Could Just Kill a Man”) with tracks that could barely remember what day it was (“Stoned Is the Way of the Walk”). The trick was wild voices over rugged beats: B-Real and Sen Dog’s mix of nasal and gruff, slipping between Spanish and English, over DJ Muggs’ thunderous funk, was a shtick too good not to rip off. —J.G.

Before MF Doom, before Danny Brown, before Tyler, the Creator, there was Kool Keith and Ced-Gee, still two of the weirdest lyricists ever. But odd lyrics and odder flow were just two elements that made Critical Beatdown stand out in hip-hop’s greatest year. On songs like “Watch Me Know,” “Moe Luv’s Theme,” and the almighty “Ego Trippin,’” producer Ced-Gee all but invented late 1980s and early 1990s hip-hop with his intricate sample chops. Critical Beatdown is like Citizen Kane — its innovations became so ubiquitous it might be hard to hear, more than 30 years later, what the big deal was. —J.G.

Like Water for Chocolate features contributions from various members of the Soulquarians collective — J Dilla’s Slum Village, Bilal, Mos Def, the Roots, D’Angelo — as well as nods to a universe of inspirations that include Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, Black Panther revolutionary Assata Shakur, and post-bop titans like Roy Hargrove. At the center is Common, who brings a restless intelligence to these warm, sensuous tracks. He admits to his lover on “The Light” that he’s probably one of those “brothers” who mistreated women in the past. On “Nag Champa (Afrodisiac for the World)” and “Thelonious,” he spits with lyrical assurance in both positive and ugly ways. It all marks an artist at his creative peak. —M.R.

Nobody was entirely prepared for The Slim Shady LP. Straight outta the urban trailer park, Eminem’s major-label debut was the fuck-everything primal scream of a white, bottle-blonde lunatic well aware he had everything to prove, both to an audience and his new mentor, the legendary Dr. Dre. And prove Eminem did, following a brilliantly goofy single produced by Dre (“My Name Is”) with an album packed with cartoonishly icky ultra-violence (“Guilty Conscience”) and genuinely disturbing ultra-violence (“97 Bonnie & Clyde”). Thanks to his mind-boggling lyrical skill and mass appeal, Slim Shady put Eminem in the hip-hop pantheon and made him a culture lightning rod overnight. Pop music hasn’t been the same since. —J.G.

On Summertime ’06, Vince Staples’ always humorous persona comes through in every bar — delivered in a relentless pocket, like some rapidly composed fire tweet. Over the bass-heavy drone of “Lift Me Up,” he snaps, “Uber driver in the cockpit look like Jeffrey Dahmer/But he looking at me crazy when we pull up to the projects,” as if he’s got a weeklong residency in the Catskills. But there are also moments of poignant beauty here. Witness the dreamy “Summertime.” And “C.N.B.,” whose boastful hook plays counterpoint to the verses’ scathing social commentary, proves that sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying. —W.D.

Nobody expected global hip-hop troublemaker M.I.A. to top or even approach her striking 2005 debut, Arular, but with Kala, she absolutely delivered. The album was brasher and more expansive than its predecessor. She quoted the Modern Lovers and Bollywood in the opener “Bamboo Banga,” stretched out her voice on the trippy, kinetic “Jimmy,” and played with stuttering melodies as she riffed on the cost of automatic weapons on “20 Dollar.” And then there’s the Diplo-produced “Paper Planes,” mixing gunfire clatter, a Clash sample, cash register ca-ching, and some sensual synths into one of the great left-field pop hits of the 21st century. —J.G.

Dashing, irreverent, hysterical, wise, and bursting with charm, Slick Rick laced his classic debut with enough magisterial tall tales to keep a Victorian public house in stitches. “Children’s Story” is a parable so eternal annotators should publish its lyrics in red ink. On “Mona Lisa,” Rick spells out his name with a mock-heroic exit-stage-right affectation that’s so bloody cocksure it’s got self-deprecation to spare. (His “K,” as in “Kangol,” rises an octave, as if he’s exasperated at his unabashed navel-gazing.) And “The Moment I Feared” is a tragedy that feels like a farce. There’s not a greater storyteller in rap. —W.D.

Digable Planets’ second album failed to capture a mainstream audience like their 1992 debut, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space). The beats resemble mid-Sixties hard bop. Butterfly, Doodlebug, and Ladybug’s lyrics are twisty and packed with cultural references to the likes of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Sekou Odinga. Save for the breezy soul-jazz of “Jettin’,” the music is shorn of easily accessible melodies; more typical is the brittle, distorted bass drums and crashing cymbals of “9th Wonder (Blackitolism),” where Mecca begins, “I’m 63 inches above sea level/93 million miles above these devils.” Ironic, then, that rap fans now consider Blowout Comb the group’s best work, a dense catalog of Nineties Brooklyn bohemia that rewards deep listening. —M.R.

Some Rap Songs is a basic title for an album with so many lifetimes behind it. Released after the passing of his father, the poet Keorapetse Kgositsil, Earl Sweatshirt’s third solo outing is meditative, insular, and snarky, with snippet-length tracks that make you feel like you’ve imbibed his entire worldview. “Azucar” is a spectral apologia, with some of the Odd Future prodigy’s most poignant lyrics — addressing his bouts with depression and alcoholism. Meanwhile, “Cold Summers,” with its Byzantine bars, simply slaps. —W.D.

The second Eric B. & Rakim album built on the sound of their landmark debut, Paid in Full, with even juicier beats and endless bars. Every line Rakim spits on the relentless tile track is an inspiration, impossibly chill and fast at the same time. Elsewhere, “Microphone Fiend” rings sleigh bells and establishes dominance, while “Lyrics of Fury” destroys all pretenders over James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” break. There is only one Rakim; no wonder it inspires MCs to this day. —J.G.

Azealia Banks’ career is too often framed in terms of the major pop success she didn’t achieve instead of the great music she made. The fact is, few artists of any caliber have made a thrilling, polyglot gem of New York club culture like Broke With Expensive Taste. “Gimme a Chance” shifts from post-disco with blaring horns to a salsa rhythm, and Banks responds in kind by switching her raps from English to Spanish. She covers Ariel Pink’s “Nude Beach a Go-Go,” dips into U.K. garage on “Desperado,” and turns into a house queen for the pulsing beat of “Luxury.” Then there’s the justly celebrated “212,” where she flips queer sex raps over a fidgety track with saucy panache. —M.R.

Quoting Mr. West: “Why do you think the song ‘Niggas in Paris’ was called ‘Niggas in Paris’? Cuz niggas was in Paris!” To wit, this gilded flex on Eurocentric creative elites is fueled by the constant looting of, and barriers to, black excellence. Jay, Ye, and their A-list collaborators subsume all genres: a dubstep sample, a Bon Iver cameo, Nina Simone’s voice deftly Auto-Tuned, Frank Ocean’s croon placed over a riff by Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera. It’s a Ye-driven spectacle, but Jay’s lyrics reveal the alienation that’s always lurking. —C.A.

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Hard to Earn is an impeccable pledge for realness that epitomizes big hoodie energy. Preemo’s murky production on “Code of the Streets” — his ultraprecise scratches sound like sonar bleeps over a sped-up riff pulled from some golden-age-of-Hollywood score — adds a steely sense of drama to the best breakdown of the day-to-day drug trade since D’Angelo Barksdale’s chess analogy in The Wire. “Mass Appeal” turns a jazzy loop — shorter than the elevator ride its blithe guitar could be the soundtrack for — into a gully anthem tailor-made for the heads. Hard to Earn proved Gang Starr was cut from the cloth. —W.D.

All eyes were on Megan Thee Stallion the spring Fever dropped. Sex romp “Big Ole Freak” from her previous project, Tina Snow, was climbing up the charts, her cunning freestyles were making their rounds, and music publications were steady knocking at her door. With the fiery mixtape of independent-woman anthems and twerk tracks, the Houston Hottie delivered a poppin’ soundtrack for the last normal summer the world saw and an impressive showcase of her empowered rapping and symbiotic collaborations with producers LilJuMadeDaBeat and Three 6 Mafia’s Juicy J. —M.C.

Chuck D and Flavor Flav made Afro-pessimism as inescapable as pop music on their impeccable sophomore opus, Fear of a Black Planet. But there was nothing soft or compromising about these 20 songs. The D.A.R.E.-era manifesto “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” comes on like a dissonant dental drill fed through some jury-rigged amp. And “Fight the Power” gave voice to the fury in the Black community — sick and tired after 400-plus years of oppression. Full of righteous rage, timeless anthems, and protest-worthy fervor, Fear of a Black Planet captivated the nation and didn’t hold back. —W.D.

Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde soars with life-affirming music. Mostly produced by L.A. Jay, it bustles with crunchy soul-jazz, Meters-styled funk, and marijuana-infused psychedelia. Romye, Slim Kid Tré, Fat Lip, and Imani sing, fast rap, and flex with youthful verve. The quartet could get imaginatively silly on “Pack the Pipe,” where Fatlip brags about smoking out a three-year-old child; or “On the DL,” where Romye claims that he shot a home invader. Then there’s “Passin’ Me By,” which may be the definitive hip-hop statement on unrequited attraction; and “Otha Fish,” where Tré harmonizes about a romantic breakup. In short, Bizarre Ride is all over the place, but it comes from a real place: the minds of four L.A. B-boys having the time of their lives. —M.R.

A legendary oddball going back to his days with old-school greats the Ultramagnetic MCs, Kool Keith arrived in the Puffy-defined mid-Nineties like a beacon of absurdist freedom, declaring himself the “paramedic fetus of the east” on the gloriously off-trend Dr. Octagonecologyst. Over Dan “The Automator” Nakamura’s deep-space production, Keith kicked psychedelic scatology, sprawling free-association and head-scratch disses like “Shakespeare’s gone, don’t even think about him,” sucking you in, and pulling you under, into his twisted cosmic netherworld. —J.D.

“Some think that we can’t flow/Stereotypes, they got to go,” raps Monie Love in her thrilling guest appearance on the womanist classic “Ladies First.” The hit single is only the most iconic moment of the debut album from the “Princess of the Posse.” A 19-year-old leader of men — she titles her collaboration with De La Soul “Mama Gave Birth to the Soul Children” — Queen Latifah offers hip-house bangers like “Come Into My House,” harmonizes on “Latifah’s Law,” and drops battle raps over the dancehall-inflected “Wrath of My Madness.” With crisp and funky breakbeat production from the 45 King, All Hail the Queen conveys a sense of endless possibility for this New Jersey artist that she’d fulfill in the years to come. —M.R.

If “glitch in the matrix” could be summed up by an album cover, it’d depict three MCs, posed Godfather style, against a black backdrop, right above the title, The Score. Nothing about any of this was supposed to work. But when the Fugees’ second album took off, it was clear they did it their way. The title track is produced by Diamond D, for chrissakes. Also: L-Boogie raps circles around everyone. Wyclef’s musical mastery means he can do just about any genre in his sleep. And, hot take: Pras (on “The Mask,” especially) is better than he gets credit for. — W.D.

Ghostface Killah often disparages his solo debut in interviews — its making coincided with a time in his life when he struggled to leave his street activities behind, and it’s not as transformative as his 2000 masterpiece, Supreme Clientele. Regardless, Ironman is stuffed with bangers, whether it’s the zippy lead single “Daytona 500,” where he memorably claims, “I slap box with Jesus”; the heartbreaking story of poverty that is “All That I Got Is You”; or incredible deep cuts like “Fish,” “Assassination Day,” and “After the Smoke Is Clear.” (By contrast, one cheeky rap about a prepubescent girl’s blossoming sexuality, “Wildflower,” hasn’t aged well.) The Wu-Tang Clan was on an incredible run during the mid-1990s, and Ironman is no exception. —M.R.

“I know y’all gonna hear me all over the nation!” shouts Juvenile at the end of “U.P.T.” A veteran of the New Orleans bounce scene, the Third Ward rapper scored numerous regional hits before an evocative video for “Ha,” with its sunbaked concrete exteriors, introduced the Cash Money aesthetic to the rest of the nation. The resulting 400 Degreez serves as a coming-out party for the whole camp: Producer Manny Fresh’s digital flurries pulse throughout, and that’s Lil Wayne closing out the bass anthem “Back That Azz Up” with the famed ad-lib “drop it like it’s hot.” But this is Juvie’s moment, and his peppery delivery makes the whole thing go. —M.R.

Southern rap titans the Geto Boys put Texas on the hip-hop map by being one of the genre’s most evocative and controversial groups. Their third album plunged emotional depths that hip-hop had not previously dared to tread: “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” is renown as one of the genre’s great windows into paranoia and mental anguish, and songs like “Chuckie” painted the blood-splattered road to horrorcore. They were also deeply political in a way that took no shorts: “Fuck a War” is a blunt protest of the first Gulf War (“I ain’t gettin’ my leg shot off/While Bush’s old ass on TV playin’ golf”). —C.W.

Upon its release in 1995, Three 6 Mafia’s debut was largely a regional success. National rap magazines focused on “Live by Yo Rep,” a fiery single that alleges Bone Thugs-n-Harmony stole their “unique quality of rap style.” It took years for the Memphis group’s innovations to filter into the mainstream, from their early use of the word “crunk” and rowdily chanted chorus to DJ Paul and Juicy J’s bleary keyboard approximations of horror movie soundtracks and dusted sampling sensibility. Three 6 Mafia may have plenty of internet mimics now, but there’s still nothing like the Triple Six threatening and taunting their enemies in murderous terms over these bleakly atonal beats. They conjure a menacing intensity that can’t be copied. —M.R.

Buhlooone Mindstate comes on a like a giddy blast of right-brained banter — as amorphous and free as the oxygen-filled globe the album’s named for. On their third path-breaking album, Posdnuos, Trugoy, and Maseo made space to just have fun and further stretch the boundaries of hip-hop. “Patti Dooke” is a lighthearted jam session with a hook by Guru and live instrumentation from the JBs’ Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, and Pee Wee Ellis. Japanese rappers SDP and Takagi Kan galvanize “Long Island Is Wildin’,” and “I Am I Be” is a verbal game of Mad Libs, full of free-associative rhymes we’re still trying to decipher. —W.D.

Get Rich isn’t just a smashing debut, it’s a key moment in producer Dr. Dre’s unprecedented three-act career. Executive producing a crew of crack beat-makers, Dre applied his magic to an underknown Queens rapper, matching East Coast lyrical minimalism with West Coast G-funk minimalism. Turned out to be an ideal blockbuster pairing. It doesn’t hurt that “In Da Club,” the album’s perfect first single, will be played on dance floors from now until the end of time. —J.G.

Black Star were students of rap that treated hip-hop as art to be studied, practiced, and performed with gratitude for the past and grace for the present. Together, Mos Def and Talib Kweli spotlight hip-hop’s joyful bright sides, proving themselves as poets pushing to manifest a new renaissance for East Coast traditionalism. It’s the rich Black history beneath their cunning flows and romantic rhymes entwined with Hi-Tek’s breakneck beats that had Black Star lauded for being a refreshing rebirth of a new old-school. —Y.P.

The 1999 release of Operation: Doomsday marked the second coming of Zev Love X., formerly of early-Nineties conscious rap crew KMD, and it reintroduced a mysterious figure who’d become one of underground rap’s greatest voices. On Operation: Doomsday, he’s a ruminating wizard over Quiet Storm-tinged tracks like the Sade-sampling ‘Doomsday.” His dexterous rhymes and salient schemes made other MCs look like talent show amateurs, and every sound he touches — from the Scooby-Doo theme song to Kool G Rap’s “Truly Yours” — gets mutated into something surreally brand new. This album the sound of an emcee who had come to destroy with honor. —Y.P.

Scarface’s rhymes on The Diary are so engrossing you feel like you’re immersed in a miss-it-if-you-blink murder mystery. Mortality and the unknown animate this album, whose bleak single “I Never Seen a Man Cry” is probably the darkest song to ever occupy space on the charts. “Jesse James” is as stylized as it is violent — a sonic Sergio Leone flick. And “Mind Playin’ Tricks 94” is a cliffhanger redux that feels like a return visit from the uncanny. The level of tortured craftsmanship and unflinching honesty displayed here proves why Scarface is one of the greatest of all time. —W.D.

On the palpably ambitious Damn., Compton, California’s Kendrick Lamar Duckworth flaunts his usual Olympian level of vocal craft and cunning. But unlike the aching sprawl of 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, the rapper’s third album clarified his array of narrative and syntactical attacks, reverses, inversions, pretexts, and flourishes into the most visceral, immediate music of his career. With a familiar galaxy of Los Angeles collaborators (and secret weapon Mike Will Made It), Lamar embeds melodic fragments or infectious refrains into his soul-scorching soliloquies. To wit, the Pulitzer Prize judges became total stans. —C.A.

Posthumously released, The Notorious B.I.G.’s final studio album was an overwhelming spectacle — its narrative sweep, Gladiator-level conflict, and hate-me-now pop ambition. Beset by jealous friends and foes, backed by foreboding yet lustrous samples, Biggie exploded, in visually explicit detail, how Black folks suffer, party, or perish in America’s white supremacist shakedown. He’s celebratory (“Hypnotize”), paranoid (“Mo Money Mo Problems”), and cautionary like a shark (“Ten Crack Commandments”). When he moaned the final chorus with veritable gospel dread — “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)” — we gasped in awful assent. —C.A.

Chuck D’s vision of hip-hop as Black people’s CNN was all but fulfilled on AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, which announced Ice Cube as our down-by-law spokesman. Naturally, Chuck (who’d lent Cube the Bomb Squad) gave fuel to the politically charged fire on “Endangered Species (Tales from the Darkside),” which placed the standard Black super-predator bit (you saw constantly on the news) within the proper enraged context. Meanwhile, “What They Hittin Foe?” invokes the benign bedlam of some late-night back-alley game of dominoes. Funny, furious, and unquestionably authentic, Cube had everyone’s ear and, on his debut, told it like it is. —W.D.

For younger listeners who believe that Paul’s Boutique and Ill Communication represent the Beasties’ best work, it may be hard to imagine the singular impact of Licensed to Ill. The trio and producer/co-conspirator Rick Rubin inspired a genuine Moral Majority panic with their frat-boy brew of Schoolly-D-inspired thuggishness, Run-DMC-styled superhero chants, and Original Concept-level jeep beats. The outrageous, Western-set story rap “Paul Revere” can still set off a party, and even Ice Cube admits to mimicking Mike D, King Ad Rock, and MCA’s nasally flows and punchy jokes. The fact that the three rappers are punk aesthetes who can’t seem to tell whether they’re in on the joke or being themselves is part of the fun. —M.R.

The Chicago poet-activist Fatimah Warner got intimate in Room 25, a deeply personal coming-of-age story with her unique jazzy flow. It’s a song cycle about finding her voice, with lines like, “My pussy teachin’ ninth-grade English/My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism.” Noname first got attention with her cameo on Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap, but she went her own way for her 2016 debut, Telefone. On Room 25, she brings in longtime Chicago friends like Saba and Smino — but there’s no mistaking it for anybody’s voice but her own. —R.S.

The third album from A Tribe Called Quest was not as whimsically experimental as 1990’s People’s Instinctive Travels… or as bohemian jazz-cool as 1991’s The Low End Theory, but it’s still a timeless fan favorite because the quartet was equally gifted when it came to meat-and-potatoes hip-hop. The samples were still brilliantly curated from the dustiest corners of jazz and soul, but the drums could knock the block off a fan of Black Moon and Gang Starr. MCs Q-Tip and Phife Dawg were as incisive and funny as ever, whether big-upping revolutionaries (“Steve Biko”), breaking down a controversial word (“Sucka N***a”), or just dropping that infamous line about Seaman’s Furniture (“Electric Relaxation”). —C.W.

Atlanta trio Migos had already cycled through a handful of peaks and valleys before making their biggest album — blowing up with zany mixtapes like Y.R.N. (Young Rich Niggas), being written off with their disappointing Young Rich Nation, regaining popularity with the “Look at My Dab” dance fad. Offset, Quavo, and Takeoff’s style eventually slowed from thumping “Hannah! Montana!” chants to the rope-a-dope mic trading of “Bad and Boujee,” where Offset, Quavo, and guest Lil Uzi Vert drop punchlines that land like feathers. “T-Shirt” is driven by Quavo’s haunting, deliberately hesitant chorus: “Mama told me/Not to sell work/Seventeen-five, same color T-shirt.” But it’s the way that the trio punctuate Culture verses with ad-libs, giving their songs a rhythmic, vocal jazz cadence, that makes their performance so memorable. —M.R.

Cheryl “Salt” James and Sandra “Pepa” Denton initially emerged as Super Nature with “The Showstopper,” where they playfully mocked Doug E. Fresh’s hit single “The Show.” Subsequently renaming themselves Salt-N-Pepa, the New York duo’s debut album is just as delightfully funky. With go-go-inspired New Jack production from mentor Hurby “Luvbug” Azor, they approximate Otis Redding and Carla Thomas’ “Tramp” as well as the Pointer Sisters’ “Betcha Got a Chick on the Side,” all with a clear sense of fun. “This is the moment that men fear/Female MCs are moving up here,” the two chant on the party-rocking cut “My Mic Sounds Nice.” Then there’s “Push It,” a classic electro-bass moment where the ladies shake their asses on the dance floor, no explanation required. —M.R.

The College Dropout is Kanye West at his most endearing. His humor is bright and weightless, even if you, as a woman or a diploma-owner, find yourself at the butt of the joke. His religious convictions are so palpable they elicit empathy, even if you’re a staunch nonbeliever. His reflections on working retail, dysfunctional families, unabashed consumerism, personal aptitude, and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming are as bewitching as raps can be. And to think, West also dreamt up nearly every timeless beat on which he bared it all as a spanking new artist is almost too much. This album is both incredibly human and impossibly extraordinary. —M.C.

For rap fans in the late Nineties looking for an alternative to what they saw as the genre’s commercial excesses, Things Fall Apart was the holy grail: a socially observant, profoundly musical thesis statement from the Philadelphia band that dared to play their own instruments. The songs are full of virtuosic verses from Black Thought and Malik B, along with fellow travelers like Mos Def and Common, and varied grooves from drummer Questlove, bassist Leonard Hubbard, keyboardist Kamal Gray, as well as collaborators like Dilla and Scott Storch — grounded as much in the renewing warmth of neo-soul as in the head-nodding energy of the cipher. It may or may not have been any realer than what was on the charts that year, but in its commitment to hip-hop’s human elements, Things Fall Apart is timeless. —S.V.L.

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