Thirty Three Jones | Desktop Site
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Around the start of December, with the end of the decade looming large, I began toying with the idea of writing some sort of grandiose piece on what the past ten years has meant to hip hop. There were certainly some major themes that stood out: the dismantling of Roc-A-Fella, the rise and apparent fall of G-Unit, the string of deaths that robbed the genre of some of its brightest stars, the various regional movements and the waning influence of the major labels to name just a few. However, it's hard to do justice to ten years of history with just a single blog post so instead I decided to pull together the images that helped define what I remember as the high and the low points of hip hop's first decade in the new millennium.
Click on the image above to see the full widescreen view of it (1280x800), with each individual picture having a link to an article or video that will hopefully shed light on why it was included. Even with the image as large as it is, I still left out a whole lot. For example, you won't find any Juelz, J-Kwon or Jadakiss, to focus on just one letter of the alphabet that was largely neglected. With that said, I think this is a fair sampling of the people, events, trends and songs that helped define the genre this past decade.
Any major omissions? Let me know what I missed out on in the comments.
12/27/2009 8:00:51 AM posted by Fresh