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As those of you who frequent all of those other hip hop blogs are probably aware of by now, my man Jeff from Passion of the Weiss along with the dude from Straight Bangin' have been polling various bloggers for their Top 25 Hip Hop Albums. I submitted my list last week and planned on doing a post about it soon afterwards, but that Swindle interview seemed a lot more interesting. So here it is, somewhat belated. I'm not sure how many of you actually care what albums are in my personal Top 25, but you're going to read it anyway, damnit. Some commentary is included after the list. Here we go:
1. A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory
2. Public Enemy - It takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
3. Nas - Illmatic
4. Fugees - The Score
5. N.W.A. - Straight Outta Compton
6. Notorious B.I.G. - Ready To Die
7. Dr. Dre - The Chronic
8. Run D.M.C. - Raising Hell
9. Jay-Z - Reasonable Doubt
10. Eminem - The Slim Shady LP
11. Mobb Deep - Infamous
12. Wu-Tang Clan - Enter the 36 Chambers
13. Outkast - Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
14. Wild Style Soundtrack (Instrumentals)
15. Eric B. and Rakim - Paid In Full
16. Boogie Down Productions - Live Hardcore Worldwide
17. The Roots - Things Fall Apart
18. Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet
19. Slick Rick - The Great Adventures of Slick Rick
20. Redman - Whut? Thee Album
21. Notorious B.I.G. - Life After Death
22. De La Soul - De La Soul Is Dead
23. Gza - Liquid Swords
24. A Tribe Called Quest - Midnight Marauders
25. Nice N Smooth - Ain't a Damn Thing Changed
Some random, unorganized thoughts about the list:
- The first thing that needs to be said about this list is that it is my Top 25 "favorite" albums, rather than the Top 25 that I consider to be the best albums overall. That may seem like an issue of semantics, but there is a difference in my mind. For example, I think that Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions... is about as close to flawless as an album can get and is arguably hip hop's most influential album, but if I had to choose between the two, Tribe's Low End Theory would always be my pick for sentimental reasons.
- Biggie is the best MC to ever pick up a mic, hands down, and Juicy is probably my favorite song of all-time. Yet Ready To Die only comes in at number six. It's a dope album, but I have to admit there were a couple of beats from Puffy's team of Hitmen that just didn't work for me. Thus it slipped a little bit in the rankings.
- Boogie Down Productions' Criminal Minded would normally be in my Top 25, but I put Live Hardcore Worldwide on there, which includes live versions of Criminal Minded's tracks on it. They're both great albums, but Live Hardcore gets the nod over Criminal Minded due to it being the greatest live Hip Hop album ever (not that there's a whole lot of competition).
- No DJ albums made the list. If there was one DJ-based album that I would have picked, it would have been The Best Of Return Of The DJ, but putting a compilation album on the list seemed like cheating. If this list were to be expanded to a Top 50, DJ Shadow, RJD2, DJ Q-Bert and the X-Men/X-Cutioners would all be on the list.
- This list should also make it clear that I prefer debut albums over an artist's subsequent releases. Judging from some of the other lists, albums from Eminem, Redman, Slick Rick and Outkast were popular picks, but most people chose later releases from those artists. I personally like the raw sound that artists typically come with on their debuts - its usually a new sound that I haven't heard before, which is more important to me than having a polished album. Outkast took the genre in new directions with their follow up albums, and Andre certainly stepped up his lyrical game, but despite that Southernplayalistic is the only Outkast album that I listen to regularly.
- I picked De La Soul Is Dead over any of the other De La albums. Most of my friends would argue that De La Soul Is Dead is the weakest of the group's albums, but for me it was their most creative effort. Sure, there were way too many skits on it, but other than that I loved it. Saturday even managed to convince me that roller skating might not be as corny as it looked.
- No "underground" albums made the list. I listen to the underground/backpacker stuff, but its not on the same level as these 25 albums as far as I'm concerned. Madvillainy or Black Star might have been the closest to crack the Top 25, but even those two albums weren't making it past my Top 40.
- That Wild Style album I'm listing is the breaks/instrumental version, not the official soundtrack. This album made it into the Top 25 simply on the strength of the Wild Style theme (also used on the intro of Nas' Illmatic).
- The only solo Wu-Tang album to make the list is Gza's Liquid Swords. Yeah, I know some of you will think that it's sacrilege not to have Only Built 4 Cuban Linx or one of Ghostface's albums in the Top 25. I love OB4CL and Ironman, but not as much as Liquid Swords.
- I wasn't sure what the "official" rules of this whole thing were, so I didn't put any mixtapes on the list. I was tempted to put the Clipse's We Got it For Cheap Vol. 2 on here, though.
All things considered, this would have been easier to do if it was a Top 50 list, rather than a Top 25. There were a bunch of albums that I consider to be on the same level as the bottom five of my list, but I just ran out of room to include them all. Here are six albums that I felt particularly bad about leaving off:
26. Kool G Rap and DJ Polo - Road to the Riches
27. Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...
28. Ghostface Killah - Ironman
29. LL Cool J - Bigger and Deffer
30. Ice Cube - AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted
31. Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique
Of all of the other bloggers' lists that I checked out, Byron Crawford's and floodwatch's lists seemed to be the ones that I agreed with the most.
4/29/2007 5:28:29 PM posted by Fresh