Without approval from popular media, such as radio or television, underground success quickly sent the album to double platinum and launched the group into fully-fledged celebrities. did not just affect the minds of those in South Central Los Angeles, its lyrics reached over all demographics and races. because of its against-the-grain attitude. The remarkable accomplishment of acts like N.W.A., at a time when music was not downloadable or easily pirated, was their ability to sell millions of records without airplay, redefining what it meant to be a mainstream success.įans from the suburbs and the cities were drawn to N.W.A. came out with “Straight Outta Compton” in 1988, the mainstream music industry was not going to allow the strength of street knowledge to be broadcasted on radio stations. Listening to radio stations today, it’s easy to hear every song as similar in meaning and style. What happens when airwaves across America ban an artist’s work from listeners, because the radio station has branded it too explicit and possibly corrupting? and Odd Future purposely write explicit lyrics regardless of wanting to achieve mainstream status? This verge of stardom is normally marked by a single on the radio, which in turn produces many record sales and sold-out tours.īut what happens when hip-hop artists like N.W.A. When experts talk about “making it big in music,” they tend to focus on the threshold that marks an artist’s ascension into mainstream success.

And straight from South Central, Odd Future managed to top hip-hop charts while giving away numerous albums online. was dynamic in ushering in the beginning of gangsta rap without airplay on a major U.S. From the grandiose cinema of the four skits on “Intro” to the triumph of “Juicy” to the bleak honesty of “Suicidal Thoughts,” the album remains a grim, groundbreaking classic that stared death in the eye and became larger than life. Biggie leavened his raw fatalism with a smooth, subtle sense of humor, perfecting a hard-soft dichotomy that would become a template for decades of artists. When his A&R rep Sean “Puffy” Combs got fired, Wallace’s future looked uncertain - but that all changed once Ready to Die was released on Combs’ Bad Boy Records in 1994. Before he became the Notorious B.I.G., Christopher Wallace had been hustling and selling drugs to make ends meet, experiences he poured into hard-hitting, semi-autobiographical songs after he signed with Uptown Records in 1992. The album starts with the theater necessary for such a high-stakes debut. Ready to Diemarked the precise moment when hip-hop’s golden age transitioned into its modern age, the height of New York hip-hop, and the sound of the greatest rapper of all time at the absolute top of his powers. To a fan coming up in the era of Cardi or Tyler or Polo G or Playboi Carti, the golden age is now. One of the incredible things about hip-hop is that it evolves and expands faster than any other genre in music history. to Houston to Chicago, and beyond.Īs 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. That’s one reason we limited our scope to English language hip-hop. 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. 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.

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