The 200 Greatest Hip-Hop Albums of All Time

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.

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.